The US taxpayers fund more than twenty percent of the annual budget of the United Nations. We house them in New York City, on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. We constantly defer to them on matters of international importance, even at the risk of our own security. Why do we continue to fund this collection of advocates for international criminals and dictators?

Recent speeches given by world leaders at the UN have brought the problems plaguing that organisation into sharp focus. The President of the United States made a speech about spreading freedom, democracy, human rights and reform, and received some polite applause. A Communist dictator from Venezuela and the mouthpiece of the Islamofascist theocrats who rule Iran made speeches attacking America, accusing our country and our President of horrible crimes, and received ovations.

"Every nation that travels the road to freedom moves at a different pace, and the democracies they build will reflect their own culture and traditions," President Bush told the assembled delegates. "But the destination is the same: A free society where people live at peace with each other and at peace with the world." Hugo Chavez of Venezuela repeatedly referred to President Bush as "the devil" during his own speech, ostentatiously crossing himself, and complained that "it smells of sulfur still today." Ahmadinejad of Iran ended his speech with a prayer for the return of the 12th Imam, asking that Allah "make us among his followers and among those who strive for his return and his cause." (Imagine the furor that would have erupted had President Bush ended his speech by praying for the Rapture and asking that God make everyone a Christian.)

Every year, thousands of lives are lost to the UN's corruption and vacillation, and untold numbers of crimes, large and small, are committed by its representatives. I'm not just talking about the reams of unpaid parking tickets issued annually by the NYC police, either. More than 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu died in Rwanda in 1994 while UN troops watched, prevented from acting by layers of bureacracy and a divided Security Council. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Serbs in Srebrenica while UN observers, well, observed. More recently, UN peacekeepers watched as Hizballah terrorists launched rockets attacks against Israeli civilians on a daily basis, even reporting that Hizballah "fired from the vicinity of five UN positions" in July 2006. Indeed, the UN's legacy of inaction is exceeded in criminality only by its actions.

After President Clinton brought NATO in to stop the slaughter in the Balkans, the region was turned over to the UN, by whom it is mismanaged to this day. UN peacekepers ran forced prostitution rings in Bosnia and Kosovo until turned in by an American worker. UN peacekeepers have been involved in rape, slavery, child prostitution, black marketeering, bribery and food-for-sex scandals from East Timor to West Africa. In the biggest disgrace in history, France, Russia and China used their votes on the Security Council to prevent action against Saddam Hussein in order to protect oil contracts they had made with his regime while he brutalised the Iraqi people. Prominent and influential people in those countries and many more took bribes from Saddam to use their influence on his behalf. The scandal reached all the way up to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself.The largest criminal organisation in history -- that's what our tax dollars are funding.

Right now, genocidal attacks are taking place against blacks in the Darfur region of Sudan, carried out by the Arab Janjaweed militias, while the UN passes resolutions "deploring" the slaughter but doing nothing to stop it. Sudan, coincidentally, is a member of the UN's Human Rights Commission, along with Cuba, Libya and China. Iran has defied repeated UN demands to stop enriching uranium in pursuit of nuclear weapons, while Russia and China -- again protecting their business partner, as they did Iraq -- block the Security Council from recommending even the weakest sanctions. Iran, again coincidentally, is vice-Chair of the Disarmament Commission. After ten years of trying, the UN is still unable to write a resolution condemning terrorism, for fear of offending terror-supporting member states. In fact, the United Nations is unable to do anything at all to fulfill its purpose, which -- as written into its charter -- was "to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace."

The problem stems from the UN's insistence on treating all member states the same, regardless of their record on human rights, terrorism, war or democracy. It is long past time for us to either change the United Nations or disband it in favor of a more effective council of nations. Either way, nations who do not practice democracy within their own borders should not be allowed to cast votes on any international actions. Pretending that delegates of governments that do not represent their people somehow speak for those people is a joke. Nations under any kind of censure for disarmament or human rights abuses should not be allowed to sit on, let alone chair, those commissions.

As long as we continue to pretend that the United Nations is what it should be, rather than what it is, we have no hope of reforming it. It's time to look at the UN's problems honestly and work to fix them, or else halt its funding and remove its headquarters from our soil.

Joe Mariani is a computer consultant born and raised in New Jersey. He now lives in Pennsylvania, where the gun laws are less restrictive and taxes are lower. Joe always thought of himself as politically neutral until he saw how far left the left had really gone after 9/11. His essays and links to articles are available at http://www.guardianwatchblog.com/