John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, said Americans expect the UN to introduce effective reforms or else Washington might look elsewhere for help in solving international problems.
One issue that exemplifies the UN's problems is that it has become a place where terrorist nations serve on the human rights commission and where even denouncing terrorism is debated, Bolton said in a speech to several hundred people on Monday as part of the Jesse Helms Lecture Series at Wingate University.
He noted that a recent session bogged down in discussion over whether national liberation movements should be allowed to engage in terrorism.
"The UN has to shake that off to be more effective," he said.
"Being practical, Americans say that either we need to fix the institution or we'll turn to some other mechanism to solve international problems," he said.
Asked whether his bluntness has been useful in dealing with UN ambassadors, Bolton responded: "They enjoy dealing with someone who tells them exactly what he thinks ... It's the way Senator Helms always proceeded and I always admired him for that."
Helms, the archconservative former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served in the Senate for almost 30 years before retiring in 2003 and founding the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate.
Bolton spoke forcefully of the split between the UN and the US over support for Israel.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly made its "single worst decision," adopting a resolution equating Zionism with racism, he said. That showed that the UN "had strayed from the ideals of its founders," he said.
While the resolution was repealed in 1991, bias against Israel remains, he said.
Other problems, Bolton said, include the oil-for-food scandal, which helped empower Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the tendency for UN peacekeeping missions to continue indefinitely, and the troubling proclivity toward sexual exploitation and abuse "of the very people they're sent to protect" by UN peacekeepers.
"This is not something we can pass off as boys will be boys," Bolton said.
He said he has little expectation that a conference in Tunis on the question of Internet governance will prove useful. He said many of the 191 governments represented in the UN contend they want to collectively exert more control over the Internet.
While the US does not want any additional controls, "we will be under heavy pressure even from our friends in the EU who want to have control," he said.
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