Dead American butterfly

The United Nations, an institution birthed from the idea of global freedom from oppression and tyranny for all, is often perceived as dysfunctional at best and impotent at worst in preventing and intervening in genocidal neighbor-to-neighbor disputes and other ideological-driven wars. Loose talk about U.N. reform has centered on the removal of specific deceitful characters and the revision of other paper shuffling commonplace among so-called democratic bodies. \n"America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people," President Bush once said. Never mind the 20th-century America known worldwide for battling and defeating Japanese Tojoism, Nazism, Marxism and Chinese Maoism abroad; 21st-century America is now known around the globe as a tyrant in the form of pre-emptive invasions of sovereign nations under the banner of liberation, uranium-depleted weapons that cause human genetic mutations and environmental degradation, "ghost detentions," torture allegations acknowledged in some cases and the continued stripping of prized American civil \nliberties. \nAll of that in the name of waging a "War on Terror" against an "Axis of Evil," which has caused North Korea and Iran to pursue nuclear weapons in the hope of deterring an America attack after witnessing the violent thrashing of Baghdad and gutting of Iraq. Meanwhile, an estimated 10,000 of our global Sudanese neighbors are butchered by militiamen every month, while U.N. Ambassador John Bolton presses for international sanctions against Sudan and the Security Council twiddles its thumbs over what to do with Iran.\nAnd so the United Nations story unfolds: Genuine reform is stalled, and direct action to save the global neighborhood from ourselves might never occur because America is not on board the U.N. ship toward the freedom of all global peoples at all.\nBolton himself spearheaded U.N. reform through the international body's dismantling of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, an eventually watered-down group of human rights-dodging nations, in order to form an improved and more modern Human Rights Council in the hope of producing "different" international "outcomes."\n"We want a butterfly," Bolton said during a Jan. 25 press conference in Washington. "We don't intend to put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a success."\nBolton has since denied the validity of the new U.N. Human Rights Council, and America was one of four nations to vote "no" for the resolution. More than 170 countries favored the proposal, and 96 of the 191 General Assembly members must now approve council candidates.\nElections to the council are slated for May 9, and the United Nations' ship to genuine human rights reform is set for departure June 19. \nHuman Rights Watch, an international watch-dog agency, has decried Bolton's move as undermining America's claim to 21st-century leadership in battling global human rights.\n"We hope that the U.S. will make a serious effort to address its own rights abuses so that it can be in a stronger position to present itself for election to the council next year," HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said April 6.\nMight America pocket its pride while metamorphosing into a human rights butterfly?