The smoke screen being generated by Senate liberals over Bush's nomination of John Bolton for ambassador to the United Nations obscures the real battle, one that has almost nothing to do with Bolton.
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'What we need in New York is a junk-yard dog, not a diplomatic lap-dog.'
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After all, if an abrasive personality and bad office manners were disqualifications for high office the Senate itself would be vastly different.
No. The real battle is over whether our sovereignty will be strangled by the UN.
The UN was created after World War II by nations to administer meetings and to help them coordinate the specialized international agencies that do the actual work. Its creators, especially the United States, never expected it to turn on them and try to swallow them up. Yet that is exactly what is happening thanks to a cabal of overly ambitious UN bureaucrats and leftist activists that is trying to hijack it and exploit it to build a New World Order.
A cabal of like-minded European Union bureaucrats and leftist Euro-liberals that has been trying to do the same thing in Europe by transforming the EU into a Super-Europe, last month received a clear wake-up call directly from the French and Dutch peoples who rejected their plan and cried out — our countries come first, not Europe. Regrettably, the Sith Lords of New York and their American co-conspirators did not get the message. Despite this clear evidence that people want their countries to be the masters and international organizations the servants, not the other way around, they are still forging ahead with their machinations.
Exactly how they propose accomplishing their objective is catalogued in an astonishing 1992 Report to the Security Council by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, disingenuously titled “ An Agenda for Peace – Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping.” Since no Secretary-General since him, including Kofi Annan, has repudiated it, we can assume that they continue to endorse it. In it, the Secretary-General calls for the following fundamental changes to the organization. Here are their ideas and the relevant direct quotes from this Report.
First, kill the Security Council veto: According to the report this is absolutely vital because, during the Cold War, “the United Nations was rendered powerless to deal with many crises [by the] veto”, “the time of absolute national…. sovereignty has passed” and “never again must the Security Council lose its collegiality….”
While the veto admittedly has been abused, it is the last best defense a permanent member has when its vital national interests are in danger.
The real reason for getting rid of it is to remove the single biggest obstacle from the cabal's path. Since, in the beginning, this will be hard to do, the Secretary-General proposed initially making an end-run around the veto by drowning it in a sea of new Council Members and demanding that its decisions be unanimous.
He also proposes shifting authority away from the Security Council. Under the UN Charter “the Security Council has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security under the Charter. The Secretary-General proposes changing this so that “this responsibility is shared by the General Assembly and by all the functional elements of the world Organization.”
The inevitable effect would be greatly to downgrade, and possibly even emasculate, the Security Council by shifting decision-making power away from it to both the General Assembly and the UN Secretariat.
And, just to be sure, the Secretary-General proposes creating a Third Chamber. Annan disguises this by re-labeling it a Human Rights Council. Left radicals who have approached me to ask me to help them promote this idea (I refused) are less disingenuous and, echoing their leftism, call it “The People's Chamber”. This Chamber would not only wield the real power, it would also be their wholly-owned subsidiary because its members would be appointed from “non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, parliamentarians, business and professional communities, the media and the public at large.” Supposedly, its purpose is to represent the UN's “widest constituency”, the people of the world, since its member states do not do this to the cabal's satisfaction. Its decisions would be final and binding on the Council and Assembly.
The report also recommends creating a free-standing United Nations Army, disguised as a Peace Force. Scandinavian and Canadian UN military staffers working on the plans for this say it would initially have one brigade but grow to three divisions. According to the Secretary-General's report, it would “…be more heavily armed than peacekeeping forces…”, maintain pre-positioned arsenals throughout the world and be “commanded by the Secretary-General.”
Last but by no means least, to pay for all this and more, the Secretary-General outlines plans to make the UN financially independent by giving it the right to dip into the coffers of the World Bank, IMF and private banks, levy taxes on “international arms sales and international travel and award “contracts without competitive bidding”. And, with chutzpa that would make a native a New Yorker blush, the Secretary-General argues we should give all this to the UN because, unlike the rest of us, it “will never be debilitated by political opportunism or by administrative or financial inadequacy [and has] a strong and independent international civil service whose integrity is beyond question.”
And he says this with a straight face! Needless to say, this claim of moral superior flies in the face of reality, especially in light of the UN's corrupt bungling of the Iraq Oil-for-Food program. In his own version of this plan, in a March 21, 2005 statement to the General Assembly 2005 that uses different words but embodies the same proposals, the current Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, chooses simply to ignore this evidence of the UN secretariat's lack of reliability and, instead, launches a cynical attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of this disaster disguised as a let's pretend “reform package.”.
Unchecked, the cabal trying to create a Super-UN will never cease trying to realize its ambitions. So they must be stopped, now, before it is too late.
As originally envisaged, the United Nations has real value and should its return to its original role, merits our support. But it is by no means irreplaceable. The nations of the world are perfectly capable of doing business without it and the specialized organizations are perfectly capable of doing the same and would even be cheaper to run without it.
But today's UN and its metastasizing lust for power, dreams of self-aggrandizement and rampant “mission creep”is in dire need of some very strong political chemotherapy, lest it malignant ambitions consume us.
And then, if even that fails, we should simply junk the entire Organization, which is why what we need in New York is a junk-yard dog, not a diplomatic lap-dog, if for no reason other than to save the UN from itself, a junk-yard dog with a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” attitude who will confront this threat head-on, and the diplomatic niceties be damned. And John Bolton has proven time and again that he is more than up to such a task. And if the other ambassadors or the Organization's top bureaucrats don't like his style or table manners, or this approach to the UN, well, as the French are wont to say in such cases, tant pis, tough!
Timothy C. Brown (tcbrown@hoover.stanford.edu) is a Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of World Tribune.com.