Tag Archives: International Criminal Court

Spreading the wealth

During last week’s debate, Republican presidential candidate John McCain struck upon a theme that polls suggest is resonating with American voters:  His rival, Barack Obama, is determined to engage in the sort of redistribution of wealth that has long been the hallmark of the radical Left.  As the Senator from Illinois famously told an Everyman questioner named Sam Wurzelbacher – who will forever be known as "Joe the Plumber": "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

The days following the third Obama-McCain debate have been filled with invective, much of it aimed at obscuring the extent to which Senator Obama actually embraces a redistributionist agenda.  Democratic partisans have emphasized their man’s proposal to give tax cuts for 95%, insisting that only the rich earning more than $250,000 would be soaked. Republicans have retorted that 40% of Americans pay no taxes, so they would actually be getting tax credits – significantly increasing the wealth dispersed at the government’s discretion.  Along the way, Joe the Plumber became political road-kill, his professional, political and tax status the object of withering scrutiny and criticism.

As it happens, Sen. Obama has exhibited a commitment to "spreading the wealth around" that extends far beyond his ominously socialistic Robin Hood agenda for this country.  Late last year, he introduced the Global Poverty Act (S.2433).  Interestingly, one of the bill’s original co-sponsors was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a man rumored to be a leading candidate for Secretary of Defense in an Obama administration.  Another sponsor is the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, who moved S.2433 to the Senate floor without a single hearing in his Foreign Relations Committee.

The stated purposes of this legislation purport to be as modest as they are seemingly laudable.  Who can object to the goal of dramatically reducing hunger and privation that afflicts hundreds of millions around the world?  And who could find fault with congressional direction that the President come up with a strategy to advance this goal?

[More]Unfortunately, the apparently innocuous language of S.2433 belies a larger and troubling purpose, one that augurs ill for those of us who still think of ourselves as American citizens – rather than as, in Sen. Obama’s words, "citizens of the world."  It would explicitly make it the policy of the United States " to promote the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day."

The operative phrase in this problematic policy directive is "the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal."  In fact, the bill would require that the mandated presidential strategy coordinate "the goal of poverty reduction with the other internationally recognized Millennium Development Goals." (Emphasis added.)

The Obama bill makes clear, in turn, that the latter are the objectives laid out by the United Nations General Assembly in its 2000 "Millennium Declaration" resolution.  As the legislation goes on to note, these goals include (but are not limited to): "eradicating extreme hunger, promoting gender equality, empowering women," combating communicable diseases, "ensuring environmental sustainability," affording access to clean water and sanitation and "achieving significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers."

Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid reminds us that, in order to advance these ambitious goals, the Millennium Declaration would require the United States to apply "0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance."  

In other words, for each year between 2002 and 2015, the United States would have to cough up roughly $65 billion over-and-above its current foreign aid distributions.  This amounts to a staggering commitment of at least $845 billion – all of which is to be given to the notoriously incompetent and corrupt United Nations to manage. 

Voters need to establish whether, as it appears, Sen. Obama has, in fact, no problem with either the magnitude of this redistribution of wealth or with the idea of having international bureaucrats dole it out.  We also must know whether he agrees with the UN functionary who is the driving force behind its Millennium Project, Harvard professor Jeffrey Sachs, who insists that a new "global tax" on carbon emissions is required to underwrite his agenda for spreading the wealth around.

If these obligations were not bad enough, Kincaid points out that, "In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, [the Millennium] Declaration commits nations to banning small arms and light weapons and ratifying a series of wildly controversial treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as ‘the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.’"

Just as wealth creation domestically has proven to be more conducive to national prosperity than wealth redistribution, it would be far better to find ways to grow the global "pie," rather than have national or international officials apportion it to their liking.  One of the most promising ways to do the latter is to adopt another piece of bipartisan legislation: the Open Fuels Standards Act. 

This legislation (H.R. 6559 in the House and S.3303 in the Senate) – which neither Sens. Obama nor McCain have as yet co-sponsored – would require most new cars in the United States to be capable of running on ethanol or methanol, as well as gasoline.  Inevitably, this Open Fuel Standard would become the international one.  The result would be to enable some 100 countries around the globe to begin growing their own fuel, rather than continuing to impoverish their peoples by having to buy oil at exorbitant prices from OPEC. 

Rewarding America’s Joe the Plumbers for their enterprise, rather than penalizing them, is the right answer for this country and its economy.  Similarly, we are far more likely to see the wealth earned pursuant to the Open Fuel Standard truly alleviate world poverty than by having politicians or officials impose global taxes – and spread around the resulting revenues, at huge expense to U.S. taxpayers and their sovereignty and interests.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

Citizen Obama

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s single most illuminating statement in the course of a just-completed overseas tour was his self-description during the stop in Berlin as a "citizen of the world."  Widely interpreted as nothing more than an innocuous expression of solidarity with his adoring, post-nationalist hosts, this declaration is actually just the latest indication that Senator Obama embraces a vision of his own country and its role in the world that should be exceedingly worrisome to America’s citizenry.

The appellation "Citizen" has a checkered past.  French revolutionaries used it  first to distinguish the common man from the reviled aristocracy, then to enforce their reign of terror on both.  Orson Welles entitled his classic film modeled on the life of William Randolph Hearst "Citizen Kane" – depicting an unscrupulous demagogue who, despite his privileged background, nearly obtained high elective office on a populist platform.

[More]Now Citizen Obama uses a turn of phrase with no less troubling overtones.  The notion of world citizenship has become a staple of transnationalists who seek to subordinate national sovereignty and constitutional arrangements to a higher power.  They are working to replace, for example, our directly elected representatives operating in a carefully constructed system of checks-and-balances, with rule by unaccountable elites in the form of international bureaucracies, judiciaries and even so-called "norms." 

Citizens of the world can have their rights circumscribed or even eliminated without their consent.  For instance, in March the Organization of the Islamic Conference – what amounts to a Muslim mafia organization – demanded that the UN Human Rights Council (dominated by the OIC’s members) amend the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The effect was to alter the foundational freedom of expression so as to prohibit speech that offends adherents to Islam.

World citizens embrace the idea that the United Nations and other multinational organizations are imbued with a moral authority not found in nation-states like ours.  When he was the Democratic Party standard-bearer, Senator John Kerry famously described American foreign and defense policy as only being legitimate when it passed a "global test" – in other words, approval by the international community.

Today, the Democrats’ incipient nominee subscribes to the view that, as he put it in Berlin, " The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together."  Global citizenship amounts to code for subordinating American interests to our putative responsibilities as a member of the international community.  The former can be pursued only to the extent our fellow global citizens – or, more precisely, their unelected, unaccountable spokesmen in Turtle Bay , Geneva , The Hague or other seats of "world government" – approve.

To further such a subordination of American power, the transnationalists have long sought to enmesh the United States in a web of treaties and institutions.  These include: the World Trade Organization (which now routinely rules against U.S. companies and economic interests while giving a pass to Communist China’s); the International Criminal Court (which has just established an ominous precedent for U.S. officials by indicting the sitting – albeit opprobrious – president of Sudan); and the Law of the Sea Treaty (described by its admirers as a "constitution of the oceans," it assigns unprecedented responsibilities for control of the oceans and even activities ashore to international organs).

Of course, the notion that there truly is such a thing as an "international community" is a conceit of the transnationalists.  In practice, decisions are made by majorities usually dominated by the world’s authoritarians – Russia, China, the so-called "non-aligned" of the developing world and, increasingly, the Islamist states.  The subordination of U.S. freedom of action, let alone national security, to such a world citizenry is a formula for disaster.

A riveting insight into this reality was provided a few months back when the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre addressed a meeting in New Orleans, the scene following Hurricane Katrina of the forceful disarmament of law-abiding U.S. citizens.  Mr. LaPierre showed a video which included a chilling statement from a senior UN official to the effect that, while she understood Americans were reluctant to part with their firearms, they had better get used to being "citizens of the world" just like everybody else.

For many in Sen. Obama’s audiences, references to "global citizenship" must sound about as benign as his mantra about promoting "change we can believe in."  It all has a sort of Rodney King-like quality to it:  "Can’t we all just get along?"

In fact, the terminology Citizen Obama uses reveals an attachment to a radical transformation of not just our foreign policy but of the nature of our country itself.  The "change" he has in mind could prove fatal to our sovereignty and constitutional form of government.

Questions about the appropriate role of America in the world and how it conducts its relationships with foreign powers are, of course, essential topics in any presidential campaign.  That is particularly true at a moment when the United States finds itself engaged in a global war with a totalitarian ideology, Islamofascism, that has embedded itself in many allied countries and enjoys strong support from most of our foes.

It falls most immediately to Senator John McCain to highlight Citizen Obama’s radical answers to these questions and ultimately to U.S. voters to determine whether they want a global citizen in the White House or a president of, by and for the American people.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.

Breaching conventions in statesmanship

Winston Churchill once said, " When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home. "

An amusing sentiment but at the same time a serious one, and it used to govern the behavior of statesmen overseas, Americans included.  No longer. This past October Bill Clinton — on a visit to London promoting his recent book "Giving" — sat down with BBC Radio host John Humphreys for an interview and, after disposing of book chat in a few minutes, breezily proceeded to harshly criticize President Bush and recent American policy in Iraq, as well as our positions on Kyoto, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and the International Criminal Court.

[More]The old rules no longer apply, having in large measure been overborne by Democrats who feel no compunction about violating them because of what they view as the mean-spirited, selfish nature of contemporary conservatism; not simply that it’s wrong but that it’s evil, which allows them to defy what had heretofore been important conventions in managing foreign policy, not to mention simple decency.

Witness the spectacle of Nancy Pelosi visiting Syrian Dictator, Bashar Assad and making irresponsible pronouncements on policy while at the same time giving legitimacy to a nasty dictator involved in killing our troops in Iraq, undermining the relatively democratic government of Lebanon and continuing support for terrorists.

And then there’s Harry Reid, joined by a number of his colleagues, denigrating our war effort.  Reid believed that the War in Iraq was lost a few years ago.  Fine, but in an action that would have shocked previous generations of American statesmen, he went so far as to publicly and emphatically say so, giving what amounts to aid and comfort to our enemies.  

But the real political sin has been the effort by a majority of Democrats in both Houses of Congress to attempt to restrict funding for the War or otherwise impede its prosecution and stultify the President’s constitutionally-mandated responsibility as Commander-in-Chief and master of American foreign policy.

At the same time, a number of Democratic politicians have felt free to either freely lie about or obscure their record of support for the War or their beliefs about WMD or about the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein.

To return to former President Clinton for a moment, he recently stated that he was opposed to the Iraq War from its beginning.  A Google search reveals no statements to that effect before the War; not even a hint of his claimed opposition.  And, indeed, it would have been widely reported at the time given his status as a former president and his wife’s vote to authorize President Bush to take military action against Saddam.

And throughout, scarcely a peep from the mainstream press about how the Democrats have debased our politics and simple common decency, about their dishonesty or about the threat this kind of   behavior presents to pursuing crucial foreign policy goals confirmed by repeated elections.  If the Democrats do it, ipso facto, it’s fine.

The Democrats have never reconciled themselves to President Reagan’s popularity or their loss of Congressional majorities, particularly in the House of Representatives, which they had held since the beginning of Eisenhower’s Administration.  As long as a figure like Bob Michel was Minority Leader and the Republicans were tame, malleable creatures — content with a little pork and to accept dhimmitude under the Democrats — the Majority party had no problem with them.  

But with the loss of power in the House in 1994 when New Gingrich took over from the soft, fuzzy Republicans of old and sharpened differences with the Democrats, the former seeming hereditary rulers have declared war on the Republicans and have used every means at their disposal, fair or foul, to regain power, beginning with delegitimizing their opponents and extending to dishonesty, obstructionism and unprecedented parliamentary and political maneuvers.

Of course, the Republicans are not entirely without blame, and the Democrats’ antics have been part and parcel of a more general "coarsening of the culture" as the expression goes.  But the sense of entitlement and righteousness that seems intrinsic to contemporary liberalism has been endorsed by the press and allows Democrats to play outside the rules.  After all, their opponents are evil, not simply wrong.

It’s a scandal, unprecedented in our history, where it used to be said that partisan differences over foreign policy stop at the water’s edge.  No longer.

Claiming that a war is lost or foreign policy freelancing only encourages our enemies to hold on until there is a change of Administration or the country is paralyzed by dissension.  Denigrating the United States from a foreign land adds nothing to the domestic debate, and it only serves to demean us in the eyes of those without familiarity with some of the nuances of American policy and politics. Refusing to fund a lawful war is not only undemocratic, but it undermines our military and compromises the President’s authority.

Traditional rules, as frustrating and imperfect as they may have been, as inscrutable as they may have appeared, grew up organically over many years and more often than not have a solid, logical pedigree.  Their destruction is undermining U.S. foreign policy, as the Democrats — and all of us — will discover to our detriment when the loyal opposition again gains the Oval Office.

Bush Doctrine 2.0?

The first term of the George W. Bush presidency and what has come to be known as the "Bush Doctrine" were marked by a profound and forceful reaction to September 11, 2001.  Determined to prevent further, murderous attacks on the United States, Mr. Bush and his national security team were determined to "drain the swamps" from whence terrorists received safe havens and other forms of support.  Out went the sort of "stability" born of accommodations with totalitarians and favored by the foreign policy establishment’s so-called "realists."  In came a U.S. commitment to bringing down the "axis of evil," in favor of a world ordered by liberty and democracy. 

Today, we are seeing the emergence of what might be described as "Bush Doctrine 2.0."  It bears no similarity to the first edition.  In fact, it pretty much repudiates everything Mr. Bush stood for during his first four years in office.  Worse yet, it threatens to render his legacy not simply one of unrealized goals but of betrayed principles, abandoned friends and unscrupulous deals with tyrants sure to perpetuate their odious regimes.

A Bill of Particulars

Herewith a sampling of the unraveling of Mr. Bush’s policies:

  • Appeasing North Korea:  Early in the first Bush administration, the President to his credit candidly revealed to Bob Woodward that he loathed Kim Jong Il’s brutally repressive police state.  After the North Koreans acknowledged lying about their nuclear weapons program, he strove to intensify Kim’s isolation in the hope of neutralizing the threat thus posed and, with luck, to bring him down.

Mr. Bush was subsequently induced to believe that this goal could be advanced best by enlisting the North’s regional neighbors – including its enablers, China, Russia and South Korea – in so-called "six-party talks."  Even as it became ever more apparent that Pyongyang’s allies were using those negotiations to thwart the original Bush Doctrine, not advanced it, the President clung to this approach and eschewed bilateral talks with, to say nothing of appeasement of, the North.

Now, however, the U.S. envoy to those talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, has eviscerated the original Bush policy.  In the name of obtaining still more vacuous promises of nuclear disarmament from Kim Jong-Il, Hill is not only negotiating directly and bilaterally with Pyongyang.  He has promised to remove North Korea from the list of state-sponsors of terrorism, despite mounting evidence that the North is actively engaged in the ultimate support for terrorism: proliferating nuclear weapons technology to the likes of two others on that infamous list: Syria and Iran.

  • A Palestinian state, no matter what: In June 2002, Mr. Bush declared that he would be willing to work towards a homeland for the Palestinian people only if certain conditions were satisfied.  These included their rejection of terrorism, the elimination of its infrastructure and the emergence of a new generation of leaders unsullied by ties to terror.

Now, Mr. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice is frantically pursuing the creation of a Palestinian state she hopes will be run by a man with lifelong ties to terror – Yasir Arafat’s crony and right-hand man, Mahmood Abbas.   In the process, she is: whitewashing his record and current conduct; euchring Israel into surrendering more territory to its enemies; and ignoring the virtual certainty that any land thus yielded will become yet another safe-haven for terror (as with South Lebanon and Gaza before it).

  • Closing ‘Gitmo’:  For years, President Bush has recognized the need for a U.S.-controlled facility outside the United States capable of securely incarcerating international terrorists.  He refused to capitulate to the often-hysterical calls, both at home and abroad, for the closure of the irreplaceable prison complex used for this purpose and located Guantanamo Bay.

Now, according to the New York Times, Mr. Bush’s administration is poised to shut down Gitmo, transfer its remaining occupants to U.S. territory and extend to them expanded rights to counsel and consideration of their cases in civilian courts.  It is unlikely that this action will earn "W." any kudos from his critics.  It will, however, make it more difficult and vastly more expensive to keep such detainees off the actual or propaganda battlefields of this war.

  • Farewells to sovereignty: During his first term, Mr. Bush recognized the threat to U.S. sovereignty posed by unaccountable and generally hostile multinational organizations like the International Criminal Court.  He went so far as to "unsign" the treaty that established that tribunal, rather than allow Americans to be subject to its prosecutions.

Now, President Bush is arguing in a case pending before the Supreme Court that the dictates of such tribunals must trump domestic law.  He is also pressing the Senate to allow the U.S. to be subjected to a host of new tribunals authorized by yet another sovereignty-sapping multinational accord, the UN Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).

The Bottom Line

With the notable exception of Iraq – where George W. Bush has largely held firm in the face of relentless criticism, with ever-more-promising results – virtually every aspect, principle and objective of his security policy is being eviscerated on his watch.  The problem is not merely that those adulterating his original Bush Doctrine by supplanting it with a 2.0 version will obliterate the principled and common-sense approach made necessary in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.  He will bequeath to his successor and his people a world made vastly more dangerous, not more stable, for his administration’s embrace of appeasement dressed up as "realism."

Bush sides with Mexican killers vs. U.S.

State Department lawyer John Bellinger says international law should be used in U.S. courts.

By Cliff Kincaid

Mr. Kincaid is President of America’s Survival, Inc., and is editor of Accuracy in Media.

The State Department’s top legal adviser told international lawyers on June 6 that President Bush is so committed to the primacy of international law that he has taken his home state of Texas to court on behalf of a group of Mexican killers. The Mexicans had been sentenced to death for murdering U.S. citizens, including young children.

John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited the case, Mexico v. United States of America, in trying to convince the attorneys that the administration is doing what it can to enforce international law in U.S. courts.

[More]In the case, Bush has come down on the same side as the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled 14-1 on behalf of Mexico against the U.S. The ICJ was headed at the time by a judge from communist China, who also ruled against the U.S.

Bellinger’s audience was gathered at The Hague, a city in the Netherlands which is home to over 100 international organizations, including the U.N.’s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Sworn in as the Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State on April 8, 2005, Bellinger is described by the State Department as "the principal adviser on all domestic and international law matters to the Department of State, the Foreign Service, and the diplomatic and consular posts abroad."

The Bellinger speech, designed to convince the pro-U.N. globalists in attendance that Bush is really on their side, should have been big news. Not only did he praise Bush for coming down on the side of foreign killers of Americans, in a major court case with international implications, but he demonstrated how far the administration is prepared to go to impress the "international community."

 

In a major disclosure, Bellinger said that Bush is currently seeking immediate Senate ratification of 35 different "treaty packages." He said these include the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a measure rejected by President Reagan and his U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Bellinger didn’t name any of the other "treaty packages" that the administration wants to push through. But a number of radical treaties are known to be pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Joseph Biden.

Once again, it appears that Bush wants to ignore the concerns of conservatives in order to work with liberal Democrats and advance a controversial legislative agenda.

International Law

"To put it simply," Bellinger said, "our critics sometimes paint the United States as a country willing to duck or shrug off international obligations when they prove constraining or inconvenient. That picture is wrong. The United States does believe that international law matters. We help develop it, rely on it, abide by it, and–contrary to some impressions–it has an important role in our nation’s Constitution and domestic law."

Bellinger’s extraordinary speech, coming at a time when Bush is under fire for failing to protect America from a Mexican invasion of illegal aliens, demonstrates how the President has been working on behalf of Mexican interests–in this case, convicted Mexican killers claiming their "rights" were violated under a treaty–against the interests of his own nation. When the implications of the Mexico v. United States case are widely known, it can only further harm the administration’s chances for an amnesty-for-illegal-aliens bill.

Conservatives have shown, through derailing the bill, that they are not content to play dumb or go to sleep when the issue involves American sovereignty.

Rights for Killers

Many Americans are not aware that the Mexico v. United States case, also known as the Avena decision, was decided against the U.S. by the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) and that the Bush Justice Department sided with the ICJ. What’s more, the Bush Justice Department took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to force U.S. states to legally recognize the "rights" of Mexicans who kill Americans on U.S. soil. A decision from the Supreme Court is pending.

The case was taken to the ICJ by the government of Mexico on behalf of 51 of its citizens who had carried out these murders in the U.S. The argument advanced by Mexico on behalf of the killers was that they were not afforded a timely opportunity to meet with Mexican representatives in the U.S. known as consular officers. This was said to be required under the Vienna Convention.

Current figures show 124 foreign nationals on death row in the U.S. Fifty-five of those are from Mexico. Most of them are on death row in California or Texas.

Bellinger explained that "The cases covered by the ICJ judgment all involved heinous murders, including of young children. Some proceedings had gone on for many years, with the victims’ families patiently waiting while our state and then federal courts reviewed the outcome to ensure that it fully complied with our laws. Yet the ICJ judgment nonetheless required us to review these cases again to consider the unlikely possibility that the outcome would have been different if the defendant had been asked whether he wanted his consular officer notified of his arrest."

The ICJ "ordered the United States to review the cases of 51 Mexican nationals convicted of capital crimes," Bellinger told the audience. Citing U.S. sovereignty and the concerns of the victims’ families, the Bush Administration could have ignored the ICJ ruling. But Bush, "acting on the advice of the Secretary of State," decided to "require each State involved to give the 51 convicts a new hearing," he said. Hence, Bush sided with convicted killers from Mexico against the American victims and their families.

Presidential Power

How did the President do this? On February 28, 2005, Bush simply made a "determination" and assumed the power to tell the states what to do.

He declared, "I have determined, pursuant to the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States, that the United States will discharge its international obligations under the decision of the International Court of Justice in the Case Concerning Avena and Other Mexican Nationals (Mexico v. United States of America), 2004 I.C.J. 128 (Mar. 31), by having state courts give effect to the decision in accordance with general principles of comity in cases filed by the 51 Mexican nationals addressed in that decision."

The Bush Justice Department argued that the president has the power to do whatever he wants to do. "In particular circumstances, the President may decide that the United States will not comply with an ICJ decision and direct a United States veto of any proposed Security Council enforcement measure," it said. "Here, however, the President has determined that the foreign policy interests of the United States justify compliance with the ICJ’s decision."

But Bush’s home state of Texas decided that Bush did not have that power.

Texas Says No

Bellinger acknowledged that "The first defendant to try to take advantage of the President’s decision was in the state of Texas, which objected to the President’s decision. In response, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the President had no power to intervene in its affairs, even to obtain compliance with an order of the ICJ. This Administration has gone to the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse this decision. We expect a ruling from that Court this time next year."

So here we have a case of the Bush Administration going to the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to enforce compliance with an international court! And the case involves litigating against the President’s home state of Texas!

There’s an old saying, "Don’t mess with Texas." Well, Bush did.

Bush Promotes New Treaties

Trying to impress his international audience, Bellinger declared that "international law binds us in our domestic system" and that the Bush Administration entered into 429 international agreements and treaties last year alone.

Bellinger bragged that "…I have a staff of 171 lawyers, who work every day to furnish advice on legal matters, domestic and international, and to promote the development of international law as a fundamental element of our foreign policy."

According to Bellinger, "Our Constitution does not prescribe isolationism. To the contrary, it promotes our active participation in the development and enforcement of international law."

This will be news to patriotic Americans.

Even in cases where the administration seems opposed to some new international institution, Bellinger made it clear that the opposition is only half-hearted.

For example, while Bush never sought ratification of the ICC, Bellinger said that "…over the past couple of years we have worked hard to demonstrate that we share the main goals and values of the Court." He explained, "We did not oppose the Security Council’s referral of the Darfur situation to the ICC, and have expressed our willingness to consider assisting the ICC Prosecutor’s Darfur work should we receive an appropriate request. We supported the use of ICC facilities for the trial of Charles Taylor, which began this week here in The Hague. These steps reflect our desire to find practical ways to work with ICC supporters to advance our shared goals of promoting international criminal justice…"

Bellinger did not explain what would happen when the ICC decided to lodge charges against U.S. soldiers or officials over "war crimes" in Iraq or elsewhere.

New Global Warming Treaty

Anticipating Bush’s embrace at the G-8 meeting in Germany of a new and much-tougher global warming treaty, Bellinger said that the U.S. was pursuing "a host of climate-related measures, both domestically and internationally," including "a new post-2012 framework on climate change." Al Gore would have been proud.

In the only remarks that could please conservatives, Bellinger said that the Bush Administration would NOT pursue ratification of the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical pro-abortion feminist measure. He said that "…we have not been persuaded that the binding international obligations contained in that treaty would add anything to the measures we take domestically."

Considering that Bush is pushing UNCLOS–and dozens of other treaties–and that he sided with Mexico against his own country and his own state in the Avena case, the failure to push ratification of CEDAW may not be hailed as much of a victory by conservatives. Indeed, Bellinger seemed to be arguing that CEDAW was not necessary because U.S. domestic law was already as radical as the U.N. treaty and that the administration was perfectly happy with that state of affairs.

Bellinger closed his speech by saying, "The principles that The Hague symbolizes are ours too, and our common future rests on them."

Last stand for American sovereignty

CNN’s Lou Dobbs asked me, during a discussion of the North American Union, why our media show no interest in the issue of sovereignty. I said it wasn’t considered sexy enough. Perhaps if "sovereignty" had big breasts and shapely legs, like Anna Nicole Smith, we might stand a chance of getting some more coverage. Tragically, American sovereignty seems to be meeting the same fate as Miss Smith.

[More]The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), now being pushed by the Bush Administration for a quick vote, is already starting to get rave reviews from the press, with the Sacramento Bee saying that protecting the oceans of the world could be Bush’s "legacy." The message to Bush is that he should go out as a liberal and he may salvage some of his reputation. But he will lose what is left of his conservative base.

As President Reagan understood, UNCLOS creates another dangerous U.N. bureaucracy, with a seabed "authority" to run ocean affairs, as well as a court system and a global tax. It is a mechanism created by the World Federalists as a major stepping stone on the road to world government. It is also designed to make it easier for the "international community" to thwart the exercise of U.S. military power in foreign affairs. One of the main authors, Elizabeth Mann Borgese, was a socialist who admired Karl Marx. But don’t expect our media to report these facts to the American people.

U.S. Navy officials, acting clueless and completely in the dark about the nature of U.N. bureaucracies, are actually lobbying on Capitol Hill for Senate ratification of the pact. It is an example of how weak the U.S. has become that our military officials have been reduced to functioning as a lobbying arm of the Washington office of the U.N. Of course, they are only doing what the President tells them to do, and Bush says he wants immediate ratification of UNCLOS. Strangely, two years ago, even when his administration was officially endorsing the pact, Bush told conservatives he wasn’t sure why his administration was supporting it.

However, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, pondering a presidential run, was studying the treaty to death and refusing to bring it up for a vote. Conservatives applauded his courage. But a Democratic takeover of the Senate has now provided the "opportunity" for Bush to promote the treaty that President Reagan rejected. Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, was still rejecting it in 2004, supposedly after the treaty had been "fixed."

Recognizing the importance of words and what they mean, a top State Department official recently told a group of conservatives that he doesn’t like to refer to UNCLOS as a U.N. treaty. He wants to avoid any mention of the U.N. connection because he understands that the world body is so corrupt that any mention of it alongside the treaty can only hurt its chances of ratification.

Make no mistake: a vote for UNCLOS is a vote for increasing the power of the U.N. You can register your opinion on the treaty by calling the Capitol at 1-800-828-0498 and asking to be connected to the offices of your senators.

On another front, White House spokesman Tony Snow calls the North American Union (NAU) a "myth," despite the abundant evidence of White House involvement in the development of a North American identification card and security strategy. This is how the subject of national sovereignty gets marginalized and dismissed. In this case, our "adversary press" meekly accepts the White House line. Echoing Snow, Philip Dine of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has written an article saying the NAU is based on an Internet "rumor" with a "few grains of truth" that has led people to "an unsubstantiated conclusion." It is apparent that he didn’t attend the "North American Law" conference which I covered, featuring wide-ranging discussions on how the North American Free Trade Agreement is leading to the integration of the economic, legal and political s ystems of the U.S, Canada and Mexico.

This week, Robert Pastor’s Center for North American Studies at American University is co-sponsoring the "Model North American Parliament" for students from the three countries. Pastor, a former Carter official and Clinton adviser who persuaded Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn to introduce a Mexico financial bailout bill, is not the type who whistles Dixie. Wearing a lapel pin featuring the flags of the U.S., Mexico and Canada, he is an ardent advocate of what he calls the "North American Community."

Those concerned about our national sovereignty had better figure out a way to get some media attention on this subject rather quickly because we are losing our sovereignty on many fronts. From the North American Union to the Law of the Sea Treaty to the illegal alien amnesty bill, America as we know it is fading fast. The sad irony is that all of this is happening under the auspices of a supposed conservative Republican President who earned a reputation during the early years of his administration of pursuing a "unilateral" foreign policy by snubbing the United Nations on matters like adopting the global warming treaty and the International Criminal Court and withdrawing from the ABM treaty so the U.S. could pursue a missile defense.

How things change. The Bush White House, Democrats and the media currently work in concert to promote amnesty for illegal aliens as "comprehensive immigration reform." House Republicans like Reps. Edward Royce, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter see through it. And illegal aliens, of course, don’t even exist in the world of politically correct journalism. All of this can be explained by the fact that our elite journalists are in the same class as those politicians who employ illegal aliens as gardeners, landscapers, housekeepers and nannies. While exploiting cheap labor themselves, they tell us the illegal aliens are simply "undocumented workers" supposedly doing the jobs Americans won’t do.

On all of these issues, it seems that Bush works better with liberal Democrats than conservative Republicans. This might lead the cynical to think that he wanted Republicans to lose power in Congress so he could finally leave a "legacy," in addition to the "No Child Left Behind" federal education bureaucracy and the monumentally expensive federal prescription drug program. But it’s impossible to believe that Bush intended for the war in Iraq to go this badly just so he could work with Democrats for his last two years. And that is mainly why the Republicans lost Congress and risk losing the White House in 2008. Bush could leave office as the President who failed to protect the borders of the United States and Iraq. The only question is which failure will prove more costly to our nation in the long run. On top of that, he now wants the Senate to ratify the most comprehensive treaty ever devised by the globalists. He is implementing the New World Order talked about by his father.  

These political dynamics have put the sovereignty of our nation increasingly at risk. If we have any hope of getting mainstream journalists to critically cover these major issues of public importance, we have to make the concept of American sovereignty and national identity into something that is interesting to write and talk about. Of course, this approach assumes that we have a media still capable of honest reporting. 

Ultimately, political pressure from the grassroots to force both political parties to deal with the survival of the nation may be the only way to get the attention of the press. We are beginning to see that groundswell developing on the subject of illegal immigration, as millions of Americans register their outrage at Republicans and Democrats who fail to take serious action to protect U.S. borders. The same outrage, if channeled into opposition to UNCLOS, could also make an impression on the Washington establishment and media. It will take 34 votes to sink UNCLOS but Republican sources on Capitol Hill say they can count less than 10 currently against it. Time is running out on the independent, free and strong America that so many sacrificed their lives for.

 

Mr. Kincaid is President of America’s Survival, Inc., and is editor of Accuracy in Media.

President Bush tells base to “get LOST”







The Law of the Sea Treaty will impede the U.S.’s ability to defend its interests in time of war.
President Bush is expected shortly to announce his determination to secure the early ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).  This treaty, which was rejected by President Ronald Reagan and bottled up by the Republican Senate in the last Congress, promises further to weaken the President’s already plummeting support among his political base, on and off of Capitol Hill.


LOST has long been the crown-jewel of a community known as the transnational progressives (“transies”) found in various quarters of this and foreign governments, international bureaucrats and non-governmental organizations.   The transies seek to have supranational institutions govern world affairs, circumscribing the freedom of action and undermining the sovereignty of the American people and those of other freedom-loving nations.  


[More]


The Bush Administration’s strong enthusiasm for subjecting this country to such an accord compounds concerns about its penchant for other Transie initiatives, including the North American Union/Security and Prosperity Partnership (NAU/SPP) now being stealthily negotiated between U.S., Canadian and Mexican officials and interest groups.


A Bill of Particulars


Among the problems inherent with the Law of the Sea Treaty are the following:



  • U.S. ratification of LOST would give real substance to the supranational organization it established, the International Seabed Authority, an entity charged with governing activity on 2/3 of the earth’s surface. The Authority (as it is ominously known) has powers unprecedented in the history of multilateral institutions for example, the power to levy what amount to international taxes, with the intention of transferring wealth from developed nations, like the United States, to the developing ones.



  • LOST has its own court called the Law of the Sea Tribunal that will be able to dictate to this country on a host of matters bearing on our security, our sovereignty and our economic well-being.  The United States may not even be represented on this politicized, multinational court, let alone be able to prevent its adverse rulings.   For similar reasons, the Bush Administration has wisely worked to keep its interests and officials out of the clutches of another such panel, the International Criminal Court.



  • The Law of the Sea Tribunal determines its own jurisdiction.  It is reasonable to expect that it will feel free to assert authority over U.S. naval activities that: allegedly affect whales; involve intelligence and submerged operations in territorial waters; and attempt to prevent terrorist attacks and proliferation by stopping and searching ships on the high seas.  The Tribunal has already claimed jurisdiction over a nuclear power plant ashore in Great Britain!



  • LOST would oblige the United States to transfer possibly militarily significant technology and information to the UN’s International Seabed Authority and its member states, including possibly America’s adversaries.   This could result in the compromise of technologies that could be used, for example, in anti-submarine warfare and will afford them data (detailed imagery of underwater access routes, off-shore hiding places, etc.) that could be used to facilitate attacks on this country.  It is not consistent with either American principles or interests to provide enemies with tools to use against us.



  • LOST is emboldening Communist China to become ever more aggressive , threatening regional and global security and economic interests.  China has used its own interpretation of LOST to assert control over much of the South China Sea in its quest for access to vast quantities of natural resources, potentially sparking conflict with its neighbors.  In addition, China has expressed its willingness to use LOST as a legal mechanism to prohibit other countries from coming to Taiwan’s defense in the event that the mainland decides to attack the island.



  • LOST sets a dangerous precedent that could be used to deny the U.S. “freedom of space.”  Just as American naval power has assured and safeguarded “freedom of the seas” for many decades, this country’s ability to have assured access to and use of space is vital for both our own national security and commercial interests and those of the Free World.  Adversaries recognize this reality, and as with the Law of the Sea Treaty and our planet’s oceans, they are attempting to inhibit our dominant position in and control of space through the imposition of international laws and regulations.   LOST will be a model for a new multilateral regime to govern the last so-called “global commons”: outer space.

The Bottom Line


One would think that the last thing President Bush needs at the moment is to alienate those who have stood beside him through thick and thin as he has striven to do the hard things needed to protect the security and (to a lesser extent) the sovereignty of the United States.  He is unlikely to get much credit from the transnational progressives, who detest him, for this concession to their agenda.  His embrace of that agenda, however, puts at grave risk the support the Administration could otherwise expect, and will certainly need, from those who have admired him and oppose what the transies have in mind for America.  

Sudan’s Chinese guardian

By Fred Stakelbeck

Sudan’s brutal Islamist President Omar al-Bashir and Chinese President Hu Jintao have become fast friends as of late, forging a Sino-Sudanese alliance that has serious implications for the Sudanese people and the future stability of the African continent. "China has burst on the African scene with a presence that has been frightening to many people who hadn’t realized how wide its reach is," U.S. Representative Randy Forbes (R-VA), chairman of the new House China Caucus, noted in January.

The recent announcement by Beijing of a new Africa policy based upon the concept of "mutual fulfillment with no preconditions" has raised concerns in Washington by those who say that China’s Sudan foreign policy is manipulative and opportunistic; and that it ignores the displacement of an estimated 2 million Sudanese villagers and the murder of 180,000 others for its own economic gain.

In testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in late 2005, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) stated, "In Sudan, Chinese oil investments have helped to prop up a regime in Khartoum that our president and this Congress have accused of involvement in genocide."

While humanitarian issues have little value in Beijing’s new Africa policy, energy interests—and the military means to protect those interests—play important roles in the Red Dragon’s actions on the continent, particularly in poverty-ravaged Sudan.

China currently imports 7 percent of its oil from Sudan; making Sino-Sudanese relations an extremely important part of China’s evolving energy strategy. As a result, Beijing has blanketed Sudan with over $4 billion in investment over the past several years, hoping to secure long-term energy agreements, while increasing its economic, political and military influence in Africa. "Chinese investment and development in Africa has strong potential because Africa is abundant in natural resources, which are urgently needed for China’s economic development," noted Chinese Foreign Minister Li Guozeng recently.

Since 1996, numerous Chinese state-controlled enterprises have been hard at work in Sudan cultivating energy relationships. The state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which owns a 40 percent share in Sudan’s largest oil venture, the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, currently pumps 300,000 barrels per day, most of which is sent to mainland China. Sinopec, another energy enterprise, has completed an oil pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where Chinese tankers ferry oil to China’s developing industrial cities. China’s Petroleum Engineering Construction Group has also been instrumental is the construction of a large tanker terminal at Port Sudan, as well as roads, bridges and dams.

To protect its vast energy investments in Sudan and to secure additional lands for energy development and exploration, China has readily supplied weapons to the Bashir regime, delivering F-7 jet fighters, assault helicopters and armored vehicles to the country.

With the help of its Muslim "Janjaweed" militia groups and the blessing of Bashir, the Sudanese Air Force has used Chinese-made weapons against defenseless villagers in Darfur. There have also been persistent claims by independent aid groups that Sudanese government troops and rebels have used Chinese oil company airstrips to conduct bombing raids on villages and hospitals.

On more than one occasion, China has purposely blocked the U.N. from taking punitive action against the murderous Bashir regime. In 2004, strong Chinese opposition forced the U.N. Security Council to tone down a resolution that would have referred the Darfur matter to the International Criminal Court. Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha told the country’s cabinet he had Chinese assurances the resolution would not be passed, "He [Taha] was confident it would not get through and told them not to worry," a cabinet source said.

Since that disappointing vote, Beijing has continued to use its permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council to protect Khartoum, pledging to veto any U.N. bid to impose an oil embargo on Sudan. Serious questions concerning China’s intentions in Sudan surfaced again last month, when Beijing announced that it was indefinitely delaying the deployment of a critical Chinese medical unit to the conflict-stricken Darfur region.

The upcoming China-Africa Summit, scheduled for later this year in Beijing, is a perfect opportunity for the U.S. to regain its footing on the Africa issue. With U.S.-Africa trade at approximately $45 billion a year and numerous U.S.-sponsored humanitarian and investment projects evident throughout the continent; the U.S. is not merely an interested African observer – it is a committed partner.

One question remains for Sudan’s tyrant Bashir: What will the thousands of entrenched Chinese nationals do in Sudan once the oil disappears?

This article originally appeared in FrontPageMagazine.com.

Waging lawfare

Over the course of the process that culminated in the confirmation of Samuel A. Alito, Jr., as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, exhaustive inquires sought to determine how the nominee’s judicial philosophy would impact the Nation on any number of fronts.

Almost entirely missed, however, was an opportunity to raise awareness of what is developing into the most significant legal phenomenon of the new century – one that we ignore at our own peril, moreover, as it constitutes a very threatening form of asymmetric warfare being waged against the United States. What is this menace? Lawfare.

Lawfare can generally be defined as a strategy of the weak employed to debilitate and defeat the United States through the manipulation of international and domestic legal fora, opinion and processes. Lawfare’s effectiveness lies in the fact that ours is a country so strongly committed to the rule of law that it will often bend over backward to appease charges of illegality – however specious – to the detriment of its own interests. This arrangement is recognized, appreciated, and most importantly actively encouraged by adversaries of American power.

Lawfare’s Three-Pronged Attack

In this campaign to diminish American prowess, lawfare is waged on three tactical fronts – the establishment of treaty obligations, the procurement of artificial "legal norms" and the imposition of those by agents within the bureaucracy and on the federal bench.

  • At the diplomatic level, foreign governments wage lawfare by pressuring the United States to become party to international regimes that assume decision-making authority in critical areas. One of their favorite tactics, accordingly, is the creation of treaties whose provisions "level the playing field" with the United States. Of course, these agreements are often aimed at little more than limiting the flexibility our government needs to develop policies capable of defending America and advancing its interests. Hence, the U.S. has been rabidly castigated for its unwillingness to submit to the International Criminal Court, the piece de resistance of lawfare advocates.
  • In addition to these formal apparatuses, lawfare is buttressed by demands that the U.S. abide by so-called legal norms, both domestic and international. These "standards," however, are often artificially created by nothing more than the policy pronouncements of politicians, NGOs and/or the U.N. General Assembly. But because champions of American interests too often ignore rather than challenge their assertions, otherwise legally insupportable, politically charged policy declarations are coming to define the parameters of legal thought in the minds of America’s citizens.

    By using legal-norms arguments to shape public opinion, pressure is indirectly applied on policymakers to adopt practices inimical to the Nation’s security. A prominent example of this approach can be seen in the campaign to paint the Patriot Act as a threat to the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans, leading many Senators who supported the original legislation into their current attempt to water-down or kill provisions critical to its effectiveness.

  • Loath to wait patiently for authority-subordination and political influence operations to take hold, however, lawfare’s prescriptions are, increasingly, simply imposed by its agents on the federal bench and within the bureaucracy. As an example of just how egregious such violations can be, consider the following:

    Despite the Senate’s 1977 refusal to accede to Protocol I to the Geneva Convention that effectively grants POW rights to non-state militias, in November 2003 – amid increasingly strident claims by foreign governments, NGOs, and a minority of American politicians that the U.S. was operating illegally in the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay – federal District Judge James Robertson determined that "general international understandings" were sufficient in extending POW status to al-Qaeda operatives held at Gitmo.

    Similarly, State Department lawyers have unilaterally determined that the utilization of riot control agents – non-lethal substances such as tear gas – by the U.S. military would violate the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention. This despite the fact the Senate demanded, as a condition for approval of the CWC, and received assurances that certain applications of RCAs by the military were permissible, an understanding that until now was upheld by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

The Bottom Line

It is time for the United States to fight back – a counteroffensive that first requires the identification of lawfare as a very threatening form of asymmetric warfare being waged against this country. From there, U.S. policy-makers alarmed by the phenomenon can reject treaties that would constrain the flexibility necessary to meet current and future challenges; discontinue conceding the legal-norms debate to self-professed authorities hostile to U.S. interests; and block the appointment of jurists and hiring of bureaucrats who would make legal determinations based on anything other than U.S. law and precedent.

The Alito nomination presented a valuable opportunity to open a national discussion – one that, unfortunately, was almost entirely missed when Senate hearings devolved into a partisan show trial. But for thoughtful questioning from Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, we would not have discovered that, thankfully, Judge Alito appears stationed firmly in the anti-lawfare camp.

Fortunately, Congress maintains the ability to play an important role in calling attention to the many ways in which lawfare is being waged against us, most immediately by initiating a series of hearings on the subject. In absence of such an exposition, lawfare’s supporters will be all too happy to continue to fill the ideological void.

Sovereignty levees breached?

(Washington, D.C.): Since it seems the only news that is fit to print (or air) these days has to do with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, finding a related angle to call needed public and leadership attention to something else happening in the world requires a little ingenuity. Since the stakes associated with another, largely unremarked story – involving a drama that will reach its denouement at UN headquarters this week – may be nothing less than the future sovereignty and character of the United States, however, a way must be found.


LOST in New Orleans


As it happens, the answer lies in the toxic liquid now being pumped out of New Orleans into waterways that will, inexorably, contaminate the international reaches of Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps beyond. The United States has unilaterally determined that this potentially huge environmental damage is justified by the need to recover and restore a major American city, its population and economy.


Interestingly, shortly before Katrina precipitated this crisis, a gaggle of former senior government officials wrote Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist demanding that he swiftly effect the ratification of a controversial accord known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (or LOST). The authors dismissed concerns expressed by conservatives that LOST would impinge upon U.S. sovereignty and vital interests.


If the United States were a party to the Law of the Sea Treaty today though, it is very likely America would be enjoined from dumping New Orleans’ toxic stew into Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi River . For one thing, this action would violate the Treaty’s environmental obligations to protect marine life and its habitats, obligations whose sweep makes those of the Kyoto Treaty seem modest by comparison.


For another, the Law of the Sea Tribunal – the sort of multilateral legal institution whose tendency for politicization and anti-American actions has prompted the Bush Administration to reject the International Criminal Court – has already established a relevant precedent. In a case brought by Ireland against Great Britain, the Tribunal has established that its jurisdiction extends to activities on sovereign member states’ soil that can arguably affect international waters. (An important question for Senators to put to Chief Justice nominee John Roberts would be whether, like some other justices, he would regard such an internationally dictated injunction to trump America’s domestic jurisprudence?)


Unfortunately, since Ronald Reagan’s day, American governments have tended to pay too little attention to sovereignty-sapping treaties and institutional power-grabs by the United Nations and other multilateral organizations. To his credit, Mr. Reagan recognized the Law of the Sea Treaty for what it was intended to be by the World Federalists and so-called non-aligned movement types who had a significant hand in shaping its supranational International Seabed Authority and related entities: a highly precedential, and undesirable, vehicle for establishing world-government mechanisms to control the “international commons” (in this case, the oceans) at the expense of sovereign states.


President Reagan refused to agree to LOST’s ratification in part because he found anathema the idea of empowering an international organization to raise its own revenues through what amount to taxes on seabed mining and energy exploitation. Regrettably, the Bush Administration has to date chosen to overlook this and the Treaty’s other adverse implications for U.S. sovereignty, and says it supports LOST’s ratification.


Meanwhile, Back at the UN


The good news is that President Bush seems in no mood to go along with the logical extrapolation of the Law of the Sea Treaty – the so-called “Draft Outcome Document” for the UN General Assembly meeting on September 14th through 16th. The document has been the focus of intense negotiations ever since Mr. Bush succeeded in getting his representative, John Bolton, in place at Turtle Bay. Despite fresh evidence from former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker that the UN is scandal-ridden, corrupt, poorly organized and managed and incompetently led, Secretary General Kofi Anan wants the American and other world leaders to ratify this week what amounts to his wish-list.


As of this writing, however, Amb. Bolton has registered strong U.S. objections to language that would bind America to actions that, under this President, it has firmly opposed: ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; opening negotiations on space arms control; creating what amounts to a standing UN army; and foregoing systemic UN reforms, in favor of cosmetic ones.


Of arguably greatest importance is the U.S. refusal to empower the United Nations to levy taxes – a step that would, as with the Law of the Sea Treaty, advance the organization’s ambitions to promote world government. Globotaxes would also eviscerate what remains in the way of American leverage to effect real reform of the UN and to punish its misbehavior. It is estimated that one proposed tax on international currency transactions alone would be able to generate a staggering $13 trillion in revenue.


The Bottom Line


Just as Hurricane Katrina ruptured the levees protecting New Orleans, the UN’s concerted assault on the barriers to further erosion of American sovereignty threatens to swamp our freedom of action and our founding principle of “no taxation without representation.” It behooves President Bush to reject any Outcome Document that leaves the door open to globotaxes, let alone one that endorses them outright. Rather than lend his authority to such an exercise, he should be willing to refuse to attend the UN summit meeting this week that Mr. Anan hoped would be the biggest fund-raiser in the history of the world.