Does the UN still have a legitimate role?

We plan to engage our audience in a lively debate over this very question by splitting into two groups:

Younnès and Erwan : agree that the UN has a legitimate role. Their task is to convince us of the positive aspects of the UN and advocate ways in which the organization ought to be strengthened.

Michael and Cédric : argue against the legitimacy of the UN. This group is out to convince the public that the UN is wasteful, corrupt, ineffective, and should perhaps be abolished.

Arguments are to focus on two essential UN goals :
- To maintain peace and international security.
- To promote international cooperation in areas useful to world progress.

In our debate we plan to address whether:

-to grant the UN an independent, career military force and the means to sustain such a force.
-voting power at the UN should be a function of economic might rather than population or WWII alignment.
-the UN's legitimacy has changed due to specific events over the past 60 years.

Because the anti-UN group took the time to post this, we'd like to get our audience interested with the following bit of polling data on American attitudes from a Luntz Maslansky survey which concluded on Sept. 5th 2006.

http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/HudsonPoll_UNfinal.pdf :

France has not been a world power for almost a century. They shouldn’t be a permanent member of the Security Council – holding a powerful veto over world and American interests.

51% AGREE
30% STRONGLY AGREE
21% SOMEWHAT AGREE
44% DISAGREE
25% SOMEWHAT DISAGREE
19% STRONGLY DISAGREE
5% DON’T KNOW/REFUSED