Building the UN Army.

Following a seemingly innocuous plan for peace through disarmament, the United States has been gradually turning control of the U.S. military over to the United Nations.

At her press conference on September 19, 2001, our nation's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, noted with approval some of President Bush's actions in the wake of the terrorist attacks on our nation. "One of the very first calls he made was to Jiang Zemin in China," she recalled. She reported that our president enjoyed a very friendly, consoling, and cooperative reception from the Chinese Communist dictator.

But one day before Ms. Rice's televised account, New York Times reporter Serge Schmemann wrote that China "would support military action for the terror only if the action was consistent with the United Nations charter." In the words of Zhu Bangzao, chief spokesman of China's military, "All actions should be consistent with international law, especially the U.N. Charter." On September 13th, two days after the commercial airliners became death-dealing bombs, USA Today reproduced a portion of an editorial from Beijing's China Daily, the voice of the Chinese Communist government. It called for "the international community...to wage all-out war on terrorism by, in the final analysis, establishing a new world order...." (Emphasis added.) Communist China obviously wants to enhance the UN's prestige by involving the organization in any military response to the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

Those who promote the use of the United Nations to coordinate and supervise international military actions have a hidden agenda. They know that for the UN to grow into the socialist world government envisioned by its founders, the world body must gain control over a military force powerful enough to impose its will. In practice, this has meant a deliberate, carefully orchestrated drive to absorb the military forces of sovereign nations into a unified command structure under United Nations authority. Because America's military is by far the world's most powerful, UN internationalists have focused especially on establishing control over the independent United States military.

Long-term Plan

On September 25, 1961, in a speech to the UN's General Assembly, President John F. Kennedy introduced a State Department-created document entitled Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament In a Peaceful World. Also designated "Department of State Publication 7277," the document calls for the United States and all nations to turn over their military forces to United Nations authority.

Freedom From War outlines three major stages, to be implemented over many years. During the first stage, the testing of nuclear weapons is to be prohibited by treaty. The size of the United States armed forces is to be greatly reduced, and treaties and monitoring mechanisms put in place to prepare for the "reduction and eventual elimination of all chemical, biological, and radiological weapons." In the second stage, independent nations will engage in further drastic reductions in armaments and military personnel, even as the United Nations establishes a "permanent international peace force" -- that is, a military of its own. In the third and final stage, "states would retain only those forces, non-nuclear armaments, and establishments required for the purpose of maintaining internal order; they would also support and provide agreed manpower for a U.N. Peace Force." During this stage, "progressive controlled disarmament and continuously developing principles and procedures of international law would proceed t o a point where no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively-strengthened U.N. Peace Force." (Emphasis added.)

So-called "arms control" is not a drive to eliminate weapons of war but to monopolize them; even those dreaded nukes will not be dismantled but transferred to UN authority.

The policy originally set forth in Freedom From War was repackaged in the 1962 State Department document Blueprint for the Peace Race. The latter has defined U.S. military policy and defense doctrine ever since. Another document released in 1962, A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, stipulated that the future UN have "powers sufficient to monitor and enforce disarmament" consisting of multinational forces "balanced appropriately among ground, sea, air, and space elements, consisting of 500,000 men, recruited individually, wearing a UN uniform." Additionally, the foreword to this remarkably subversive document -- which was written under a contract with the State Department -- proposes that this UN force should possess power to conduct "unrestricted international inspection of all states against violation of the disarmament agreement." On page three, the document bares all:

Finally, to avoid endless euphemism and evasive verbiage, the contemplated regime will be occasionally referred to unblushingly as a "world government."

Many of the steps outlined in these documents have since been implemented. President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in September 1996, and, although the Senate has not ratified the treaty, the United States has adhered to its requirements ever since. Even among its conventional forces, the United States military in recent years has seen drastic reductions in men, materiel, and readiness. Meanwhile, United Nations military forces have gained steadily in size and credibility. And perhaps most ominous of all, American leaders have increasingly found excuses to place American military personnel under foreign command.

Changing Command

The first opportunity to set a precedent for UN involvement in a military conflict came with the Korean War. President Harry Truman used pretended authority under the United Nations Charter to unconstitutionally embroil United States forces in the conflict there without a congressional declaration of war. The Korean War was not a war, Truman argued, but was instead a "police action" under the auspices of the UN.

During the Korean War, the UN operated mostly behind the scenes. Although UN flags were flown, the world body wasn't yet in a position to create its own military arm. But because of the interference of Communists and their sympathizers in the UN, American General Douglas MacArthur was hamstrung in his efforts to secure total victory. In the end, MacArthur was sacked, the war was drawn out, and a permanent international military force polices the volatile Korean DMZ to this day.

The precedent Truman set has been followed unswervingly by U.S. policymakers ever since. American presidents, thanks to the UN's "peaceful" influence, now make war without congressional declarations of war -- the prerogative of a monarch, not the president of a constitutionally limited republic. The result has been one foreign imbroglio after another, with wars fought not to satisfy obvious strategic objectives -- like victory -- but nebulous UN-sponsored internationalist goals like "containment."

In a reprise of Korean War-era manipulation, U.S. forces became involved in another, bloodier "police action" only 10 years later. The apparent bungling and incompetence that characterized the inane "rules of engagement" and "containment" policy in Vietnam were inspired by the same set of cynical internationalists who had given us the Korean fiasco. The men who fought in Vietnam served under the overall authority of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a regional subsidiary of the UN. On March 26, 1966, the State Department, responding to inquiries about President Lyndon Johnson's authority to send troops into Vietnam, stated in its Bulletin 8062:

The Southeast Asia Collective Defense treaty authorizes the President's actions. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was designed as a collective defense arrangement under Article 51 of the UN Charter.... The United States has reported to the Security Council on measures it has taken in countering Communist aggression in Vietnam.

The rules of engagement under which our troops fought in Vietnam cost thousands of lives, led to the forced retirement of high-ranking military officers who protested those rules, and ensured victory for the communists. As a result of that UN-led treachery, our nation's military became still more deeply entangled in the UN's web.

Desert Storm

By the time the United States was gearing up for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. the precedent for United Nations involvement in military operations was so generally acknowledged that President George Bush decided to take UN military empowerment to a new level. Instead of seeking Congressional authority for his war on Iraq, he went directly and publicly to the United Nations. The anti-Iraq coalition was indicative of a "new world order," Bush said in a televised speech to the nation. With such international military cooperation, he added, we were close to having "a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." Bush then sought "legal" authority for his war from the UN Security Council, not Congress. Early in 1991, just before the outbreak of hostilities, a servile U.S. Congress voted to authorize the president to "use U.S. Armed Forces pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 678."

As with Korea and Vietnam, the UN's bloody fingerprints were all over the Gulf War and its aftermath. After coalition forces inexplicably ceased offensive operations in Iraq without finishing the job, Saddam Hussein signed a cease-fire -- not a surrender -- that allowed him to stay in power. With the UN looking on, Saddam launched a bloody crackdown on Shiite insurgents in the South and Kurds in the North. A meaningless and ineffectual game of hide-and-seek ensued between UN weapons inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi government, which managed for the most part to stay ahead of the game. United States warplanes and ships are now a permanent presence in the region, dropping bombs and missiles almost weekly on the Iraqis even as a UN-mandated embargo starves Iraqi civilians. In Iraq, as in most other spots the United Nations has sullied, perpetual peace is maintained by perpetual war and perpetual misery.

An Entangling Alliance

Just prior to the start of the Korean War, our nation joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which now includes 18 other nations. As the official NATO Handbook states, the alliance was "created within the framework of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter." NATO is and always has been a subsidiary of the UN. The UN Charter, the NATO charter and NATO's own literature make this very clear.

American forces have been placed under NATO command ever since 1949. Their usefulness in the service of the world body has become obvious in recent years with U.S. forces being sent into NATO-directed combat and peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. For instance, in April 1994, U.S. fighter planes were ordered to attack positions in Bosnia. But the order was issued by a British commander (General Sir Michael Rose) and a UN diplomat from Japan (Yasushi Akashi). It had the enthusiastic approval of Boutros Boutros Ghali, the Egyptian bureaucrat serving at the time as secretary-general of the United Nations.

Although it's hard to imagine that any American commander would take orders from such a source, our uniformed military personnel were directed by American leaders, right up to the President of the United States, to obey the NATO/UN chain of command during U.S. operations in Bosnia. Years later, our troops are still there, still serving ultimately under foreign command.

American forces continue to serve in UN-led operations across the globe. From Somalia to Haiti to Kosovo to Macedonia, the formula has not changed: use a regional quarrel as a pretext to insert U.S. forces under the rhetorical cover of humanitarianism. Promise to limit the mission to a specific objective, and then expand the mission objectives once troops are on the ground. Above all, ensure that the conflict is not resolved, so that a permanent UN/NATO police presence is established. In this way, country by country, a worldwide permanent UN military occupation force is being assembled, paid for increasingly in the coin of U.S. blood and resources.

The looming War on Terrorism, however just the cause, presents a new panorama of opportunities for UN-sponsored military interventionism, as socialists like Jiang Zemin realize. Will the coming conflict enable the UN at last to establish a heavy, long-sought military presence in Palestine? Will Afghanistan soon be patrolled by blue helmets? How many new permanent wards of the international community will the hunt for bin Laden beget?

Mr. McManus is author of Changing Commands: The Betrayal of America's Military.