Observers of the United Nations said reform is the talk of headquarters in New York because the body's ineptitude has become increasingly clear. In its latest dithering, the world body dawdled over the Sudan, where 6,000 to 10,000 Africans a month are dying from starvation and civil strife.

As David Brooks of the New York Times has written: "The United States said the killing in Darfur was indeed genocide, the Europeans weren't so sure and the Arab League said definitely not, and hairs were split and legalisms were parsed, and the debate over how many corpses you can fit on the head of a pin proceeded in stentorian tones while the mass extermination of human beings continued at a pace that may or may not rise to the level of genocide."

On long-standing conflicts in Asia, the United Nations has done little to foster reunification of South Korea and North Korea, to ease the dispute between China and Taiwan over that island's fate, to combat terror and piracy in Southeast Asia, to mediate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir or to end 20 years of ethnic strife in Sri Lanka.

Stanford University historian Victor David Hanson wrote recently: "(O)ur global watchdog, the United Nations, had been largely silent. It abdicates its responsibility of ostracizing those states that harbor mass murderers, much less organizes a multilateral posse to bring them to justice."

Schemes for fixing the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly have been flying around for months. The key is to find an acceptable balance among the major powers, middle powers and smaller nations.

In the Security Council, the world powers supposedly exercise leadership, but Britain and France have long since slipped off that top shelf. If they could be persuaded not to veto reforms, perhaps a three-tiered Security Council could be assembled. Criteria for the top and middle tiers would be population, political stability, economic strength and military power.

The top tier would comprise the United States, the European Union (which includes Britain, France, Germany and Italy), China, India, Japan and Russia. The veto would be diluted by requiring two top-tier states to block an action.

In the middle would be permanent members without veto power, such as Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Korea, Indonesia, Egypt and Mexico. In the third tier would be members rotating by geographic region: Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Arab world and Pacific island nations.

In the General Assembly, which has nearly quadrupled from 51 members in 1945 to 191 members today, the U.S. vote counts no more than that of Palau, population 20,000.

Consequently, the assembly is largely ignored.

Weighted voting might be tried to make the General Assembly effective. A nation would get one vote for every 100 million people, for instance, and another for every 2 percent of the world's gross national product. That would give the United States 17 votes (3 plus 14) and China 14 votes (13 plus 2).

Resolutions would be binding, as they are not now, they gained a two-thirds vote.

All this is admittedly speculative. As a devoted advocate of the United Nations says: "That the U.N. does not fairly represent today's world is true — but that doesn't make reorganizing it any easier."