Your Tax Dollars At Work

Every year the United States sends millions of dollars to the United Nations (at some 22% of their $4.19 billion budget we are its largest contributor) and, unsurprisingly, the United Nations has been doing what it does best with that money - wasting it. Indeed, corruption, fraud and mismanagement have recently caused the United Nations to waste some $610 million of the money it was supposed to have spent on peacekeeping.

That's right folks, the United Nations has been using some of your American tax dollars so that it can rig financial bids, bribe locals, give bureaucrats kickbacks, and other wholesome things in places like Congo, Haiti and Peru. And it does all of this under the auspices of 'peacekeeping;' or, in other words, sending soldiers from one 3rd world country to another 3rd world country in order that they might do nothing. (Well, that is, assuming that bumming free liquor off the locals counts as nothing.)

Of course, the dirty little secret is that the United Nations shouldn't be doing peacekeeping at all; and it's primarily because that's simply not what the organization was set up to do. The United Nations was never supposed to be a beacon of Human Rights and Democracy, for God's sake one of its founding members was Joseph Stalin's Russia. It was simply set up to prevent another World War. Consequently, the U.N is geared towards and prepared for the handling of inter-state conflict - and not ethnic violence, insurgencies, or NGOs like al-Qaeda. Put simply, the United Nations was created to help solve European problems - and this was done on the, obviously mistaken, premise that other international problems would be like Europe's.

Indeed, it's no coincidence that probably the two best examples of the U.N's effectiveness, The Korean War and The First Gulf War, fit a classic European template: one Nation-state invades another, violating the other's national sovereignty, and thus has to be stopped. However, nearly all of the problems the U.N faces these days, be it Hezbollah in Lebanon or genocide in Darfur, have absolutely nothing to do with questions of inter-state war or violations of national sovereignty. As a result, the U.N is unable to solve them effectively, and ends up getting mired down in a sea of corruption and incompetence instead.

I, for one, am tired of having the United Nations waste it constituent states' money on peacekeeping projects, that it has neither the ability nor the capacity to fix, and wish it would just avoid them altogether. Afterall, it's simply not what the organization was cut out for.