The United Nations is a Complete Failure:

The UN, conceived with the greatest of ambitions and highest of hopes to create a global community capable of working out the world's problems without the use of force is a complete and utter failure. This grand experiment in international diplomacy has proven itself an ineffective, inefficient, and irrelevant exercise in futility.

The UN's complete lack of effective management of ANY program it has undertaken where the stakes were real and the price of failure more than a ripple of frustration. Whether it is the UN Human Rights Commission's offensive lack of perspective - i.e. submitting more resolutions about Israel than about Darfur, or Iran, or China (for specifics I refer you to the Eye on the U.N. website dealing with these matters); whether it is the Oil for Food scandal; UNIFIL; UNRWA; lack of action on Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda; running at first blood from any conflict zone (consider Iraq); accusations of sexual impropriety...the list goes on.

Consider the Iranian nuclear program and the UN's seeming inability to achieve consensus on how to bring it to a halt. Consider the fact that the best the UN can come up with are ambiguously worded, highly touted, and ultimately inefficient resolutions.

What is needed is a coalition of democracies - or, more to the point, a Coalition of Free States. Such a club would be based on shared values, would provide proportional voice to larger countries while maintaining the integrity of the voices of smaller states. Membership would be limited to those states that truly abide by the principles of democracy, that provide equal opportunities to minorities, women, and share a respect for human life.

There would be no room for countries like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, China, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, et al. That is, this international body would be comprised of states deserving of membership rather than states whose political or strategic value mandates coddling them and ignoring their moral shortcomings.

But whether or not a new international body is created, one thing remains clear to me: the United Nations is a failed experiment. And though the idea is a good one, this incarnation is as utter a failure as its predecessor, the League of Nations.