UN-Necessary?

With the death of former Yugoslavian Caeser Slobodan Milosevic on March 11, the United Nations International Criminal Court breathed a collective sigh of relief. Gone, with the last breath of a psychopath, also was the onerous responsibility of meeting the standards of "international justice". Not that the Western idea of justice was on the table to begin with, as the worst Milosevic faced for the ethnic cleansing of a quarter of a million people was life in prison. Since his May 1999 indictment for war crimes, the thumb-twiddling Hague court allowed Milosevic to employ every antic imaginable to essentially take over his own trial. Saddam Hussein and friends have apparently noticed this, and are currently employing a few pages from the deceased strongman's playbook.
The core problem with the U.N. court is the same one that plagues any type of decision making body so large and so diverse. John Adams once observed that in his opinion, "One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress." The point, extrapolated to the U.N. court, is that it will operate to the standards of the lowest common denominator. How can a court whose judges hail from Jordan, Venezuela and China be considered anything but hypocritical? This is the virus that infects the U.N. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination boasts two members, India and Pakistan, whose ethnics have butchered each over ownership of a few miles of valueless dirt in the Hindu Kush for hundreds of years. The Committee on Migrant Workers has Mexico as a member but the United States is conspicuously absent. A fox in the henhouse, even one that has been tamed, will not be able to resist the urge to grab a chicken and run when the farmer isn't looking.
The U.N. was truly a great idea at it's inception. Today, however, it has become a joke. The admission of nations that are non-democratic goes against the principles the U.N. supposedly stands for. The current state of the U.N. exemplifies what happens when standards are lowered. While the notion of the entire world sharing the same kind of wealth and luxury the United States has is noble and humanitarian, it is also suicidal (see Empire, Roman) When the citizens fell victim to the concept of "cultural equivalence", they were destroyed by a primitive band of nomads. By contrast, earlier in their history they stood firm against the forces of Hannibal, destroyed the great power of Carthage in the Punic Wars and conquered Greek, Macedonian, Armenian, Persian civilizations. The difference was not in the size of their army or their armaments; it was in their Roman pride. In the latter years, they questioned their own beliefs and institutions, the things that made Rome great to begin with. When they lost their pride and conviction, they lost their will to fight and were subsequently defeated by bands of unorganized barbarians. Let us not,at this pivotal time in history, forget what it means to be an American.