The United Nations was not intended to prevent genocide in Darfur. It was not to swap oil-for-food, depose of rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction, or fight avian flu. It has never had the means or accountability mechanisms available to do so. It was created by the victor powers of World War II ???????? Russia, China, France, Britain, and the United States ???????? with the sole purpose of maintaining stability and collective security. Global order was at the top of the agenda. Human rights may have received its rhetorical due, but ???????never again??????? proved to be empty in substance.

With the emergence of the United States as the world????????s sole superpower following the Cold War, it is no wonder that such UN functions became easier to carry out. Russia????????s government was flooded with Western policymakers and China maintained its distance from the organization. Few critical times was a veto threatened. Yet with Russia falling back on authoritarianism and growing into an energy superpower, and China charging onto the world stage, the dynamics of UN functionality are once again challenged. Only now, the United Nation actually has something of an infrastructure in place to deal with these issues, and it is being infected by the kind of despotic plague that renders international consensus on action impossible.

The greatest recent example of this is the stalemate on Iran????????s upcoming nuclear arsenal, in which China????????s and Russia????????s financial and energy interests trump the danger posed to the entire world. It culminates in the creation of the new Human Rights Council, whose predecessor was filled with human rights abusers like Zimbabwe and Sudan who used the Commission on Human Rights to audit their own records. Yet, at a time when Kofi Annan and Jimmy Carter are giving a lot of lip service to reform, the new manifestation has only led to the progressive nations of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Cuba, Russia, and China ???????? among a many great others ???????? sitting on the new council. In the meantime, Iran is still developing nuclear weapons, genocide is ongoing in Sudan, and UN workers spend their free time giving poor African preteens food in exchange for sex.

The world needs a new kind of international system. The United Nations is a democracy of dictatorships that cannot be reformed so long as so many of its member countries are given representation without duly representing their own people. They use the body solely as a means of advancing their own corrupt interests instead of that of human rights and world peace. To be able to address the world????????s problems in a truly democratic, accountable, and effective way, the body must be made up of only democratic and free countries, with the purpose of advancing the cause of freedom and prosperity.

It????????ll never happen.

I point you then to a new organization founded in 2000 called the Community of Democracies, a currently informal grouping of over 100 democratic governments that seeks to find a common agenda and strengthen ties between democracies worldwide. You won????????t see China, Sudan, Zimbabwe in this group. The country of Nepal, whose King seized power last year, was uninvited from the 2005 summit. Russia and Venezuela are likely to be booted out the door as well. There????????s a consistency in ideals and actions here that the United Nations just can????????t pair up to.

It is this organization that we in the free world should be putting our hope and support in. No longer can we rely on an institution that is so awash in corruption and moral relativity that an attempt to genuinely reform its human rights body ends with the membership of countries that engage in gender apartheid, slavery, religious persecution, and the evil totalitarianism that is communism. This is no way to judge and act on human rights violations. If the cause of freedom and democracy is ever to be pushed forward, it is the Community of Democracies that must be strengthened and the United Nations that must be abandoned as a legacy of the past that cannot be reformed to fit the needs of the world today.