An assesment of the United Nations and why it has failed in its duties.

The UN is meaningless, weak, completely ineffectual and doomed to the fate of its forerunner, the League of Nations.

After the Gulf War, the UN imposed conditions on Iraq that demanded full cooperation with weapons inspectors. Since then, the UN has renewed that demand more than a dozen times due to Iraqi lack of cooperation. What does the UN do? In 1998 its inspectors leave Iraq. In a horrifying addition to this, Iraq is soon to become the Chair of the UN's disarmament committee. Contrast this with the fact that in May 2001, the US was dumped from the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, despite having been a founding member in 1947. Instead, the overseeing of human-rights abuses is left to one-party states such as China, Cuba, Pakistan and its Chair Libya.

Libya! A police state ruled by a mad dictator (Colonel Qaddafi) who hates Israel and has a passion for acquiring his own weapons of mass destruction. Libya is a nation where torture and government-sponsored murder are routine, where women have those good old-fashion Muslim human rights and where the government maintains a close relationship - including providing training camps - with terrorist groups. So welcome, Libya, to the Chairmanship - a perfect exemplar of the role of morality, justice, freedom and common sense at play in the contemporary United Nations organisation.

One might have thought that the credibility of the UN Security Council had already been badly weakened - say in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 or in East Timor in 1999, to cite only three recent cases when it failed to protect the lives of thousands of defenceless civilians from slaughter.

The failures of Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere are regularly called up by detractors of the United Nations as examples of its incapacity to...