The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened their Friday editorial with this:

[Y]ou can always count on the United Nations to rehabilitate a rogue. So it did on Monday by granting the Islamic Republic [of Iran] a leadership role at a conference on nuclear nonproliferation.
You can’t make this up, and with the UN you never need to.

 The leadership role?

The global body chose Iran as one of the 34 vice presidents to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I’ll elide the idiocy of a committee so large and so bloated with feel-good title inflation as to have 34(!) vice presidents.

The larger matter is this. While the editors are correct to characterize Iran as a rogue nation, they’ve missed the beam in their own eye: the UN is, itself, a rogue entity, no longer serving to work toward/preserve peace and comity among nations as it was—however naively—created to do. Instead, it routinely gives high level voice to the very kind of political entities it was intended to corral.

In the end, the only reason to continue the expense of providing facilities in New York City for the UN’s headquarters is the wisdom of the old adage of keeping one’s enemies closer.