The new United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, can't stand the place where he works. There's no doubt he has deeper friendships than the one he shares with Kofi Annan. Ten years ago, he publicly condemned the organization from the basement to the rafters. He described it as superfluous, and he made fun of it. John Bolton, the right-wing Republican, isn't exactly a nice guy.

The thing is: John Bolton is right in many ways. If the UN were a business, it would have had to file for bankruptcy 10 years ago at the latest, and its executives would probably have found themselves in jail. The miserable failure of the United Nations in Rwanda and the Balkans cost more than a million human lives. In Sbrenica, the organization also humiliated itself when a Serbian general popped the corks on bottles of champagne with Dutch military personnel as a massacre was going on. No, of course the UN didn't know what was going on, it was innocent, as always. And it wasn't the UN leadership that then had to step down, but rather the Dutch government, because it took responsibility for the scandal. But for the 8,000 Bosnian men and boys killed in the massacre, the gesture came too late.

There has hardly been a UN intervention in any war zone in recent years that one could call successful. The organization wasn't even up to snuff in comparatively straightforward Kosovo. In the first few months after KFOR troops marched into Kosovo in the summer of 1999, many important UN officials could be seen walking through downtown Pristina, their brightly-colored plastic ID cards around their necks and their filofaxes filled with appointments. But the impressive appearance of UN officials in their white Toyotas couldn't have meant much to the 2,000 or so Serbs and gypsies killed at about the same time by Albanian extremists.

And now we're hearing that Bolton's appointment isn't just a slap in the face for Democrats, but also for Europe. This is naïve. The Democrats and the US Congress certainly have every right to take action against this man they see as a reactionary jerk with an enormous moustache. Indeed, they would be foolish to simply go ahead and give the all-clear to this ill-tempered individual the US president has decided to dispatch to the UN.

But the argument that Bush's decision is an insult to "Europe" doesn't hold water. Why? Because as far this issue is concerned, "Europe" is just as nonexistent an entity as "Africa" or "America." The reactions in Warsaw to Bolton's appointment are completely different from those in Berlin, London or Madrid. By now, even those who conjured up the fairy tale that Old Europe is "for" the UN and the United States and New Europe are "against" this institution no longer believe their own words.

If the UN isn't reformed from the ground up, it will quickly become superfluous. The UN must radically cut its dangerous, energy-consuming bureaucracy. It also doesn't necessarily need more money, just a clear and determined mandate in crisis situations. The UN must abandon its harmless principle of non-targeted aid -- à la watering can principle -- just as it must give up the romantic idea of broadly gauged multinational policing campaigns, which usually mean that the work is done by a portion of UN forces, while the remainder spend their days lying around in hammocks at their barracks and collecting generous hardship pay. The romantic image of a homogeneous global organization that does good things and prevents bad things from happening may still exist in some places, but it ceased to be a reality a long time ago.