Sunday, January 25, 2009

Why I Don't Support the U.N.

When I was in high school I (geek alert!) participated in the Model United Nations. It was one of the few things I really enjoyed about high school. My fellow "countrymen" (we represented Bulgaria) dressed up like extras from Resevoir Dogs and took the whole thing rather seriously. It was a lot of fun playing world politics.

The drawback of Model U.N. is that it utterly fails to represent reality. For example, in Model U.N. there was no way that Iran would be made head of the UN Development Program. It wouldn't have passed the laugh test. There would not have been a Human Rights Commission that included Sudan, China, or Pakistan.

There was also no laser-like focus on Israel in our pretend U.N. In reality, a terrorist organization can lob rockets into Israel for years while the U.N. takes no notice. Once Israel finally retaliates though, you can expect a flood of resolutions and condemnations, none of which take note of what precipitated the action.

Model U.N. was an idealized image of what in reality is essentially a giant bureaucracy for allowing rogue states to wield far more power than is dictated by common sense.

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