Time to declare our independence from the United Nations
By Tom DeWeese
The United Nations is a mess. It now finds itself
buried under scandals. It has Oil for Food scandals, sex scandals,
power-abuse scandals, smuggling scandals, theft scandals, and unpaid
traffic tickets. Rob, rape, and pillage seem to be the UN's modus
operandi.
Yet why is anyone surprised? The UN considers itself
above the law of mere nations. And it answers to no one. There is no vote
on UN leaders (other than by the culprits themselves). There is no
international referendum on its policies. The UN sets its own standards of
conduct and it controls its own judge and jury. These, of course, are the
very reasons why many have opposed
U.S.
membership in the UN. And it's why many have feared the UN gaining any
sort of power to gain its own ability to tax, field an army, or create a
court system. Possessing these three powers drastically changes the UN
from a volunteer membership organization to a global governing body.
Compliant nations simply give the UN a pretense of
legitimacy. The
United States
government plays to the folks at home by talking tough about the need for
"UN reform." Yet not once has the Republican-led Administration
or the Republican- controlled Congress taken any steps to withhold funds
for UN programs. Instead, the U.S. continues to go along with nearly every
policy scheme, international conference and peace-keeping mission, paying
the majority of the funds, thus supplying huge amounts of tax-payer money
to UN coffers so that business as usual goes on down at UN headquarters.
There is one public entity to which the UN at least
pretends to react. – The court of public opinion. There is a growing
awareness, at least in the living rooms of common Americans, that
something is very wrong with the UN. The UN's greatest fear is that those
Americans might influence our leaders to withdraw from the world body. If
that ever happens, then the UN is finished and it knows it.
Articles are surfacing and pundits are pondering,
questioning the future of the UN. To sidestep the obvious that the UN has
utterly failed in its stated mission to promote world peace, or to even
have a hint of influence in making anyone's life better voices are
beginning to suggest the word "reform." Reform the UN; make it
more "workable." American
leaders, looking for a way to get around the growing argument to dump the
UN may latch on to such a reform movement. But they should be careful what
they wish for because they may not get the kind of reform they are
expecting.
The UN is never without a contingency plan for its
well-prepared agenda of global governance. A major thorn in the side of
those who seek to drive the UN into a position of international power is
the Security Council and the veto power of its permanent members. Many say
the
United States
controls the UN with its veto power. Solution: take it away.
One of the twelve points of the Charter for Global
Democracy, which surfaced prior to the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000, was
a plan to "reform" the UN by doing away with the Security
Council and replacing it with an "Assembly of the People." The
Assembly would be made up of "people from the world" in the form
of non-elected, non-governmental organizations (NGO's). Take note, these
are the same NGO's which write the background material for most of the UN
treaties like Agenda 21, the Biodiversity Treaty, Rights of the Child, and
even the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. NGOs are special interest groups
(almost all leftist) who are seeking to create the UN as a global
government. They are the ones pushing for UN tax schemes, standing armies,
and the International Criminal Court. While the average citizen focuses on
the Security Council and its dramatic, even heroic image, NGOs have become
the driving force in setting UN policy.
To them it would be a dream come true for the UN to
scrap the Security Council, which still pretends to be a place where
nations simply air their differences. They would then be free to install
the Assembly of the People through which their drive for UN power could
accelerate unabated by pesky
U.S.
vetoes.
The fact is the UN is not an instrument for guarding
the peace. The UN is the source for international unrest and
"reform" will not fix it. Most urgently, American leadership
must not fall into the trap set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to
allow the UN to take the lead in rebuilding
Iraq
. Worse, Blair is also attempting to bully the
United States
into embracing the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. Such a foolish move
would be a disaster to the
U.S.
economy and would do nothing to cool the planet.
For the past fifty years, as the UN lived off the
perception that it provided a forum where nations could air their
differences off the battlefield, more wars were fought than ever before in
human history. Instead of removing the threat to peace, the UN has
encouraged, even nurtured, regimes that waged violence on their neighbors,
and indeed, oppressed and tortured their own people.
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