Posted on 11/05/2003 9:14:12 AM PST by VxH
Behind the Deception by William F. Jasper
President Bush’s reversal from unilateralism to multilateralism was entirely predictable. He is merely following the internationalist principles that guide his administration.
‘‘Unilateralism!" "Cowboy diplomacy!" Clintonites and other denizens of the one-world Left had been using such expressions to vent their outrage over President George W. Bush’s foreign policy long before he launched Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the March 19 invasion of Iraq started a new round of hyperventilating by the fervid internationalist choir. The president was undoing the multilateralist world order set up after World War II, they wailed. He was scorning and undermining the United Nations, they declaimed.
Many American patriots, on the other hand, were elated. Finally an American president was standing up to the UN and putting America’s security and well-being first. Shame on the UN! Shame on the Frenchies, Germans, Russians and other fair-weather friends who opposed our retribution on Saddam for the 9-11 terror atrocities! The radio waves crackled with jubilant hurrahs from the Rush Limbaugh-Sean Hannity-Ollie North end of the broadcast dial. Rush-bots and Bush-bots exulted: Hurray for President Bush and America First, go-it-alone unilateralism!
Conservative Controversy
On March 7, just a couple weeks before our troops entered Iraq, I received a telephone call from one of these newly elated patriots. An old friend and a longtime subscriber to THE NEW AMERICAN, "Joe" was calling to see if I was aware of the good news. "Did you hear Bush last night?" he asked excitedly, referring to the president’s March 6 press conference. "Boy, wasn’t that fantastic?" Joe continued along these lines. (I’m recounting this conversation from notes, not precise quotes from tapes.) "He really blasted the UN, didn’t he?" enthused Joe. "Did you hear the thunderous applause he got from that? Now, is THE NEW AMERICAN going to be willing to admit it was wrong about Bush being a pro-UN internationalist?"
I assured Joe that we would be supremely delighted to find ourselves wrong in this case. Unfortunately, the president’s rhetoric notwithstanding, we had found no reason to issue mea culpas yet. Joe was dumbstruck. "What? You can’t be serious!" he exclaimed. According to Joe, George Bush had just dealt the UN its death blow. Bush had completely exposed and discredited the world body. This is the first time, said Joe, that he could recall hearing people on the street, in the office, and on talk radio all saying we ought to get out of the UN. "That’s what you guys have been calling for for years," Joe exclaimed. "I’d think you’d be ecstatic."
There will be ecstasy aplenty, I explained, once President Bush signs legislation ending our participation in, and cutting off funding for, the UN and all of its subversive agencies and activities. But I cautioned him not to hold his breath while waiting for that glorious day to come. Far from leading a U.S. withdrawal from the UN, Bush has repeatedly praised the UN and restated his support for it.
"Of course! He has to say things like that to show he is for the things the UN claims to be for — like peace," Joe, the elated patriot, explained. "But he has made it clear to the UN and the ‘international community’ that we don’t need their permission to defend ourselves."
The president had indeed sounded a welcome note of sovereign defiance. His biggest applause line on March 6 was his declaration that "when it comes to our security, if we need to act, we will act. And we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so." Bravo! Well said! This was followed a few seconds later with a bold reiteration proclaiming that "when it comes to our security, we really don’t need anybody’s permission." More rapturous applause.
"You should be rejoicing," my friend continued. As he saw it, it was goodbye Clinton UN multilateralism and hello Bush America-First unilateralism.
"I think you are going to be very disappointed," I told Joe. Despite President Bush’s go-it-alone bluster, I explained, the president had shown repeatedly, by deed as well as word, that he is a solid UN multilateralist, an inveterate internationalist. That he is actually leading the effort to strengthen the UN.
I pointed out that sandwiched in between the president’s March 6 remarks about not needing UN approval or permission was this statement by Bush: "I want the United Nations to be effective. It’s important for it to be a robust, capable body." This was a repeat of similar statements he’d made dozens of times in various speeches, such as:
• "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations...."
• "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?"
• "We want the resolutions of the world’s most important multilateral body to be enforced."
• "I want the United Nations to be effective.... It makes sense for there to be an international body that has got the backbone and the capacity to help keep the peace."
• "The message to the world is that we want the U.N. to succeed."
• "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not?... If Iraq fails to fully comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."
• "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"
President Bush wants the UN to be relevant! Over and over again, he has called for the UN to exercise authority that conservatives in the past always have argued the UN should never have. He has taken a very revolutionary stand that argues for vastly empowering the UN Security Council. He has time after time criticized the UN for being too weak and has called — implicitly and explicitly — for making it stronger. But by making it appear that this is serving America’s national interest, he has disarmed those who normally would oppose such a radical shift in U.S. policy.
An indication of how radical the Bush position on the UN is can be seen from the alarming compliments the president has gotten from the likes of Robert Wright. Professor Wright, an avowed advocate of world government, notes that Bush has given the UN "a prominence it has rarely enjoyed in its 57-year history." "In fact," said Wright in a New York Times piece earlier this year, "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." Wright noted that "if Nixon could go to China, President Bush can go through New York." The Bush administration’s pressure on the UN to enforce its resolutions is making it easier for the UN to claim the authority to do so, and to call on the U.S. to provide it with the military muscle to do just that. By leading the charge on this issue, Bush is making it more difficult for fellow Republicans to oppose UN empowerment — just as, decades earlier, Nixon’s trip to Beijing made it more difficult for fellow Republicans to oppose opening U.S. relations with Communist China.
George W. Bush has implemented many other concrete steps to expand the UN’s power and influence. In launching Operation Iraqi Freedom he did not seek a congressional declaration of war, as the Constitution requires; like his father in Desert Storm, he has cited UN resolutions for his authority. It is George W. Bush — not Clinton — who has pressured Congress into paying the UN back dues. It is Mr. Bush who has gotten Congress to pony up billions of dollars more for the UN’s AIDS program and other UN programs like the UN Millennium Challenge Account, the World Bank, etc. It is President Bush who has taken us back into UNESCO, one of the worst UN agencies, after we’d been out of it for 20 years and three administrations.
"Mark my words," I told Joe, "you will witness a great reversal in Iraq." I predicted that after "unilateralist" President Bush had sent several hundred thousand U.S. troops into Iraq in another undeclared war, and after the cost of occupation began to mount — in lives and tens of billions of dollars — we would then see "multilateralist" Bush going hat in hand to seek help from the UN and all its anti-American critics. The Iraq venture would end up humiliating the United States, elevating the UN and convincing millions more Americans that independence in security and foreign policy is no longer tenable. It would mark a great advance for "collective security" under the UN.
"Not possible," said Joe, still emotionally high from the effects of the president’s speech. Bush, he insisted, had caused too great a rupture in UN-U.S. relations, and in our relations with France, Germany and other false allies. "The problem with you," my friend declared, "is that you’ve been against everything for so long you can’t believe it when things start going right. Mark my words, the UN is toast!"
Reality Check
Not long ago a decidedly unelated Joe called to unbosom himself of a growing unease over President Bush’s new multilateralism. He had read the transcript of President Bush’s September 23 address to the UN General Assembly. Particularly galling was the president’s statement that "America is working with friends and allies on a new Security Council resolution, which will expand the U.N.’s role in Iraq." The UN, said Bush, "should assist in developing a constitution, in training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections."
Could the president really be serious, Joe wondered? "Where has the UN ever conducted free and fair elections or developed a constitution worth a d***?" he asked. Unfortunately, the president is serious indeed. And if more Americans do not prevail on their congressmen to halt his reborn multilateralism, we will be skidding downhill fast.
Paul Robinson, assistant director for the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull in England, offered a very sobering analysis of the Bush-Iraq venture in the October 18 issue of the London Spectator. "[T]he United Nations, far from being humiliated by recent events, could well emerge invigorated," wrote Robinson shortly after the Bush administration appealed to the Security Council for material and military aid in Iraq. "The more America has to backtrack and summon help from the UN, the more it will be the latter which will be seen as the winner in the power struggle between the two.... The Americans have had to go back to the UN this week to get a resolution to bail them out in Iraq. Having declared the UN ‘irrelevant,’ they have now discovered that they cannot manage without it."
Robinson concludes:
In sum, the results of the war in Iraq will probably be the very opposite of those for which it was launched. The fires of terrorism will be fuelled, not quenched; Iraq will not be a beacon of Western liberalism transforming the Middle East but a bankrupt maelstrom of discontent; efforts to create a new power bloc to counter America will not fade away but redouble; the legitimacy of the United Nations will not be weakened but strengthened; and the constraints on American power will be tightened, not removed.
Robinson’s analysis is fairly accurate, except for his assumption that the negative results are the opposite of those intended by the Bush administration’s internationalists. My colleague, William Norman Grigg, writing months before Robinson, called it more accurately, I believe. In "Same Ends, Different Means" (published in the March 24 issue of this magazine shortly before the beginning of the most recent war with Iraq), Grigg observed: "The president and his subordinates have made their intent transparently clear: The impending war on, or occupation of, Iraq is intended to carry out the UN Security Council’s mandates, not to protect our nation or to punish those responsible for the September 11th attack. The war would uphold the UN’s supposed authority and vindicate its role as a de facto world government."
In a subsequent article ("Baghdad Bait-and-Switch," June 30), Grigg warned that the protracted occupation of Iraq would result in "a steady and worsening hemorrhage of national power, wealth, and prestige," leading to a situation in which "American servicemen and their families, weary of the burden of empire, would eagerly embrace transferring that burden to the UN" — a radically empowered UN boasting its own standing military.
In pursuing this course, George W. Bush is following the internationalist inclinations that guide him and his coterie of advisers and handlers. As the presidential election of 2000 was entering its climactic weeks, the September/October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs clued in its multilateralist reading audience not to take George Bush’s unilateralist utterances too seriously. James M. Lindsay of the left-wing, one-world Brookings Institution noted in that issue that "both Al Gore and George W. Bush are internationalists by inclination...." Foreign Affairs is the weighty journal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the group that has been in the forefront of promoting UN one-worldism and world government for the past 80-plus years.
Lindsay and the crew at Foreign Affairs were not merely guessing at George W.’s inclinations. They knew that his father is a devoted internationalist and a former top CFR member. Just as important, they knew that candidate Bush had surrounded himself with advisers who were (and are) CFR stalwarts, many of whom had served in the first Bush administration: Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, George Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, Robert Zoellick, Elliott Abrams, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, et al.
They knew for certain that the new Bush administration would end up taking a pro-UN, multilateralist course — even if it had to march under a false America First, unilateralist banner, in order to get patriots like Joe onto the one-world bandwagon. Unfortunately, too many Joes still don’t realize they’re being taken for a ride.
What do you all think?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1015327/posts
What's the effing point
of this thread? So, Bush isn't
perfect. Do you want
people to vote for
Hillary and Clark?! To you
are they the good guys?!
This is nice and all, but it's unrealistic to expect a first term President to do such a thing - unless his desire is not to be re-elected.
People say they want out of the U.N. Probably most are sincere. But an event like this would be so huge, impact foreign relations so much, and be questioned so loudly that even those who wanted out of the U.N. might end up not voting to re-elect the guy that did it.
The Constitution,
of course, says nothing about
parties. And, in fact,
the Constitution
says political power
should be balanced in
the Executive,
the Legislative and the
Judicial branches
of the government.
In an indirect way that
could simply be read
as an injunction
against political might
vested in parties.
But -- you tell me -- WHO
do I vote for to get rid
of the party works?
And, between Bush and
Hillary, who is the less
bizarre and monstrous?!
>>What's the effing point of this thread?
Maybe, Boss, "the effing point" is the power of illusion.
That crafty ability to the keep the sheeple's attention on the right hand - while removing their Constitutional valuables with the left.
It's almost amusing, what people can be led to believe - given a well targeted advertising campaign... but mostly it's just sad.
"Yes, for only 19.95, we'll rush you a majic stick that will melt away those pounds - so that you too can look like the Sports Illusionated Swimsuit Model that your husband has been led to believe he's supposed to want..."
Immigration was a problem for sure, but the real downfall was the liberal use of a new-fangled system called the Dole
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