Iraq war empowers the United Nations.

ITEM: In his January 20 State of the Union address, President Bush candidly described the Iraq War as a mission to bolster the United Nations: "Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein, and the people of Iraq are free."

ITEM: In a January 25 news analysis commenting on the recent disclosures of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, Associated Press special correspondent Charles J. Hanley wrote: "Kay ... concluded that years of earlier UN inspections had 'got rid of' weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 'The weapons do not exist,' he told National Public Radio. That finding, if accepted in the corridors of power in Washington, may help revive a unified, UN-led strategy on arms proliferation.... "

ITEM: In a January 30 essay, National Review Online editor Kathryn J. Lopez suggested that President Bush--denounced by foes and lauded by supporters as a champion of American "unilateralism"--has done such a superb job of rehabilitating the UN that he should be appointed to the organization's highest office: "After he's won reelection and after he's served his second term as leader of the free world, President George W. Bush could do a world of good as United Nations secretary general. Yes, seriously.... In speaking about Iraq before the general assembly in September 2002, President Bush asked, 'Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?' In the administration's work on human-rights issues, the president has made the U.N. a better body, more responsive to today's crises of human dignity, and more relevant globally."

ITEM: In an essay entitled "Partnership and Principle" in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs (the house journal of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations), Secretary of State Colin Powell sought to dispel the idea that the Bush administration is a collection of unilateralist, anti-UN cowboys. "Above all, the president's strategy is one of partnerships that strongly affirms the vital role of NATO and other U.S. alliances--including the UN," wrote Secretary Powell, who went on to elaborate how the administration has worked through the UN in its "war on terror," and the invasion of Iraq: "President Bush went before the UN on September 12, 2002, to make his case for the UN's enforcing its own resolutions (16 of them in total) ... Security Council Resolution 1441--which warned the Iraqi regime to comply with its own obligations under previous UN resolutions--passed unanimously in November 2002 ... we tried for a further resolution to unite the international community in the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began ... we went to the UN in May 2003 after Operation Iraqi Freedom to secure Resolution 1483, lifting sanctions against Iraq that had become obsolete ... we sought and secured Resolution 1500 in August, recognizing the Iraqi Governing Council."

ITEM: In a cover story seeking to defend the Bush administration's Iraq policy, the January 20-February 2 issue of the conservative journal Insight, reviewing the record of the past two years, concluded: "The evidence shows that Bush's reasons for going to war against Iraq were fully rooted, as he has said all along, in successive UN resolutions issued since ... 1990.... The president warned that the United States would lead a coalition to enforce UN resolutions." Once again, this was intended as a defense of the administration's policy.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: For months prior to the beginning of the Iraq invasion last March, THE NEW AMERICAN warned--repeatedly, explicitly, and with specific citations of key administration statements--that the war's true purpose was to empower the United Nations. These warnings came at a time when the conservative radio punditocracy and nearly the entire conservative press was insisting that the Bush administration was heroically defying the UN in order to defend our nation from the supposed threat of Saddam's huge, ready-to-deploy arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Our October 21, 2002 cover story, for example, described "Overthrowing Saddam" as "A ploy to empower the UN." That story asked a pointed question of conservatives who supported the UN-mandated war in Iraq: "Are we willing to send our nation's sons to kill and die on behalf of UN disarmament decrees, which would eventually apply to our own country as well?"

"The president and his subordinates have made their intent transparently clear," we warned again in our March 24, 2003 issue (which was published shortly before the invasion of Iraq began). "The impending war on ... Iraq is intended to carry out the UN Security Council's mandates, not to protect our nation or punish those responsible for the September 11th attack. The war would uphold the UN's supposed authority and vindicate its role as a de facto world government." And in our June 30, 2003 issue we anticipated that the protracted occupation of Iraq would induce a "steady and worsening hemorrhage of national power, wealth, and prestige.... Ultimately, those costs will prove too much for our nation to bear alone.... It's reasonable to imagine a not-too-distant time when American servicemen and their families, weary of the burden of empire, would eagerly embrace transferring that burden to the UN."

Now that the WMD rationale for the Iraq war has been exposed as fraudulent, some conservative media organs (such as National Review and Insight) are actually trying to redefine empowerment of the UN as a conservative objective!