Sen. Frist Prepares to Run Against the U.N.

U.S. Senate majority leader Bill Frist has started his proto-campaign for the U.S. presidency in 2008 by targeting the U.N. In addition to demanding the U.S. stay out of the new Human Rights Council, he is circulating a petition on his blog demanding Iran be removed from the U.N.’s Disarmament Commission.

Frist obviously has a point here. The larger problem, though, is that the U.S. basically has very little control over the General Assembly, of which the Disarmament Commission is a subsidiary organ. The GA is a basically one country, one vote assembly, which means that there is always going to be enough anti-U.S. sentiment on all of its subsidiary organs.

As a consolation, though, the GA and the Disarmament Commission basically have no powers to do anything. Like the new (and old) U.N. Human Rights Council, these organizations are largely symbolic. As symbols, though, they do make easy targets that can be used to discredit the U.N. as a whole.