God help me, but I'm starting to see eye to eye with George Bush, and no, I haven't taken to driving my friends around in pick-up trucks or butchering aphorisms in public. But when everyone's favourite Texan hints that the UN is a sick dog that ought to be hauled out behind the shed and put down, I can't help but notice, to my own personal horror, that I've started to nod my head in agreement. In fact, I would have expected to see Fidel Castro ringing the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange before I started entertaining thoughts about the demise of the United Nations.

Two words: "never again."

That was what we were supposed to have learned from World War II. No more genocide, no more ethnic cleansing, no more of what even a relativist has to grudgingly acknowledge as outright evil. And the United Nations was supposed to be the tool to help achieve this and stop such slaughter from ever happening again.

Now, let me see...Gulags, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and a host of somewhat smaller atrocities from Chile to China amount to a big fat "F" when it comes to grading the UN's performance over the last sixty years.

But they get an A+ for generating reports; mounds and mounds of studies, position papers, statistics, and observations that, if nothing else, might account for the serious deforestation problem we have on our hands. Just go to the UN website and see what a single-minded dedication to not getting your hands dirty can lead to. If you want something studied to death, give it to the UN. If you want something done to stop it, you'd better look somewhere else.

The strategy is a time-honoured one: if you study anything long enough, the problem will eventually solve itself; sort of like a physician who keeps taking his patient's temperature every hour until the fever leaves him with one less patient. In Darfur (that faraway land you may have read about, full of black people busy killing each other, and not worth much more than page-ten coverage in most papers), the UN is still sorting out just how many are dead.

Some say 70,000, some say 300,000, and one suspects by the time they're done the magic jackpot will be past a million and finally worth some attention. Of course, it all depends on who you include in the census, but if 70,000 doesn't count as something worth worrying about, perhaps it's time to change the refrain: "never again...over one million."

Now, if Sudan's greatest natural resource weren't emaciated Africans but oil (Sudan's proven reserves account for less than half a per cent of Iraq's), Kofi Annan could at least pad his retirement fund a bit more. Whether using the oil-for-food program in Iraq to add an extra layer of gilt to their gold-plated ambassadorial limos, or standing by while the US went looking for cans of hairspray that looked suspiciously like sarin bombs, the UN has been exposed as both corrupt and as impotent as centenarian with an icepack in his shorts.

The best the Security Council has been able to come up with is a travel ban for genocidal Sudanese who want to cut and run before the international wheels of justice finally unstick themselves and send a nastily worded summons to appear in court.

This is what we learned from World War II? Travel restrictions and poison pen letters?

In its six-decade history the UN has drafted more resolutions and shaken more fingers at more noses than a PTA board too high on importance and triple cappuccinos for its own good. If the Security Council isn't drawing straws to see who can veto something next, then its members are busy snacking on caviar and patting each other on the back for instituting another no-fly zone that they won't bother to enforce.

Well, here's one disciple for the great world dream who's seen enough.

If UN members don't have the backbone to finally stand up and put a stop to something that we have seen time and again, and time and again have done nothing about, then perhaps it's time to put this old, tired dog to sleep. He was a great companion. He made us feel good, and would occasionally fetch slippers and do an amusing trick or two. But when push came to shove, he really never did a whole hell of a lot, and it's getting tiresome watching him grow old.

Why waste any more time on a lost cause? Pass the gun, Martha.