So obvious that everyone should be saying it

Norman Coleman spoke at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday about the problems with the UN.

The United Nations is flawed by design and needs to be changed if it is going to serve as an effective world body, a senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee Republican said this week.

U.N. supporters agreed that reform is necessary but said the question is how it should proceed.

"Any organization in which the majority of members are not fully democratic, by definition, will not have a perfect performance on promoting human rights and spreading democracy," Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota told an American Enterprise Institute meeting Tuesday.

Mr. Coleman cited the Group of 77 developing-country bloc that now numbers 130, the 118-member Non-Aligned Movement and the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference as typically blocking initiatives pushed by democratic countries while their members contribute little to the U.N. budget.

The G-77 countries, for example, contribute about 10 percent of the regular U.N. budget while the United States contributes 22 percent, according to the U.N. Association of the USA.

The countries in these groups, according to AEI, have blocked a number of initiatives such as a resolution on human rights violations in Uzbekistan and reforms of the U.N. Secretariat.

Terry Miller, director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for International Trade and Economics, told the conference, "One person, one vote is a democratic ideal. One country one vote, is something else entirely."

"And when many of the countries casting those votes are not democracies, then I think the question of just whose views are being represented is a very real one," he said.

The new Human Rights Council, in the first year of its existence, has "made a mockery of its stated purpose," Mr. Coleman said.

He criticized the council for focusing primarily on Israel.

"They didn't talk about Darfur, they didn't talk about Zimbabwe, they didn't talk about Cuba," he said.

The problem is that reform will be impossible exactly because of the votes of these undemocratic countries. Instead of pretending that the U.N. has some sort of moral authority because it was founded on idealistic principles, I'd prefer for the U.S. to put it energies into a union of democratic countries. If a country is abusing its own citizens, it should not have a voice on world policy. And such an organization would not allow in phony democracies that get 99% of the vote or jail oppositional leaders like Iran or Egypt. Just think of the desperation if the United States switched its funding from the corrupt United Nations to such a new organization.