"Hat in hand," on "bended knee": after supposedly breaking with the UN over the Iraq War, the Bush administration has not only come to the UN as supplicant but is pushing for a UN standing army.

It's quite nice when you've been generally dissed about your irrelevancy and then suddenly have people coming on bended knee and saying, "We need you to come back."

--Edward Mortimer, a senior aide to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan

"Today in Baghdad," President George Bush told reporters at a June 1 Rose Garden press briefing, "U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, announced the members of Iraq's new interim government." In fact, Mr. Allawi had been picked as interim prime minister by the U.S.-installed Governing Council from a short list presented to them by UN envoy Brahimi. Mr. Brahimi not only pre-seleeted Prime Minister Allawi, but Iraq's new president, its two deputy presidents, and its 33-member cabinet as well.

During the course of his remarks and responses to questions, President Bush repeatedly underscored the UN's dominant role in determining the makeup of the new Iraqi government:

* "[UN envoy] Mr. Brahimi put together a government."

* "Mr. Brahimi made the decisions and brought their names to the Governing Council. As I understand it, the Governing Council simply opined about names. It was Mr. Brahimi's selections and--Ambassador Bremer and Ambassador Blackwill were instructed by me to work with Mr. Brahimi."

* "Mr. Brahimi made the decision on [Iraqi National Congress head Ahmed] Chalabi, not the United States. Mr. Brahimi was the person that put together the group."

"Earlier today," said President Bush, "I spoke to Secretary General Kofi Annan. I congratulated him on the U.N.'s role in forming this new government." At virtually the same time that President Bush was making these remarks, Kofi Annan was conducting a press conference at the UN's New York headquarters, where he heaped praise on Lakhdar Brahimi, whom he conspicuously referred to as "my own envoy."

Yes, one year after the administration launched the Iraq War in apparent defiance of the UN, and less than a month before the June 30 deadline for handing over control of Iraq to the Iraqis, it is the UN that is calling the shots--while the U.S. continues to pay in blood and treasure. The UN has handpicked the new Iraqi government. The UN will supervise Iraq's national elections in 2005. The UN will administer billions of dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction aid, despite the fact that the UN's administration of Iraq's "Oil-for-Food" program under Saddam Hussein has been exposed as one of the biggest corruption scandals of all time.

"The United Nations, once snubbed and excluded from the task of shaping Iraq's future, suddenly finds itself pressed to play the major role in that effort," wrote the New York Times' Warren Hoge, in an April 18 dispatch from Baghdad. U.S. General Anthony Zinni, in an April 16 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, characterized the Bush administration's position as coming back to the UN "hat in hand," after having ridiculed the world body in the run-up to the war. Kofi Annan's aide, Edward Mortimer, painted the U.S. humiliation even more dramatically in a New York Times interview, describing the Bush administration's appeal for help as coming to the UN "on bended knee." Mr. Mortimer was obviously expressing the sense of vindication and satisfaction felt by his boss--and all one-worlders, for that matter--at seeing the United States, the world's only superpower, prostrated before the UN globalists.

In reality, the Bush administration had never "snubbed" the UN, as the Times asserts and as so many people believe. President Bush and other administration officials had repeatedly stated that the purpose of the war was to disarm Saddam Hussein per United Nations Security Council resolutions. Their complaint with the UN was that it was not enforcing its own resolutions and that its resolutions should be enforced. The Bush administration's policy to empower the UN is not new; what is new is that the policy is now much more transparent than it was at the beginning of the Iraq War. In fact, the war has greased the skids for UN empowerment.

One of the most stunning developments to come out of the Bush administration's war on Iraq has been almost completely ignored by the media cartel. Incredibly, the Bush Defense and State Departments are jointly proposing to establish, with the apparent blessing of the White House, a 75,000-strong army of international "peacekeepers." Called the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), this astonishing scheme calls for recruiting and training primarily Third World peacekeepers, to the tune of over $600 million over the next five years.

"On a Permanent Basis"

The most zealous advocates of world government have been pushing to create a standing UN army for the past half century. All such proposals have ultimately foundered and perished on the shoals of realpolitik; nations have been unwilling to turn any sizable portion of their military forces over to UN control, or to fund a permanent UN army. More recently, the organized one-worlders have tried to achieve their purpose indirectly and piecemeal, calling for a UN Rapid Deployment Force made up of military units that member nations would commit to "standby" availability. That, too, has failed.

Now, the administration of President George Bush, "Mr. Unilateralist," is proposing a dangerous and brazen scheme that, had it been proposed by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, would have touched off a typhoon of protest and a speedy drafting of articles of impeachment. Senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry--both fervent internationalists--would not dare advocate such a blatantly globalist program, knowing full well that it would be the kiss of death for them politically. Yet, so far, there has not been even a peep of protest from Republican loyalists about the president's pitch for a global constabulary.

The first mention of GPOI came in an April 19 Pentagon press release that announced: "The Bush administration is planning a new drive to boost the supply of foreign troops available for peacekeeping missions worldwide." According to the release, "the initiative could ease the pressure on U.S. forces to participate in such missions."

Ten days later, on April 29, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz briefly mentioned GPOI while presenting the administration's security assistance request to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Mr. Wolfowitz told the subcommittee members:

   Looking at our global security challenges,
   we can see an ever-growing
   need for competent forces to engage
   in peacekeeping and peace enforcement
   missions. The requirement for
   missions to stabilize trouble spots
   around the world is growing. We have
   seen this in Haiti, Liberia, and Burundi,
   among other countries, in just
   the past year. I urge Congressional
   support for another request from
   President Bush that is designed to address
   the gap between peace operations
   mission requirements and the
   supply of forces: The Global Peace
   Operations Initiative.

   With an emphasis on Africa, the
   U.S. and its partners would work to
   increase global capacity to conduct
   peacekeeping and peace enforcement
   missions. President Bush's initiative
   will increase our efforts in Africa
   nearly three times, and work to bring
   in other partners from around the
   world. The program will be managed
   and funded by both the Department of
   Defense and Department of State. We
   are requesting this authority to allow
   us to implement the initiative quickly.

Shades of Bill Clinton and PDD-13! That's short for Presidential Decision Directive 13, the secretive order that got Clinton into such hot water. The document was brought to public attention when the Washington Post reported on August 5, 1993 that PDD-13 "endorses the United Nations as ersatz world policeman and commits Washington to support multinational peacemaking and peacekeeping operations 'politically, militarily and financially.'" The Post noted that "the presidential directive endorses a broad new definition of what constitutes a 'threat to international peace and security,' setting the stage for forcible U.N. intervention when a country undergoes 'sudden and unexpected interruption of established democracy or gross violation of human rights.'"

PDD-13 was actually an attempt by the Clinton one-worlders to implement the audacious program proposed by then-Secretary-General of the UN Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his 1992 report, An Agenda for Peace. According to Mr. Boutros-Ghali's report, "The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty ... has passed," and the time has come for "a United Nations capable of maintaining international peace and security, of securing justice and human rights and of promoting ... 'social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.'"

Boutros-Ghali called on member states "to make armed forces, assistance and facilities available to the Security Council ... not only on an ad hoc basis but on a permanent basis." This was nothing less than a blatant appeal to establish a UN planetary military force.

To the dismay of many Republicans and the glee of Democrat internationalists, then-President Bush (the elder), in his September 21, 1992 address to the UN General Assembly, announced: "I welcome the secretary-general's call for a new agenda to strengthen the United Nations' ability to prevent, contain, and resolve conflict across the globe...." President Bush pledged to work with Boutros-Ghali and the UN "to best employ our considerable lift, logistics, communications, and intelligence capabilities." He further stated: "The United States is prepared to make available our bases and facilities for multinational training and field exercises. One such base, nearby, with facilities is Fort Dix [New Jersey]."

No one should have been surprised. Despite his conservative rhetoric, George Herbert Walker Bush's credentials as a certified internationalist were by that time already a public record. He had been a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he had served as a director, and the Trilateral Commission, two of the most notorious and influential groups promoting the merger of nations, the death of national sovereignty, and, ultimately world government under the United Nations.

Even more important than his own membership in these groups was the fact that Bush--like other recent presidents, both Republican and Democrat--appointed hundreds of CFR members to top positions in his administration, including the heads of most of his cabinet departments. Many of those prominent CFR one-worlders now serve in his son's administration, including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Blackwill and John Negroponte.

Bush's Blue Helmets

When President Bush (the elder) delivered his September 11, 1990 televised speech on the developing Iraq situation to a joint session of Congress (prior to Operation Desert Storm) he declared: "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective--a new world order--can emerge.... We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders."

President Bush's repeated and reverential praise for the UN's founders is very telling, especially since virtually all the Americans at the founding UN conference in San Francisco were CFR members. That includes, of course, arch-traitor and Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who served as acting secretary-general of the conference. But more pertinent to our present situation was President Bush's (again, we're talking about George senior) use of Saddam Hussein and Iraq War I as an excuse to enhance the UN's "peacekeeping role" (i.e., the UN's military, war-making capacity). That is precisely what the CFR-laden administration of George W. is now attempting to do with the dangerous and secretive Global Peace Operations Initiative.

It wasn't until May 15, 2004, when the House Armed Services Committee released its report on H.R. 4200, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005, that a general outline of the GPOI began to emerge. There, tucked away on page 368 of the report, we find the following alarming revelations:

   On April 29, 2004, administration officials
   briefed committee staff on the
   Global Peace Operations Initiative. In
   general, the initiative is a joint venture
   between the Department of Defense
   and the Department of State to
   train and equip roughly 75,000 foreign
   military personnel in peacekeeping
   and peace enforcement operations
   over five years. The
   administration further proposes legislative
   authority for the Department
   of Defense to spend up to $100 million
   in operations and maintenance
   funding on training foreign military
   forces, either by transferring those
   funds to the Department of State or
   conducting the training itself. Over
   the next five years, the administration
   estimated that the total cost of the initiative
   would be $606 million and that
   the Department of Defense would be
   responsible for roughly eighty percent
   of the total....

   In general, the committee supports
   the goals of the Global Peace Operations
   Initiative. However, it is concerned
   about the process by which the
   administration seeks to fund the program
   and move it forward. Historically,
   the Department of State has
   trained and equipped foreign military
   forces for the United States under title
   22 of the U.S. Code, which restricts
   the kinds of training that can be provided
   and the countries to which it
   can be provided.... In this case, however,
   the administration proposed exempting
   the Global Peace Operations
   Initiative from those legal constraints
   and requested authority to use Department
   of Defense funding intended
   to pay for the operations and maintenance
   of U.S. forces. As a result,
   any use of the authority could mean
   depriving U.S. threes of the resources
   that the administration had requested,
   and which Congress had authorized
   and appropriated, for their operations
   and maintenance.

Incredible! As has been widely reported, our soldiers and Marines in Iraq are suffering from a shameful lack of body armor and shortages of food, water, ammunition and just about every other battlefield necessity. But the Bush administration wants to spend $606 million to train and equip foreign soldiers for UN peacekeeping missions. The money would conic mostly from the Defense budget, despite the fact that our own troops are already under-equipped. And, like the Clinton administration's effort to keep PDD-13 from Congress and the American public, the Bush administration is trying to sneak its subversive GPOI past Congress in stealth mode. It has been extremely stingy about releasing any details of this revolutionary program.

Thus, it is somewhat reassuring to find that there are, apparently, at least enough genuine Americans on the House Armed Services Committee to put the brakes on this proposal, even though, "in general, the committee supports the goals" of the GPOI. The House committee report quoted above states that "the committee recommends against granting the authority requested. Instead it recommends a provision that would seek additional information on the Global Peace Operations Initiative."

If the committee had more information about the GPOI, it might quickly realize that it could in no way support the goals of the program. Those goals include empowering the UN with military capabilities as recommended in the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations issued in August 2000. It is more commonly known as "The Brahimi Report," after the panel's chairman, the same Lakhdar Brahimi whom Kofi Annan and George W. Bush selected to put together the new Iraqi government.

The Brahimi Report opens with this stirring appeal to global action:

   The United Nations was founded, in
   the words of its Charter, in order "to
   save succeeding generations from the
   scourge of war." Meeting this challenge
   is the most important function
   of the Organization, and to a very significant
   degree it is the yardstick with
   which the Organization is judged by
   the peoples it exists to serve.... Without
   renewed commitment on the part
   of Member States, significant institutional
   change and increased financial
   support, the United Nations will not
   be capable of executing the critical
   peacekeeping and peace-building
   tasks that the Member States assign
   to it in coming months and years....

What does this mean in concrete terms? "It means bigger forces, better equipped and more costly but able to be a credible deterrent," says the Brahimi Report. Specifically, the report "recommends that the United Nations standby arrangements system (UNSAS) be developed further to include several coherent, multinational, brigade-size forces and the necessary enabling forces, created by Member States working in partnership, in order to better meet the need for the robust peacekeeping forces that the [Brahimi-led] Panel has advocated...."

The Brahimi Report defines a brigade as a military unit comprised of 5,000 troops. President Bush's GPOI, with its proposal for training 75,000 foreign "peacekeepers," goes well beyond the Brahimi call for "several" brigades.

Bush: Doing What Liberals Cannot

At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan implored the leaders of more than 150 countries to consider "very seriously" the Brahimi Report's recommendations. The so-called "Millennium Declaration" unanimously approved at that summit reflects the Brahimi Panel's impact, expressing a commitment to provide the UN with "the resources and tools" it needs "for conflict prevention, peaceful resolution of disputes, peacekeeping, post-conflict peace-building and reconstruction."

President Clinton signed on to the Brahimi Annan peacekeeper/warmaker agenda. "When leaders seize [the] chance for peace, we must help them," Clinton declared in his Millennium Summit speech from the UN podium. He lamented that in Sierra Leone and West Timor "the U.N. did not have the tools to finish the job. We must provide those tools--with peacekeepers that can be rapidly deployed with the right training and equipment, missions well-defined and well-led, with the necessary civilian police."

Now it is George W. Bush who is carrying forward the UN agenda previously pushed by the CFR-dominated administrations of his father and Bill Clinton. Professor Robert Wright, an unflinching advocate of world government, pungently remarked in a New York Times column last year that President Bush, despite his seeming anti-UN rhetoric, has bestowed upon the UN "a prominence it has rarely enjoyed in its 57-year history." "In fact," Professor Wright mused, "there remains a slim chance that the president could, however paradoxically, emerge as a historic figure in the United Nations' own evolution toward enduring significance."

Robert Wright then noted that "if Nixon could go to China, President Bush can go through New York." This observation is particularly apropos at this time. For those too young to understand the significance of the professor's Nixon-China reference, it was President Richard Nixon, a reputed conservative Republican, who sold out Taiwan, our anti-Communist ally, leading to its expulsion from the UN, and its replacement in that world body by Communist China. And it was the same Nixon, who had built a reputation as an anti-Communist, who went to Beijing and paved the way for completely reversing U.S. policy and establishing relations with Mao's Communist regime.

Those betrayals more than three decades ago started the massive loans, aid and technology transfers that have transformed Communist China into the global economic and military power that now poses one of the greatest dangers to our lives and livelihoods. Many liberal-left, internationalist Democrats lamented at the time that Nixon had stolen their program--while others of the same ilk exulted that a Republican had accomplished what they could never have pulled off. Robert Wright, speaking for many in the one-world comer, sees George Bush doing for the UN what Nixon did for China.

Republicans and self-styled conservatives who put party loyalty and the Bush cult of personality above our country's interests, and who fail to oppose the Bush program to empower the UN, are aiding and abetting--whether they realize it or not--an assault on America that is far more dangerous than anything Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein could ever muster.

Americans who want to pass on our nation's legacy of freedom will spare no effort in getting Congress to terminate our UN membership--before that option is no longer available to us.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disarming the U.S., arming the UN.

by William F. Jasper

On September 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy presented to the 16th General Assembly of the United Nations a disarmament proposal entitled Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World (State Department Publication 7277). Crafted by the CFR brain trust in his State and Defense Departments, Freedom From War is a blatantly treasonous proposal calling for the gradual disarmament of the U.S. and the simultaneous arming of the UN.

The document sets out a three-stage program for the "disbanding of all national aimed forces ... other than those required to preserve internal order and for contributions to a United Nations Peace Force," The Kennedy-CFR plan proposed: "In Stage III progressive controlled disarmament ... would proceed to a point where no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened U.N, Peace Force."

On June 3, 2004, the Bush administration announced that it would make dramatic nuclear weapons reductions that it described as "historic." Linton F. Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that the reductions would leave the U,S. with "the smallest nuclear-weapons stockpile we've had in several decades." Although Brooks did not state precisely how many weapons would be decommissioned, he said that our nuclear arsenal would be cut "almost in half."

The Bush plan for arms cuts represents the most radical step toward fulfilling the Freedom from War vision of "progressive controlled disarmament" since the Kennedy administration first proposed it. The Bush administration's Global Peace Operations Initiative for 75,000 "peacekeepers" is the most ambitious effort to date to create a "progressively strengthened U.N. Peace Force," as recommended by the Kennedy globalists more than four decades ago.