UN is a silly thing

Many UN components have clearly been driven well outside the realm of their mandate and/or common sense by special interests. Whether this counts as "corruption" or not is a question I can't answer for you, but it does so count for me.

The 40,000-odd dead -- mostly civilians -- in Iraq since the US started its most recent round of overt meddling in the Middle East is but a pale shadow of the bloodshed entailed in UN "peace efforts" over the years, to say nothing of the deaths which have resulted when a supranational organisation had an opportunity to intervene but instead sat on their hands, perhaps not even "viewing with concern". Some of the WHO programs are also pretty horrifying when viewed through independent glasses.

The UN as a whole is not a panacea for anything, although some of its components have done absolutely brilliant jobs within their own particular spheres of influence. The problem is those other components, which are part and parcel of the same UN.

If the UN as a whole was effective, there would be neither reason nor excuse for the USA to sidestep them.

Both the UN's waffling and having the US sidestep them is frightening for a non-US Westerner (and presumably for non-US non-Westerners too, although obviously I can't speak from personal experience). Both Dubya and his political opponents have shown great willingness to be arrogantly heavy-handed in dealing with others, and to turn a blind eye to actions which should have been policed by them if they were going to intervene at all.

It's difficult for many USians to understand just how they appear to the rest of the world and I can't think of a simple way to explain it to them -- perhaps think of their country as the quintessential obnoxious tourist in his faux-Hawaiian shirt complaining because the damn natives won't do things "properly" like they do back home (modulo a dash of historic myopia: rememering the good about "back home" but not the bad).

I think all an outsider needs to do to understand how this process works is to haunt US news sites for a week or so and have a careful look at how this news is prioritised, and at the perspectives exposed in the few stories which do mention the rest of the world. Remember that USians face this perspective every day, and try to imagine what kind of effect this constant, subtle training must have on one's mind. You may not like being looked down upon and treated as essentially unimportant, but you might begin to understand why a USian might do that kind of thing by default.

1. The UN was instigated by the US ( furthering national gains
with less public visibility )

2. The current US public dismissal/hate is a wellgroomed thing
to try to end the UN ( because No. 1 does not work that well anymore )

3. General behaviour, tactics and methods of US Government and Microsoft
don't differ that much, they stem from the same culture.
Both seem to live in a world where everybody else is out to get them.
Therefore in "Selfdefence" no fairness is necessary.

I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that currently the USA is the dominating (one could argue "only") superpower in the world.

If you are the biggest child on the playground (and the USA is not only the biggest, in for example military spendings they are larger than the next ten countries *combined*) you don't really see the value of having any overnationaly governing structure. Why would you ? The alternative is that the USA does precisely like it wants to.

For the same reason, I'm willing to bet that Microsoft don't see much value in having any sort of anti-trust legislation.

No marketplace can be healthy when one player is dominating it. I propose that the world of international politics is a marketplace in this context.