Most Americans welcomed President Barack Obama's pledge in a speech last month to re-engage the United States in the work of the United Nations.

The U.N. can do much important work around the world and also relieve the United States of some of its global responsibilities or aid it in meeting them.

All that said, it is fair to add that the U.N. is sometimes difficult to work with, given some of its own curious practices. One of them is how it selects the non-permanent members of the Security Council, the U.N.'s most important decision-making body. It is composed of 15 members, five of which -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the most important nations that won World War II -- are permanent, veto-bearing members.

The other 10 are non-permanent and do not have a veto over council actions. Five are elected each year, roughly on a regional basis, to serve two-year terms. This is where the craziness sometimes comes in. Last Thursday five members for the 2010-11 term were chosen: Brazil, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gabon, Lebanon and Nigeria.

One of the G-20 countries, Brazil is the only one of the five that is solid and democratic. Bosnia-Herzegovina is barely functional, operating with the ramshackle structure put in place by the 1995 Dayton Accords. Gabon's long-time kleptocratic dictator, Omar Bongo, died in June and was replaced in dubious contested elections by his son, Ali. Lebanon is one of the most divided nations on the planet, frequently unable to choose a president or a prime minister and paralyzed by religious and other divisions. Oil-rich Nigeria is universally judged to be one of the world's most corrupt nations.

On Jan. 1 these five countries will join the five permanent Security Council members and the other five non-permanent members in their second year -- Austria, Japan, Mexico, Turkey and Uganda. Typical of the kind of issues the council faces was one referred to it Friday by the U.N. Human Rights Council -- the explosive question of possible Security Council action on a report on war crimes allegedly committed by Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza during the war at the turn of the year which took the lives of some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

Fortunately, the council has responsible nations to deal with weighty issues of this sort, but it's difficult to take some of the members seriously. Given the Security Council's responsibilities to the world, it's just not good enough that U.N. countries abdicate their responsibility to provide a solid council by allowing the choice of members to be made on the basis of precedent, money changing hands or trade-offs.

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