The UN is weak.

[A Black Falcon]

The UN is far from being weak. It is, however, extremely difficult to get nations which often do not agree to have much of anything to do with eachother, so because our agenda does not always get done the UN is "weak". When you have a body with such a diverse range of views, and with a construction that makes it impossible to pass anything that one of the major powers doesn't like, there's going to be deadlock... so very little happens in Burma or Sudan because China likes governments that will sell them resources no questions asked and that aren't fans of the US.

Even so, when the UN does act things happen. The UN can be a very powerful and effective body when it actually agrees on something, such as all the work on trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program or to just figure out what exactly Iran has done towards one. Slow? Yes, diplomacy usually is. But it also can be effective; there's as good a chance now as there ever will be for North Korea to actually give up its nuclear program.. we'll see if it complies, it could go either way, but I don't think you'll find a much better chance than now, and that would never have happened without the international community. As for Rwanda (and Bosnia), in both of those cases, the fighting finally stopped once the UN finally managed to get around to getting involved. I think that in both cases the UN was horribly remiss in waiting so long to act (so many died before they did...), but once they finally did things happened... though in Bosnia of course things then got worse again and it was the US and NATO that finally dealt with Serbia (way, way, way too late), but that required international, and UN, support as well.

Oh yeah, and since the invasion into Iraq we've learned how effective the UN sanctions on Iraq were. In short, they worked perfectly: Sadaam was unable to rebuild his weapons program. There should have been a better effort to save the lives of Iraqi children who died because of the lack of medicine that came with the long 12-year blockade (a lot of people died in Iraq of curable illnesses because of lack of supplies), but even so the blockade succeeded at its primary mission and showed that the UN can indeed work. The UN weapons inspectors also proved their worth by not finding weapons where there were none... :)

It's pretty disgusting the way that conservatives in the US use this "the UN doesn't work" cloak as a cover for their actual agenda, destroying the UN so we can either stick our heads in the sand again (for isolationsists) or just take over the world ourselves (for neocons, though given how horribly badly their attempts to do that during the Bush administration have gone you'd think that they'd have learned that we actually do need help from other countries...). You can't get anything done these days without international support, and the Republicans still are refusing to deal with this fact.