United Nations Ambassador John Bolton catalogued the agency's problems Monday, saying Americans want to fix the U.N. or find an alternative to it. "Being practical, Americans say that either we need to fix the institution or we'll turn to some other mechanism to solve international problems," he said in a speech to several hundred people as part of the Jesse Helms Lecture Series at Wingate University.
One issue that exemplifies the United Nations' problems is that it has become a place where terrorist nations serve on the human rights commission and where even denouncing terrorism is debated, Bolton said.
He noted that a recent session bogged down in discussion over whether national liberation movements should be allowed to engage in terrorism.
"The U.N. has to shake that off in order to be more effective," he said.
Asked whether his bluntness has been useful in dealing with other U.N. ambassadors, Bolton responded: "They enjoy dealing with someone who tells them exactly what he thinks. 
It's the way Senator Helms always proceeded and I always admired him for that."
Bolton spoke forcefully of the split between the United Nations and the United States over support for Israel.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the U.N. General Assembly made its "single worst decision," adopting a resolution equating Zionism with racism, he said. That showed that the U.N. "had strayed from the ideals of its founders," he said.
While the resolution was repealed in 1991, bias against Israel remains, he said.
Other continuing problems, Bolton said, include the oil-for-food scandal, which helped empower Saddam Hussein in Iraq; the tendency for U.N. peacekeeping missions to last indefinitely; and the troubling proclivity toward sexual exploitation and abuse "of the very people they're sent to protect" by U.N. peacekeepers.
"This is not something we can pass off as boys will be boys," Bolton said.
Indeed. Throw that man a steak.