The U.N. Kills

That's Mark Steyn's conclusion in this article in The Austrailian. Here he points out the absurdity that is the U.N.:

If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of
Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.

Victor Davis Hanson illustrates why the daily slaughter of defenseless human beings continues as the U.N. looks on:

[People] simply die because the United Nations acts as if it's going to do things, so it thwarts unilateralism on the part of responsible parties, and it does nothing, and people perish and are forgotten. So I think the United States is saying look, we're willing to step forward, but we're not going to do this anymore where we get hung out to dry in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Balkans, and Panama. Every time we try to do something to stop a dictator or a thug, we have these triangulators who want it to be done, but not us to do it. So I think we're sort of seeing an American zen now, where the United States is trying to say you wanted this type of world, you have it. And then yet not being completely nihilistic, in the sense that we will act, finally, if no one else will, but we want this other dialogue to play out.

Another reason the U.N. is so ineffectual is its leadership. Kofi Annan is too busy raking in large sums of money from people he subsequently appoints to UN commissions to notice the genocide taking place under his watch.