Abolish The U.N.

Whenever I walk by the United Nations, usually hunched over forward to prevent the icy wind blowing across Turtle Bay off the East River from enveloping my face, I try to listen or read what a group or individual are protesting. While fighting the elements as I make my way through the crowd or barricade, I can’t help wonder when this unfunded dinosaur will join the ranks of other beautiful relics in New York’s museums and become a peaceful historical geopolitical Jurassic Park. The Museum of Natural History came to mind. Prime East River real estate, wasted on an outdated global failure. Just like the U.N. peace missions and countless resolutions. Twentieth century failures, as Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq and Sudan remind us. Isn’t it really time for the U.S. to get out of the U.N. and the U.N. to get out of the U.S.?

Walter Lippmann once wrote: “A policy is bound to fail which deliberately violates our pledges and our principles, our treaties and our laws. The American conscience is a reality.” One of the first lessons I learned when I started practicing law was that “what starts fucked up ends up fucked up.” Barnie Shapiro, a senior partner at the firm I started my legal career, ingrained that quote in me after I questioned why a particular company we were representing was bankrupt. I’ve modified the expression to: “An organization is like a building. It’s as good as its foundation.”

The U.N. was built on the site of a former abattoir – a slaughter house. Built in 1952, the retro modernist building, with stained glass by Marc Chagall, murals by Fernand Leger and a tapestry by Picasso’s celebrated anti-war painting, Guernica, violates New York’s safety and fire codes. The building is packed with toxic asbestos, has no sprinkler system and leaks about a quarter of the heat used to keep it warm in winter. The U.N. wants to build another office building next door, so that the headquarters building can be gutted. How appropriate. Why not just go for the kill?

Why waste the $1.6 billion on a temporary conference hall for the General Assembly that will be in use until the proposed renovations that will take place until 2013? The $1.6 billion price tag is 55% higher than anticipated. No surprise there.

The Hong Kong government demolishes buildings with weak foundations, even brand new ones if the pilings are not up to code. The U.N.’s pilings, not to mention piles, that the UN security videos reveal of the homosexual sexual activities in the the most secretive confines of the building while trying to defend themselves against crime and terrorism do not serve or comply with any code of today’s geopolitical reality and like substandard buildings in Hong Kong should be replaced-superceded by a global organization that is up to the geopolitical code of the 21st century.