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From there it was a short step to the Assembly's ecstatic reception of a pistol-packing Yasser Arafat in 1974 and of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1975. Having been created partly under the impact of the Holocaust, the U.N. now became a prime mover of anti-Semitism, culminating in its sponsorship of the anti-Semitic hatefest in Durban in 2001. The U.N. did nothing about Iraq's attack on Iran in 1980, and ignored the plight of peoples in places like Tibet and Sudan while focusing obsessively on the alleged "war crime" of Israeli settlement activity.

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the U.N. continued to perform miserably not only in Rwanda and Bosnia. Although UNSCOM, the agency set up to monitor Iraq's disarmament after the Gulf War, originally functioned effectively, the U.N. eventually defanged it and replaced it with the impotent UMNIVOC, helping set the stage for the current Iraq War. Under its Oil for Food program, the U.N. became more concerned with fattening Saddam than containing him. Instead of promoting human rights in the world, the U.N. appointed such stalwarts as Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to its Human Rights Commission, which has devoted 30 percent of its resolutions to Israel. Syria, one of the main state sponsors of international terrorism, was allowed to serve on the Security Council from 2002 to 2004.

After nine crisp chapters of description and analysis, Gold turns to prescription, suggesting a two-track approach for dealing with the U.N. One track is to circumvent the Tower of Babble and create a Community of Democracies with common values and strategic goals. Such a body would not necessarily have to include America-hostile countries like France and Germany, but could include states as diverse as Australia, Poland, India, and the Philippines. The second track is for the U.S. and its allies to work within the U.N. to alter its voting patterns. Gold, who does not favor discarding the U.N. completely, maintains that many African and Asian states would be amenable to cooperating with a democratic bloc, and "these nations need to be led and not abandoned."

But any such positive transformation of the U.N., he acknowledges, "will take many years to complete," and that is why "going outside the U.N. is crucial." The corrupt, malfunctioning, destructive U.N. we have today is one of the central problems of our time, unflinchingly diagnosed by this revealing book.

topics:
Law, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, United Nations, Africa, North Korea, Oil