Can the United Nations reform?

The Economist is hopeful, calling Kofi Annan’s proposals as the most sweeping reforms since the U.N. was formed in 1945. Here’s a recap of the recent, unsavory, past:

If there is one thing on which both critics and supporters of the United Nations agree—especially since the enormous row over the Iraq war—it is that the world body is in need of reform. America and its allies were exasperated at the UN’s failure to agree action against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Opponents of the war were equally angry at the UN’s failure to stop America from launching it. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, there was the revolting spectacle of Britain and France sucking up to Lansana Conté, the tinpot dictator of tiny Guinea, because the UN’s rules had given him one of the Security Council’s rotating seats. Earlier, there was the equally stomach-churning sight of the tyrannical Libyan regime getting a turn at chairing the UN’s Commission on Human Rights. Then there was the gross embezzlement that has been uncovered in the UN’s $70 billion oil-for-food programme in Iraq—not to mention the UN’s prolonged inaction while the mass slaughter has continued in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Nowhere to go but up with that resume.