UN Watch

I, along with many others in the blogosphere, and in the general public, have been asking for some time now, what good is the UN? Here's a blog that tries to answer. Check it out.

I'll give the guys at UN Dispatch credit for trying, but on the face of it they've presented very little in concrete evidence or proposals that might justify continuing the UN in its present form. They do link to an interesting RAND proposal that suggests that the UN might be the best agent for promoting "nation building" in small countries. This suggests a possible division of labor. Major reconstruction and emergency relief operations could be undertaken by ad-hoc coalitions of nations that command sufficient resources to do the job properly [as in the case of recent tsunami relief], while smaller, less urgent tasks could be managed by the UN.