The New Yorker:

Just before Thanksgiving, John Danforth, the United States Ambassador to the U.N., expressed his frustration with the organization, but he didn’t talk about Iraq, or oil-for-food, or Security Council politics, or the deployment of force, or institutional reform. Instead, he lamented the General Assembly’s refusal to condemn abuses against the people of the Darfur region of Sudan, where the Bush Administration has determined that genocide is under way. Nobody in the hall wanted to be bothered, and Danforth asked, “Why have this building? What is it all about?” As it happened, Danforth, who has served only six months at the U.N., had sent his letter of resignation to the White House the day before, and his blunt outburst suggested that he knew the answers to his questions all too well.

Great column, until this closing line, utterly unjustified by everything which preceded it:

We have the U.N. and keep trying to make it work because we would be even worse off without it.

Yeah? Tell that to the 7,000 massacred at Srebernica who the UN promised to protect, and then fled from. Tell that to the countless massacred Rwandans who might have been helped in an alternate reality in which all imperative for action did not reside with the corrupt UN. Tell that to the Sudanese of Darfur...