IS THE U.N. DEAD?
The UN famously failed to enforce its sanctions against Iraq, so the US led an invasion to enforce them anyway.
The UN has famously failed to do much about North Korea's nuclear weapons programs, due mostly to Chinese and Russian machinations within the Security Council, so the US has forged an alliance outside the UN to blockade North Korea's shipping.
Now that Libya has disarmed (thanks to US and British pressure, and the discovery of Libyan arms deals with senior members of the Axis of Evil), the US is not trusting the UN to verify the extent of Libya's WMD programs. With good reason, apparently:
The U.S., convinced that dictator Moammar Gadhafi's weapons programs are far more extensive than guesstimated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, will send technical experts to Libya in January."While Mohammed ElBaradei, the director of the U.N. agency, says he has seen four nuclear sites, CIA and British intelligence have concluded there are 11 sites," the Associated Press reported today.
"The United States intends to pursue its own program for dismantling Libya's nuclear program as well as programs to develop chemical and biological weapons and missiles as well," said AP, quoting a U.S. official.
The UN's primary missions are global security and non-proliferation of WMDs--everything else it does is just evidence of mission creep. The French, Russians, Germans and Chinese have effectively made the UN useless to the point of being counterproductive. The most underreported story of 2003 is probably the slow death of the UN, and the rise of other US-led institutions and alliances built to carry on that old body's core missions.
UPDATE: Steve Verdon has more on Libya's nuclear program, which operated completely unobserved by the IAEA. Either the UN is structurally incompetent or it is staffed by people whose sympathies lead them to allow proliferation to happen on their watch intentionally. Having observed IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei over the past couple of years, I'm leaning toward the latter.