The ironic thing about the UN is that everything that's been added on since 1945--the UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, the World Health Organization...although you will recall Mayor Lastman in Toronto didn't know WHO. Who are those WHO people about the SARS crisis?
Anyway, all that to say they are brilliant. Sure, the human rights folks have some problems when Libya is the chair and such things, but overall those add-ons... God knows I've worked with UNICEF and UNHCR a lot; they're great and they do a lot of good work. It's the raison d'être for the UN, which was to save us from the scourge of a third world war, and they did, I guess. We didn't have one, thank God.
During the Cold War their capability to cope with situations in Cyprus and the Middle East, which were relatively benign, was perfectly okay. It's the post-Cold War period where we have factions around the world, internal factions, fighting away at each other.
Michael Ignatieff probably explains it better than anybody in his book Blood and Belonging. Once we removed the glue that held the two groups together--the Soviet Union and NATO, led by the U.S.--once that disappeared with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, all these ethnic, religious, territorial, and historic tensions just exploded. In Yugoslavia it was worse than anywhere else because it was both ethnicity and religion.
So the UN serves a very useful purpose. It's got serious problems when it comes to the security responsibilities it has, and that's because it's hamstrung by the permanent five. You probably know the ambassadors from Japan, India, and Brazil, three folks who I think have strong qualifications for permanent membership, went around the world for a year seeking support for them to become permanent members. The report, which was issued about a year and a half ago, said they found the challenge to be problematic but they promised to revisit the issue in 15 years. I've never heard of anything like that in my life--in 15 years.
Those permanent five have it locked up solid, because not only do they have the veto for security issues, it's a little-known fact that they have the veto for procedure within the Security Council, which means the membership. It just takes one of them to veto a new member, and they do every time.