Posted on 09/07/2002 5:07:13 AM PDT by TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!
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Much is made of Iraq's non-compliance with United Nations resolutions, missing the larger point: The security of the United States is threatened. That's what matters. It is not the United Nations that is responsible – legally or any other way – for the security of the United States, or of any other nation. National security is exactly what those words connote: The security of an individual nation. Security Requires Sovereignty That, in turn, is fundamentally what national sovereignty is about. In the watery eyes of globalists, who yearn for elimination of all national sovereignty and its replacement by a universal super-government, the United Nations is but an interim instrumentality of worldwide authority, a transitory forerunner of Hillary Clinton's "global village" with ubiquitous claws and limitless wealth of taxation. Anything that limits, erodes or demeans any individual nation's sovereignty is, to them, all to the good, a step nearer nirvana. Boondoggle in Manhattan The reality is that the United Nations' 185 member nations are nothing more, and frequently a lot less, than a spiffy international debating society, gaudy in costumes, Babelic in languages and ostentatious in limousines but as toothless as a confederacy of crotchety crones. Indeed, that was how it was created at the end of World War II. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt's dream – and even he had reservations – that the wartime Big Three unity among the victorious United States, Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics might be continued into the postwar recovery period. That it might also serve as a major-powers bulwark against a recurrence of international aggression was dream, even wispier. Anachronism of the Veto In recognition of that, the Big Three gave each other a veto power, which soon became an absurdity and is today an operational aardvark. The U.N. General Assembly, where each of the 185 member nations has a seat, is still merely a place to get in out of the rain while debating. Its resolutions are utterly powerless. What little clout the United Nations possesses resides with the 15 member nations composing the Security Council, five of which are permanent members: Great Britain, France, the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the United States. How the Veto Works To enact a resolution on a substantive matter takes nine affirmative votes of the 15 in the Security Council, of which five must be the votes of all five permanent members. In other words, one negative vote among the Big Five means the resolution is dead. Even if a substantive resolution is adopted, there is no practical means of enforcement unless the United States, as the world's only superpower, acts to enforce it. If the United States doesn't lend its muscle, nothing gets enforced. If only the United States acts to enforce, it will get enforced. Of No Earthly Use So who needs the United Nations? There are two answers to that question: Answer 1: Every other nation on Earth except the United States thinks it needs the United Nations – but only so long as the United States acts to enforce a Security Council resolution and pay most of the freight. Answer 2: The United States does not need the United Nations for anything, for it is the only nation with enough power to enforce any Security Council resolution. Power, in this sense, includes not merely military force. It includes also economic resources. The United States is the only nation with enough wealth to finance enforcement. Our Worthless Dependent Even in the non-enforcement arena, the United States is critical to the day-to-day life of the United Nations. Were the United States to withhold its dues, the United Nations would collapse. So all this talk about the United States' having to kowtow to the United Nations before it can take military action against Iraq is a lot of hooey. Even the United Nations, global-gaga as it is, recognizes in its charter that every member state has the right to exercise its own sovereign power as it sees fit to protect its own vital national interests. Right of Self-Defense If the United States feels that Saddam Hussein's assembly of weapons of mass destruction is a threat to American security, it has the sovereign right to do whatever it thinks it must do to remove that threat. And the same right has to be accorded to Iraq. If it feels it must engage in the production of mass-destruction weapons, that's its prerogative. There is nothing in the doctrine of national sovereignty that says a nation has no right to act with stupidity and self-destruction. Saddam Hussein might consult Adolf Hitler. Is it bad that Iraq has flouted all those Security Council resolutions these many years? Of course it is – not because the Security Council has been ignored but because, in the process, Iraq has become a greater and greater threat to American security. The Reason to Act That's why the United States should go after Iraq, destroy those stockpiled weapons, remove Saddam Hussein and his outlaw regime and liberate that country for re-entry into the world community as a nation based on democratic principles. If the United Nations General Assembly wants to spit in George W. Bush's face when he addresses its annual opening session shortly, so be it. If it wants to pay polite attention to what he has to say, that's nice. If the United Nations General Assembly wants to register a veto vote on a resolution of support for war with Iraq, so be it. If it wants to adopt such a resolution, that's nice. Getting Priorities Straight The reality is the United Nations is as irrelevant to the world as mammary glands are to a boar hog. The No. 1 business of the United States of America is to look out for the business of the United States of America. And No.1 on that agenda is the security of the American people. There's nothing shameful about that, and President Bush need make no apologies to members of the United Nations. It is they who owe the United States of America, which has repeatedly come to their rescue – United Nations or no United Nations.
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...There are those in power in this nation that want me to surrender my freedom as an individual...
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.comWASHINGTON – The winner of this year’s "Mightiest Pen” award has condemned "one worlders.” In fact, says Charles Krauthammer, President Bush’s "distinctive” unilateralist go-it-alone-if-necessary foreign policy in general - and with respect to Iraq in particular - is justifiable. Krauthammer, however, believes the chief executive’s two immediate predecessors have made it difficult for the commander in chief to exercise America’s "self-evident right to resist evil.”
Friday, Sept. 6, 2002
Accepting the coveted award Thursday from the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Krauthammer warned against "easy one worldism” that eight years of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy permeated into U.S. foreign policy. But the journalist also said President Bush’s father set "a costly and dangerous precedent” in seeking United Nations approval in the effort to get Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 BEFORE first going to the U.S. Senate.
With a top official of the present Bush administration also featured on the program, Krauthammer delivered a scathing denunciation of "liberal internationalists” who, he said, have tried to impede this nation’s ability to do what is right. The respected writer whose column appears in more than 100 newspapers across the nation, recalled that four out of five Democrats voted against giving the senior President Bush the go-ahead, and noted some of the few Democrats who did vote yes were persuaded to do so by the approval or permission of "the international community.”
"That puzzles me,” he said. "By what logic are the Chinese, Russians and the French [who sit on the U.N. Security Council] the arbiters of international morality? It was beyond me then, and it is beyond me now.”
That precedent - amplified in spades by President Clinton - has put the current President Bush in the position where he believes he needs world approval to go after Saddam Hussein, albeit with the sensible caveat that this country will act in its own interests with or without that approval, the CNP audience was reminded.
Should that in fact be a procedure in President Bush’s current crisis in Iraq?
"In principle, no. As a practical matter, yes,” Krauthammer said. "That practical policy has dominated our international thinking over the past ten years,” he complained, adding it is widely considered normal that the United States cannot act in its own interests without the green light "from this or that U.N. Security Council resolution.”
That mentality went into eclipse briefly after 9-11, but once again the rhetoric on Capitol Hill and elsewhere has revived it.
Krauthammer cited Bill Clinton - president of "the most powerful nation on earth” at one time pausing in the middle of a foreign policy speech, "stressing international approval over the best interests of the United States.”
"By what logic do we turn to Moscow or Paris rather than the American peoples’ elected members of Congress?” he wanted to know.
This is not an argument against consultation. We have "a moral obligation” to consult if in doing so, "it might assist our own purposes.” But we should do it with the understanding that protecting the safety and best interests of Americans is our number one responsibility, something which in Krauthammer’s opinion the U.S. Senate failed to do several years ago, when it ratified "that ridiculous Chemical Weapons Treaty, even though it was unenforceable.”
He cited an instance several years ago when the Swedes scolded Finland and demanded to know the reason for the latter’s refusal to go along with the Land Mines Treaty. A top Finnish official at the time replied dryly, "Because Finland is their [its critics’] land mine.”
By the same token, the United States "is much of the world’s land mine,” the award-winning columnist claimed, noting - to cite one example - that it won’t be Swedes or French on the front line if another war breaks out in Korea.
A letter from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was read to the gathering. The secretary praised Krauthammer’s wisdom in the foreign policy field.
Defense Under Secretary Dov S. Zakheim, who was present for the luncheon, praised the writer for his strong sense of "what is right and what is not.”
Zakheim allowed as how whether to subscribe to the mostly left-wing Washington Post, Krauthammer’s home paper, was "an issue” in his household, but that the columnist’s writing "justifies the subscription.”
He also drew praise from Rep. Christopher Cox, R.-Calif., best known for his chairmanship of a special congressional committee which in 1998 investigated the Chinagate scandal and its implications for U.S. security.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Any agency that makes the bold statement as the U.N. did regarding them having taken over the control and peservation of our resources is not an entirely weak agency. At the very least our government uses the U.N. to enforce on Americans what they wouldn't dare try on their own because of the Constitution, but because it's an international "compromise" it's suppose to be ok. We do want to get along with the rest of the world, now don't we?
Yeah, the author better take another look at the U.N.
Rest assured this leftist crap is the MINORITY. Look at the election map from last election. I am sorry you are subject to this nazi crap where you live.Ever thought of moving to the country somewhere?
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