Ainda a reforma da ONU

(...)
Annan and other U.N. reformers including U.N. Ambassador John Bolton are asking the wrong question. They are asking how to make the United Nations a better action body. The United Nations is not and will never be effective at taking action. Its highest and best use is to gather the nations of the world -- regardless of their systems, values or beliefs -- under one roof for interaction and communication. In that sense, if there were no United Nations, then we'd have to invent one. But the very diversity that makes it effective as a world forum renders it ineffective as an action body. In a world where disasters and violence come fast and furious, the U.N. debaters will always be too little, too late.
When action is needed, the world has learned to work around, not through, the United Nations. Proponents of the new International Criminal Court, for example, acknowledged that they organized that body with an independent prosecutor and other unusual provisions in order to avoid the politics and powers of the U.N. Security Council. Advocates of a ban on land mines or changes in climate control called their own conferences and adopted their own treaties, circumventing U.N. agencies and processes. The United Nations and its coalition went into Iraq when the U.N. Security Council would not adopt a further resolution. Even in humanitarian disasters, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations can deliver more aid faster than the United Nations.
Sixty years after its founding, let's give the United Nations high marks as an international forum. But the action bodies of the 21st century are coalitions of the willing, nations with common values who will join together to create courts, enact treaties, stop genocide and provide relief. All the high-minded reforms on the table will not -- and should not -- transform the United Nations from a debating society to a fast-action team.
David Davenport