Who Needs the Security Council Anyway?

What exactly do we have to show, after all, for our previous stints on the council? While we’re at it, what does the Security Council have to show for its 64-year existence? The League of Nations was supposedly undone by its failure to take action in the face of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. But the Security Council’s history has been one long series of Abyssinias, of crises it failed to resolve and invasions it did nothing to stop, from Hungary to Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. Indeed, it could not even muster a futile vote against these atrocities, being stymied at every turn by the Soviet veto. The shining exception was Iraq, whose conformity the council demanded in 17 consecutive resolutions, but which in the crunch it declined to enforce, Saddam Hussein being the client of several members of the council, or indeed, via the UN’s own Oil for Food scam, their sponsors.