Steve Forbes says: Get the United Nations out of New York

It won't happen, but the U.S. should advocate relocating UN headquarters out of New York City. Where? A lot of cities would qualify, all having the common denominator of being in troubled, poor countries. The poverty and backwardness of Port-au-Prince, Haiti or Lagos, Nigeria or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania or Addis Ababa, Ethiopia would serve as daily reminders to UN diplomats of one of the reasons their organization was created-and in ways that New York never can. In Manhattan UN diplomats and bureaucrats inhabit a privileged, pampered, junket-oriented bubble, a contributing factor to the UN's years-long record of murderous failure and moral turpitude. No surprise that the UN is now trying to expand its NYC operations. The oil-for-food scandal, perhaps the biggest instance of corruption in history, allowed Saddam Hussein to siphon off tens of billions of dollars and direct it (after meeting his own needs) to favored countries, companies and individuals whose influence could help perpetuate his deadly dictatorship. The UN has long turned a blind eye to terrorism. It failed, miserably, to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda-militants of the dominant Hutu tribe literally hacked to death 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi tribe. On the eve of this mass murder, Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping efforts, pulled out half the UN's forces, thereby giving a tacit green light to the slaughter that followed. The UN's utter lack of principles is on constant display in the UN Human Rights Commission: One of its members is Sudan, whose Arab-dominated government is committing genocide against the black population in the Darfur region. Another outrage was the UN's recent attempt to influence our presidential election. A top UN bureaucrat manufactured the way-overhyped story about an alleged missing weapons cache in Iraq. The timing of this was no coincidence-it was payback for President Bush's violating UN sensibilities with regard to Iraq. UN failings are not new. Repotting it might not enable the UN to regain its moral bearings, but it's certainly worth a try.