Even skeptics might acknowledge that the world would be better without the United Nations.

Is a start being made on demolishing the UN, or at least a wing of it?

News comes from The Hill:

A key House Republican is quickly pressing forward with her goals to scale back U.S. funding for the United Nations.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Hill that oversight would be a key function of the panel, particularly funding to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) that is “a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“I’d like to make sure that we once and for all kill all U.S. funding for that beast,” she said last month. “Because I don’t think that it advances U.S. interests, I don’t think that that’s a pro-democracy group, it’s a rogue’s gallery, pariah states, they belong there because they don’t want to be sanctioned.”

Lovers of all things UN – leftists, the State Department, Obama and his shills, global warmists, world-government advocates, anti-Semites – have an argument for supporting the HRC which sounds ever so diplomatic, clever and subtle, as if they were cunningly manipulating the loathsome tyrannies that dominate the  organization, when in fact they are trying to deceive its honest and indignant critics.

Supporters of continued U.S. support of and participation on the HRC say that it’s essential that Washington have leverage on the panel, renowned for including countries that have their own records of human-rights violations [to put it very mildly – JB].

But staunchly the admirable Ros-Lehtinen is sticking to her resolution:

On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen will host a panel of U.N. critics and advocates … The 10 a.m. briefing before the full committee is titled, “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.”

Fans of the UN and the shills for the HRC will appear before it to put their cunning (but transparent) argument:

One of those scheduled to testify, Peter Yeo, represents the United Nations Foundation/Better World Campaign, which at the start of President Obama’s term urged the commander in chief to “mount a campaign” to secure a place on the HRC, which the Bush administration had boycotted.

“Support of our UN commitments is more than an obligation, it is a smart investment in America’s strategic, economic and political interests,” Yeo told The Hill. “Continued American engagement and diplomacy at the UN will only advance our goals for democracy, human rights and world prosperity.”

Weasel words!

But there will be others who are fully aware of the evil the UN does, and some who have nobly exposed it.

U.N. critics set to appear include Claudia Rosett, who unveiled the oil-for-food scandal in 2004 and 2005 in The Wall Street Journal; Brett Schaefer, who regularly takes on the U.N. at the conservative Heritage Foundation; and Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which monitors the controversial HRC. …

Neuer [said] of Obama’s initiative to place a U.S. representative on the council with the intention of reforming from within that it was “naive for anyone to have thought it would change significantly.”

Or at all, since changing it is not Obama’s real intention – unless into a seat of world government.

Neuer probably knows this. He certainly knows how iniquitous the UN and the HRC really are. He has pointed out that 35 of the 45 resolutions produced by the HRC over the last five years have been “one-sided measures against Israel.” And he has lamented (The Hill reports) that “the U.S. and allied nations haven’t pulled together to trigger emergency sessions on crises such as the crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Iran or abuses against Tibetans or Uighurs by China.”

Another Republican who wants to “take on the UN” through control of the purse-strings, is Rep. Cliff Stearns:

The first bill in this Congress taking on the U.N., introduced on the first day the House was in session, came from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) [who] introduced a measure to ensure that no federal funds may be used for the “design, renovation, construction, or rental of any headquarters for the United Nations in any location in the United States” unless Obama “transmits to Congress a certification that the United Nations has adopted internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement.”

“During the Bush administration, it was learned from internal U.N. auditors that 43 percent of $1.4 billion in procurement contracts investigated involved fraud,” Stearns said in a statement to The Hill.

“In addition, U.N. peacekeeping operations are plagued with numerous cases of abuse and sexual exploitation,” he added. “The U.N. is in desperate need of reform from top to bottom, and my bill is designed to have the world body take the simple step of adopting internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement, which includes taking the bid representing the best value.”

But the UN is not reformable. The UN (like its predecessor the League of Nations) was a bad idea to start with. After the Second World War the victors sat down together on the UN Security Council where the West and the Soviets, and later Communist China, glared at each other for the the duration of the Cold War – and still do; while in the General Assembly an overwhelming majority of despotisms vented their envy and spite against the West and especially Israel – and still do; and the bureaucrats who ran it, or at least some of them, corruptly enriched themselves at the expense of helplessly subjugated peoples (as in the oil-for-food scandal when they conspired with Saddam Hussein to line their own pockets and rob the oppressed Iraqis) – and still do.

The US sustains it. The US could destroy it at a stroke. Just not giving it the billions it does ($6.347 billion was the amount of American tax-payers’ money handed over to the UN in 2009) would crash the whole institution.

The Republicans are not apparently planning to be so radical as to bring down the edifice. Or not immediately anyway. We might hope that it is in their minds as an eventual aim. At present they’re ready only to chip away at its corners: 

The U.N. is also included in a broad-reaching budget-slashing bill by Ways and Means Committee member Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

The Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011, introduced Jan. 7, calls for a 10 percent reduction in voluntary contributions to the United Nations — monies the U.S. is not required to give by law — for fiscal year 2011. …

“America can fulfill its generous financial obligations to the U.N., but will set priorities within the voluntary funding areas,” he said. “A financially and economically sound United States is in the U.N.’s best interest.”

A politically wise United States would see that abolishing the UN would be in the world’s best interest.  A movement to achieve its abolition would be a real “Better World Campaign”.

The Republicans need to throw away the chisel and lay the explosive, because the UN must be destroyed.

The UN does an enormous amount of harm. It would have to do an enormous amount of good just to balance its moral books, but does it do or has it ever done any good at all? If so, we’ve missed it.

Whatever the noble intentions behind its creation, its General Assembly is nothing better than a grand coven where evil-wishers chant curses on the United States and Israel. Its Security Council occasionally passes resolutions, of dubious value at best, that theoretically have the force of law but cannot be enforced. Its plethora of commissions and agencies send their devils posting about, going to and fro on the earth and driving up and down on it, doing wrong on tax-free wages.

And who pays pays the most for it? Why, the United States of course.

From the Heritage Foundation:

The U.S. has been the largest financial supporter of the U.N. since the organization’s founding in 1945. The U.S. is currently assessed 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget and more than 27 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. In dollar terms, the Administration’s budget for FY 2011 requested $516.3 million for the U.N. regular budget and more than $2.182 billion for the peacekeeping budget.

That includes cash for UNIFIL, the organization that assists Hizbullah (see here and here), and for Moroccan rapists sent to keep peace for the UN in the Ivory Coast (see here).

The U.S. also provides assessed financial contributions to other U.N. organizations and voluntary contributions to many more U.N. organizations. …

The OMB [Office of Management and Budget] released its report on FY 2009 U.S. contributions to the U.N. in June 2010. The report revealed that the U.S. provided $6.347 billion to the U.N. system in FY 2009, including over $4 billion from the State Department, over $1.7 billion from USAID, over $245 million from the Department of Agriculture, and tens of millions more from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Energy.

This is an all-time record in U.S. financial contributions to the U.N. system but, considering recent budget trends in the U.N., the record is likely to be broken in FY 2010.

Claudia Rosett writes about the UN’s waste, fraud, and abuse. She combs through such reports as can be winkled out of it and finds these instances among others:

In the realms of UN peacekeeping, with its more than $8 billion annual budget, for which U.S. taxpayers alone fork out roughly $2 billion per year, check out the UN’s nearly $1 billion annual program for peacekeeping air operations. In an August, 2009 report, the UN’s own internal auditors noted that participation by senior management was “inadequate,” current staffing levels were “insufficient,” time of effective bidding on air charter services was “insufficient,” provisions in air charter agreements were “unclear” and some vendor registration was “improper.”

It takes a certain amount of determination to slog through the UN jargon, in which an executive summary of “not adequate” is often code for outright abuse or screaming failure, if you slog on to the details of the report. But in these reports, which cover only a sampling of the UN’s sprawling global system, the problems roll on and on. In corners that rarely receive attention from the media, they range from poorly documented lump-sum handling of noncompetitively-sourced travel arrangements for the UN mission in East Timor (UNMIT), to the UN’s disregard of its own rules in choosing a director for the UN Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD), headquartered in Japan. …

When the Oil-for-Food scandal [UN/Iraq, see here] broke big time in 2004, the UN refused to release its internal audits of the program even to governments of member states, including its chief donor, the U.S. After a showdown with congressional investigators, the internal audits were finally tipped out in early 2005, via the UN inquiry led by Paul Volcker. They provided damning insights into UN administrative abuses and derelictions that helped feed the gusher of Oil-for-Food corruption. Those reports might have been useful in heading off the damage of that UN blowout, had they been released to the public as they were produced, instead of being exposed later as an embarrassing piece of the UN’s self-serving coverup. …

The UN delenda est!

The UN must be destroyed!