UN update, plus thoughts on multilateralism and the Bush doctrine

Sudan is really just the perfect poster-child for the failed international body that is the United Nations.

One idea of McCain's I really liked (unlike his abhorrent health-care plan) is the idea of a League of Democracies.

I'm not against Wilsonian Multilateralism (or Clintonian for that matter). I'm just against foolish reliance on a corrupt organization that protects genocide while denouncing fledgling democracies. The hypocricy is staggering. Not only that, but I do think that America is in the unique position to be the best leader of such a multilateral foreign policy.

I'm also in favor of regime change when possible, so I guess that means I'm a "neocon" but I do believe government's like Sudan should be toppled for the greater good. I believe in a permanenet democratic revolution of sorts.

Could we blend some version of practical multilateralism with the Bush Doctrine? It seems less and less likely that either way is plausible without some help from the other.

More on this later.

UPDATE: This materialized into a full length piece up at Newsvine.

Resisting the UN

Michael Totten's latest dispatch is out:

There is no love for the United Nations in Kosovo.

Kosovo is the fourth country I've visited where the UN has or has had a key role, and in only one of them – Lebanon – is the UN not despised by just about everyone. In Lebanon the UN has so little power to make a difference one way or the other that any anger at the institution would largely be pointless. In Bosnia, though, UN “peacekeepers” stood by impotently while genocide and ethnic-cleansing campaigns were carried out right in front of them. The UN's Oil for Food program was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq at the expense of just about everybody who lives there. Kosovo, meanwhile, declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, but the elected government is still subordinate to the almost universally despised UN bureaucrats who are the real power. Many Kosovars insist the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is actually a dictatorship.