IT'S time we scrapped the United Nations. It's a useless talking shop which costs millions that would be better spent on - well, anything really from bananas to beer.

The UN was set up after the end of the Second World War because the earlier organisation, the League of Nations, had singularly failed to prevent the most destructive conflict in history. Unfortunately, the UN is as big a failure as the League was. In crisis after crisis these last 50-odd years, it has proved impotent in the promotion of international peace and justice and in the suppression of tyrants.

Where, for instance, was the UN at the time of the Rwanda conflict, in which more than a million people were massacred? Answer: nowhere. What did the UN do to stop the murderous - and incidentally racist - policies of Slobodan Milosovic? Answer: nothing. It took a Nato force led by the United States and supported by Britain to put an end to the terror in Kosovo. What is the UN doing to curtail Mugabe's racist violence in Zimbabwe? Answer again: nothing at all.

The UN has been consistently powerless to check Saddam Hussein these last 11 years since the Gulf War was prematurely and mistakenly ended with the Iraqi dictator still in power. Its weapons inspectors were tricked and hoodwinked constantly and eventually ignominiously thrown out. That should have been the moment for the organisation to admit its impotence and offer its collective resignation. But arrogant, over-paid international bureaucrats are not in the habit of jumping off their gravy train as easily as that.

Now the farcical suggestion is that UN weapons inspectors go back into Iraq to resume their search. What, only to be hoodwinked, misled and deceived as before? I have just been talking to a knowledgeable person who returned the other week after spending months in Iraq. He told me that Saddam manufactures and stores his chemical and biological weapons on hundreds, if not thousands, of outlying farmsteads - at great danger to life and limb of the farmers since the weapons materials are radically unstable. That's how much the Great Dictator cares about the lives of his own people. And his nuclear project is well-hidden at several sites, very probably underground.

Then we are told that America and Britain must obtain a UN resolution before starting a war on Iraq. Why? Iraq has been in contempt of more than 20 UN resolutions for years, and nothing is ever done about it.

Every day, every month, every year of its existence the UN demonstrates its fatuity. For more than half a century it has shown itself to be corrupt and incompetent. It's long past the time to end all those freebies for its hordes of self-regarding bureaucrats and turn out the lights in the UN building. For too long they have lived in a politically-correct cloud cuckoo land, an international fantasy world in which the apparatchiks themselves are the only ones who think they are doing any good at all.

September 11 proved once and for all that the fantasy is over.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.