Bolton Fight is Really Over Whether U.S. Should Surrender its Sovereignty

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.

'What we need in New York is a junk-yard dog, not a diplomatic lap-dog.' --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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!

A 1993 analysis of a U.N. army by Heritage.org

A U.N. Army: Unwise, Unsafe, and Unnecessary

by Thomas P. Sheehy

Executive Memorandum #362

August 16, 1993

A campaign is underway in Congress to endorse the concept of a standing army controlled by the United Nations. Senator Joe Biden, the Democrat from Delaware, has introduced a resolution (S.J. Res. 112) to allow American troops to be part of such a force. He claims that the United States must abandon "the vainglorious dream of a Pax Americana and look instead for a means to regularize swift, multinational decision and response." Biden's assertion is curious given a U.N. operation gone awry in Somalia, a confused U.N. mission in Bosnia, and chronic U.N. mismanagement and fraud. This is not a time to expand the power and influence of the United Nations. If anything, this is a time to be skeptical about U.N. effectiveness in settling conflicts around the globe.

For this reason, the U.S. should not endorse the idea of a U.N. standing army. It could drag the U.S. into deadly and expensive conflicts having little to do with American vital interests around the world. Moreover, a standing army will only increase the U.N.'s appetite for precipitous involvement in conflicts for which it is poorly prepared. To be sure, a standing army would be more readily available for deployment, but that may mean an overly hasty involvement of U.S. forces in far-away conflicts in which no U.S. interests are at stake.

Advocates of arming the U.N. make a curious argument. They say that a U.N. army is necessary to keep America from becoming a global policeman. Senator David Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat, has noted that, "while Americans want something done, they do not want to do it alone." In other words, in a standing U.N. army the U.S. supposedly will share the burden of international peacekeeping with other nations.

Additional Burden for U.S. While a standing U.N. army may increase token international support for a peacekeeping force, it would also surely create a temptation for the U.S. to go along with questionable armed interventions by the U.N. With some seventy areas of conflict or potential conflict world-wide, a U.N. standing army certainly would see much action. There are today fourteen U.N. peacekeeping operations underway, involving some 80,000 troops from 75 countries. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali two weeks ago suggested sending U.N. peacekeepers to hotspots in the former Soviet Union, which would nearly double the number of U.N. military operations around the world. Thus, while relieving the U.S. of the burden of going it alone, a standing U.N. army would create a new burden of participating in dubious and far-flung operations which the U.S. otherwise would avoid.

Once U.S. forces are thus deployed, the potential for escalation is high. American forces would hold the key to avoiding the military failure of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Indeed, in Somalia, most of the firepower and command and control capability available to the U.N. force is American; without that support the operation would have eroded long before now. This would likely be the case in all U.N. operations involving U.S. forces. Once committed to a failing U.N. operation, the U.S. would have to choose between saving it by unilateral escalation or condemning the entire operation to failure by withdrawing.

The U.S. is already facing this dilemma in Somalia. The U.N. operation there is falling apart as the U.S. tries to decide whether to escalate or withdraw. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell has spoken of "going after" those responsible for the recent deaths of four U.S. servicemen in Somalia. With the Clinton defense budget in a virtual free-fall, a prolonged military commitment to a country unimportant to America's vital interests would be the height of folly. It would deprive the country of resources possibly needed to defend America's interests elsewhere -- in Korea and the Persian Gulf, for example.

Supporters of the U.N. standing army point to the U.S. Security Council veto as a safeguard against ill-advised operations. However, the veto would not be very potent. Invariably, the U.S. would face pressure not to veto a U.N. standing army deployment to relieve the type of human suffering seen in Somalia last fall and in other countries today. Certainly the Clinton Administration would find it difficult to resist such pressure. Indeed, the Administration's policy of "assertive multilateralism," as outlined by U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N. Madeleine K. Albright, is based on a growing American reliance on the U.N. for humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.

Confused Command. Another problem with a standing U.N. army involves command structure. U.S. troops in a U.N. standing army eventually will find themselves at odds with a multinational command. Would resisting orders of a multinational command be insubordination, or merely consistent with the good order and discipline an American commander should display? To which flag would the American commanders owe allegiance? The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognize the potential for this confusion, and traditionally have resisted subordinating their services to international command.

Biden's Senate resolution would reduce congressional oversight of the use of American military force. The resolution states that "the President shall not be deemed to require the authorization of the Congress to make [American troops] available to the Security Council on its call." Having encumbered the President's ability to deploy forces as commander in chief with the War Powers Act, Congress now wishes to make the President accountable to unelected U.N. bureaucrats. Biden apparently believes that the President should be restricted in his ability to defend purely national interests, but free to commit forces in defense of more "noble" multinational interests.

To reject a U.N. standing army is not to reject U.N. peacekeeping. There is plenty for the U.S. to do to improve the financial, logistical, and professional aspects of the U.N.'s current peacekeeping activities. For example, officers in the U.N. "command center" in New York rely on CNN television news broadcasts for their information from the field. The Clinton Administration could help correct this problem by establishing an improved command, control, and communications structure for U.N. military operations.

A standing U.N. army encourages the misguided perception that a "good" commitment of U.S. force is one for which there is multilateral support, making future commanders in chief more reluctant to apply force unilaterally to defend American interests abroad. Moreover, it will embolden the U.N. into greater activism in conflicts to which the U.S. would otherwise not have committed American lives and resources.

The U.N. should concentrate on improving its traditional peacekeeping role following realistic and achievable objectives, while rejecting revolutionary efforts to create a standing U.N. army. Thomas P. Sheehy is a former Policy Analyst at The Heritage

Foundation.

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