'Hat in Hand,' on 'Bended Knee'

Articles

by William F. Jasper, New American, June 28, 2004

After supposedly breaking with the UN over the Iraq War, the Bush administration has not only come to the UN as supplicant but is pushing for a UN standing army....

It’s quite nice when you’ve been generally dissed about your irrelevancy and then suddenly have people coming on bended knee and saying, "We need you to come back."

— Edward Mortimer, a senior aide to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

‘‘Today in Baghdad," President George Bush told reporters at a June 1 Rose Garden press briefing, "U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, announced the members of Iraq’s new interim government." In fact, Mr. Allawi had been picked as interim prime minister by the U.S.-installed Governing Council from a short list presented to them by UN envoy Brahimi. Mr. Brahimi not only pre-selected Prime Minister Allawi, but Iraq’s new president, its two deputy presidents, and its 33-member cabinet as well.

During the course of his remarks and responses to questions, President Bush repeatedly underscored the UN’s dominant role in determining the makeup of the new Iraqi government:

• "[UN envoy] Mr. Brahimi put together a government."

• "Mr. Brahimi made the decisions and brought their names to the Governing Council. As I understand it, the Governing Council simply opined about names. It was Mr. Brahimi’s selections and — Ambassador Bremer and Ambassador Blackwill were instructed by me to work with Mr. Brahimi."

• "Mr. Brahimi made the decision on [Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed] Chalabi, not the United States. Mr. Brahimi was the person that put together the group."

"Earlier today," said President Bush, "I spoke to Secretary General Kofi Annan. I congratulated him on the U.N.’s role in forming this new government." At virtually the same time that President Bush was making these remarks, Kofi Annan was conducting a press conference at the UN’s New York headquarters, where he heaped praise on Lakhdar Brahimi, whom he conspicuously referred to as "my own envoy."

Yes, one year after the administration launched the Iraq War in apparent defiance of the UN, and less than a month before the June 30 deadline for handing over control of Iraq to the Iraqis, it is the UN that is calling the shots — while the U.S. continues to pay in blood and treasure. The UN has handpicked the new Iraqi government. The UN will supervise Iraq’s national elections in 2005. The UN will administer billions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction aid, despite the fact that the UN’s administration of Iraq’s "Oil-for-Food" program under Saddam Hussein has been exposed as one of the biggest corruption scandals of all time....

In reality, the Bush administration had never "snubbed" the UN, as the [New York] Times asserts and as so many people believe. President Bush and other administration officials had repeatedly stated that the purpose of the war was to disarm Saddam Hussein per United Nations Security Council resolutions. Their complaint with the UN was that it was not enforcing its own resolutions and that its resolutions should be enforced. The Bush administration’s policy to empower the UN is not new; what is new is that the policy is now much more transparent than it was at the beginning of the Iraq War. In fact, the war has greased the skids for UN empowerment.

One of the most stunning developments to come out of the Bush administration’s war on Iraq has been almost completely ignored by the media cartel. Incredibly, the Bush Defense and State Departments are jointly proposing to establish, with the apparent blessing of the White House, a 75,000-strong army of international "peacekeepers." Called the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), this astonishing scheme calls for recruiting and training primarily Third World peacekeepers, to the tune of over $600 million over the next five years.

“On a Permanent Basis”

The most zealous advocates of world government have been pushing to create a standing UN army for the past half century. All such proposals have ultimately foundered and perished on the shoals of realpolitik; nations have been unwilling to turn any sizable portion of their military forces over to UN control, or to fund a permanent UN army. More recently, the organized one-worlders have tried to achieve their purpose indirectly and piecemeal, calling for a UN Rapid Deployment Force made up of military units that member nations would commit to “standby” availability. That, too, has failed.

Now, the administration of President George Bush, “Mr. Unilateralist,” is proposing a dangerous and brazen scheme that, had it been proposed by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, would have touched off a typhoon of protest and a speedy drafting of articles of impeachment. Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry — both fervent internationalists — would not dare advocate such a blatantly globalist program, knowing full well that it would be the kiss of death for them politically. Yet, so far, there has not been even a peep of protest from Republican loyalists about the president’s pitch for a global constabulary....

Boutros-Ghali called on member states “to make armed forces, assistance and facilities available to the Security Council … not only on an ad hoc basis but on a permanent basis.” This was nothing less than a blatant appeal to establish a UN planetary military force....

No one should have been surprised. Despite his conservative rhetoric, George Herbert Walker Bush’s credentials as a certified internationalist were by that time already a public record. He had been a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he had served as a director, and the Trilateral Commission, two of the most notorious and influential groups promoting the merger of nations, the death of national sovereignty, and, ultimately world government under the United Nations.

Even more important than his own membership in these groups was the fact that Bush — like other recent presidents, both Republican and Democrat — appointed hundreds of CFR members to top positions in his administration, including the heads of most of his cabinet departments. Many of those prominent CFR one-worlders now serve in his son’s administration, including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Blackwill and John Negroponte....

... the administration proposed exempting the Global Peace Operations Initiative from those legal constraints and requested authority to use Department of Defense funding intended to pay for the operations and maintenance of U.S. forces. As a result, any use of the authority could mean depriving U.S. forces of the resources that the administration had requested, and which Congress had authorized and appropriated, for their operations and maintenance.

Incredible! As has been widely reported, our soldiers and Marines in Iraq are suffering from a shameful lack of body armor and shortages of food, water, ammunition and just about every other battlefield necessity. But the Bush administration wants to spend $606 million to train and equip foreign soldiers for UN peacekeeping missions. The money would come mostly from the Defense budget, despite the fact that our own troops are already under-equipped. And, like the Clinton administration’s effort to keep PDD-13 from Congress and the American public, the Bush administration is trying to sneak its subversive GPOI past Congress in stealth mode. It has been extremely stingy about releasing any details of this revolutionary program.

Thus, it is somewhat reassuring to find that there are, apparently, at least enough genuine Americans on the House Armed Services Committee to put the brakes on this proposal, even though, “in general, the committee supports the goals” of the GPOI....

The United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Meeting this challenge is the most important function of the Organization, and to a very significant degree it is the yardstick with which the Organization is judged by the peoples it exists to serve....

Bush: Doing What Liberals Cannot

...Now it is George W. Bush who is carrying forward the UN agenda previously pushed by the CFR-dominated administrations of his father and Bill Clinton. Professor Robert Wright, an unflinching advocate of world government, pungently remarked in a New York Times column last year that President Bush, despite his seeming anti-UN rhetoric, has bestowed upon the UN “a prominence it has rarely enjoyed in its 57-year history.” “In fact,” Professor Wright mused, “there remains a slim chance that the president could, however paradoxically, emerge as a historic figure in the United Nations’ own evolution toward enduring significance.”

Robert Wright then noted that “if Nixon could go to China, President Bush can go through New York.” This observation is particularly apropos at this time. For those too young to understand the significance of the professor’s Nixon-China reference, it was President Richard Nixon, a reputed conservative Republican, who sold out Taiwan, our anti-Communist ally, leading to its expulsion from the UN, and its replacement in that world body by Communist China. And it was the same Nixon, who had built a reputation as an anti-Communist, who went to Beijing and paved the way for completely reversing U.S. policy and establishing relations with Mao’s Communist regime.

Those betrayals more than three decades ago started the massive loans, aid and technology transfers that have transformed Communist China into the global economic and military power that now poses one of the greatest dangers to our lives and livelihoods. Many liberal-left, internationalist Democrats lamented at the time that Nixon had stolen their program — while others of the same ilk exulted that a Republican had accomplished what they could never have pulled off. Robert Wright, speaking for many in the one-world corner, sees George Bush doing for the UN what Nixon did for China.

Republicans and self-styled conservatives who put party loyalty and the Bush cult of personality above our country’s interests, and who fail to oppose the Bush program to empower the UN, are aiding and abetting — whether they realize it or not — an assault on America that is far more dangerous than anything Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein could ever muster.

Americans who want to pass on our nation’s legacy of freedom will spare no effort in getting Congress to terminate our UN membership — before that option is no longer available to us.

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