The UN is not sincere By Ron Dermer (July 12) In his 1795 essay "Toward Eternal Peace," Immanuel Kant championed a morally infused politics that would one day empower an international federation of free countries to keep a "perpetual peace." Over a century later, in the aftermath of World War I, Woodrow Wilson tried to make that vision a reality by proposing the formation of a League of Nations, only to see his idealism rebuffed by the American Senate - an act, which, along with the League's foolish distribution of institutional power, left it incapable of taking effective measures against Japanese, Italian, German and Soviet aggression. Emerging from the anti-Axis coalition of World War II, the current United Nations, along with its permanent Security Council, was supposed to herald a new age of international security. Yet despite five decades of dispatching peacekeepers everywhere from Congo to Cambodia, the UN has been a monumental failure at fulfilling the ideal that Kant spoke of two centuries ago. While some policymakers argue for strengthening this feeble institution, the failure of the UN is not a function of its relative impotence, but rather its structural injustice. This federation of "free" states has Ireland seated next to Iraq, and Denmark only one chair removed from the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea. Since November 29, 1947, when a Soviet Union intent on expelling Great Britain from the Middle East supported the partition of Palestine, Israel has had few good days at the UN. As the ranks of non-democratic members swelled throughout the '50s and '60s, the representatives of the "international community" increasingly turned a blind eye to threats to Israel's security, whether they came in the form of Syrian mortar shells or Egyptian nautical restrictions. With dictatorial regimes having the run of the place in the post-colonial 1970s, the UN's attitude toward Israel turned from blatant disregard to outright hostility. Opening the door to the PLO and its gun-toting leader, the UN General Assembly even went so far as to equate Zionism with racism. As the 1980s drew to a close, the UN was banging out anti-Israel resolutions at a 30-a-year clip, and only the steadfastness of the United States stymied attempts to suspend Israel's membership. Not once deigning to pass a resolution condemning the spilling of Jewish blood, the UN did take time out from its busy peacemaking schedule in 1990 to censure Israel for expelling a handful of Hamas terrorists. Long after our enemies had turned using the legitimacy of the UN to delegitimize the Jewish state into an art form, the mounting campaign against Israel was temporarily sidetracked by Saddam Hussein's misguided attempt to devour his Kuwaiti neighbor. Of course, that famous handshake on the White House lawn was supposed to throw all that anti-Israelism into history's dustbin and usher in an era of unprecedented international goodwill. But the UN's refusal to hand over a tape that may provide valuable information on the abduction of three Israeli soldiers last fall, along with its earlier denials that such a tape even existed, shows that like so many other Oslo dreams, this too has proven to be a dangerous illusion. Fortunately, the election of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has made it less dangerous than it otherwise might have been. You may recall that members of the previous government considered placing the Temple Mount under the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council - an esteemed body in which the "People's Republic" of China enjoys permanent membership and where that bastion of justice called Syria will soon occupy a temporary seat. Remarkably, men as intelligent as former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who continues to believe that the only hope for Israel is an imposed solution monitored by the "international community," naively think that the UN is capable of neutrality. Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat knows better. The PLO leader understands that he is sure to get the support of the UN's non-democratic bloc, rife with authoritarian Arab and Muslim regimes. He also realizes that the UN is bound to keep a watchful eye on a democratic Israel and turn a blind eye towards his own kleptocracy. The same freedoms enjoyed by Israeli citizens will leave the Jewish state transparent to UN monitors, while Arafat's corrupt junta will keep those monitors, like their own subjects, in the dark. Moreover, Arafat knows that the UN is more concerned with protecting the lives of its own peacekeepers than with adjudicating between right and wrong. This places democracies like Israel, which would never consider harming UN forces - as the Hizbullah threatened to do this week - at a considerable disadvantage vis-a-vis regimes that will countenance any form of brutality. The silver lining this week is that for many Israelis, the true face of the UN, like that of Arafat last September, has been unmasked. Thus, when Israel finally decides to defend itself, its people will hopefully take the predictable international opprobrium that will follow with a heavy grain of salt. Twenty-five years ago, George Will, America's most eloquent pundit, wrote that the United Nations is guilty of many things, but not of sincerity. Little has changed since then.