This stuff starts on the playground, really. Who among us hasn't been hauled to the principal's office after hitting back at the school bully - and then told, gosh darn it, he's here all the time but you're supposed to be better! It's the tactic of the thoroughly cowardly bureaucrat.

Some of us want punishment for whoever started the fight; some of us want punishment for whoever finished it.

This is why so many wars have been started under democrat Presidents. It's also why, the wars our country fought that finished with a lasting, enduring, durable peace, were fought before we had the United Nations. Since then, every wildfire around the globe, rather than being altogether extinguished, just subsides into a smoldering slow burn ready to erupt into an inferno at any time.

House of Eratosthenes

This reminds me of a story one the people I met in college told me. She said she was in Model UN, and one time they were running a scenario where they were representatives of NATO countries at a time when terrorists had taken control of a NATO building in Brussels. They were tasked with resolving the situation. After many hours of debate, they released a statement saying that an attack against one was an attack against all. So the terrorists blew up the building, killing thousands, including themselves.

She told the story as a funny anecdote of how a group of people (a committee, really) are unable to come to any kind of decision, even in a crisis. In retrospect, however, I think they modeled the UN very accurately.

As a counter point, I offer this story from one of my high school friend's time in JROTC. He was invited to the Pentagon to do some war games. Their scenario was the acquisition of nuclear weapons by North Korea. North Korea was preparing to invade South Korea, and they were supposed to stop them.

Their solution was to launch a series of cruise missile strikes at North Korea's anti-air defenses (said defenses provided by the Chinese), and then bomb the ICBM launch complex as well as North Korea's military staging areas. This caused the Chinese to 'aid' North Korea by invading South Korea. And to stop that monstrosity, they nuked one Chinese ballistic missile sub base and a staging area where China had massed close to one million troops, thus negating China's military might.

The coordinator ruled that China dropped out and America won the war.