Mission accomplished? President Bush's war on Iraq has opened the U.S. to new dangers, weakened our defenses, and provided a huge lift to the UN and advocates of world government.

When President Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, he was greeted with a huge banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." U.S. forces had quickly routed Saddam Hussein's army, and many Americans were under the impression that our troops soon would be coming home. But as we approach the June 30 deadline for turning control of Iraq over to the UN-chosen government in Baghdad, we can see no end in sight for U.S. involvement and no clear exit strategy for American forces. The cost to America in blood and treasure already has been enormous and is likely to escalate as we move into the new Iraqi political arrangement, where the fuzzy lines of authority are preset for confusion, contention and confrontation.

So what, precisely, is the U.S. mission in Iraq, and when will it be accomplished? The answers to those questions are far different from what most Americans think. Our "mission," we are led to believe by many statements emanating from the Bush administration, is to combat terrorists who threaten our existence. However, a close examination of the administration's statements and policies shows that there is a much larger mission involved--one that aims at a complete reordering of the American constitutional order and the present world order of sovereign nation-states. As we enter into this new phase of the Iraq War, it is imperative that we make a sober appraisal of the damage that already is being accomplished by this mission and do everything within our powers to avert or limit further harm. We offer the following brief assessment.

* Lowering the threshold for war. The genuine patriot realizes that any nation that hopes to survive and to be free must be ready and willing to defend itself. However, the decision to commit a nation to war--the most extreme act of the State, almost always entailing great destruction, suffering and loss of life--should only be made for a just cause. And even then, a nation should only go to war when all other options have been exhausted. Initiating aggression is wrong. In the case of our invasion of Afghanistan, the administration could reasonably argue that the al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9-11 attacks were using Afghanistan as their base of operations. We had been viciously attacked and had suffered grievous losses; we were justified in seeking retribution against those responsible.

The same argument cannot be reasonably applied to Iraq. The Bush administration offered no proof that Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9-11 attacks and has never directly charged him with being connected to it. However, prior to 9-11 the administration was inordinately fixated on Iraq as the center of an axis of evil in the world, and after 9-11 it repeatedly insinuated (without actually saying) that there was a direct tie between the Butcher of Baghdad and the terrorist attacks on America. The White House deception strategy has proven very effective; opinion polls have shown that most Americans believe that Saddam was involved in the attacks. The American people were beguiled into supporting the Iraq War, believing it to be a war on the terrorists who had hit us first.

In addition, the administration repeatedly warned that Iraq directly and imminently threatened the U.S. with huge stockpiles of dangerous Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). This dire warning was false, but, as opinion polls have shown, many Americans were led to believe that it was true.

In short, the Bush administration launched an offensive war against another nation not shown to have attacked us, and was able to beguile Americans into supporting this aggressive act on the basis of deception.

* Unleashing U.S. war powers. Under our Constitution, no single person--not even the president--may decide to unleash the dogs of war. The U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of our nation, grants the power to declare war only to Congress. The Founders believed that before the U.S. government could plunge the whole nation into the maelstrom of war, it must have the support of the nation, as reflected by the vote of the people's representatives--that is, both houses of Congress. And they provided no loophole whereby Congress could transfer the war declaration power to the president, "authorizing" him to decide whether and when to go to war. Yet this is exactly what the Congress did, five months prior to the Iraq War.

In attacking Iraq without a declaration of war, President Bush and most congressmen violated the supreme law of the land and their oaths to uphold the Constitution, and we, the American people, have allowed them to do it. The rule of law cannot long survive when the people meekly tolerate lawlessness by those who govern. We become culpable for the evil that is done in our name when we allow the law to be flouted by those sworn to defend it.

* Enhancing and empowering the United Nations. One of the most deceptive aspects concerning the Iraq War was the supposed strained relationship between the United States and the United Nations. Although polls show that most Americans think we went to war with Iraq to fight terrorism, the Bush administration repeatedly stated that we were going to war to enforce UN resolutions. In his speeches, President Bush won applause for frequently rebuking and criticizing the UN. But too few Americans realized that the president's addresses carried a double message. His rebukes were aimed at the UN for risking becoming "irrelevant" by failing to put teeth behind its resolutions. The White House speechwriters cleverly crafted a pro-UN propaganda campaign to strengthen multilateralism in a cloak of unilateralism. They harnessed patriotism and national anger over the 9-11 terror attacks to push an internationalist agenda.

In his September 12, 2002 speech to the UN General Assembly, President Bush declared that the "conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations." He continued: "Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance.... We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced." On November 8, 2002, Mr. Bush stated: "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the [UN]Security Council resolution or not? ... If Iraq fails to comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."

Over and over again, throughout 2002 and 2003, the president repeated this message, asserting that we must "not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society." Last year in THE NEW AMERICAN, we observed:

   Historically, the conservative critique
   of the UN has been that it should not
   do what it claims the power to do--namely,
   enforce the will of the "international
   community" regarding
   disarmament, environmental regulations,
   and so forth. Under Bush, there
   has been a dramatic revision in the
   conservative party line: Now the UN
   is being criticized for failing to carry
   out the tasks it has set for itself. The
   "problem," in other words, is that the
   UN has too little power, so the president
   is willing to lend it some of ours.

The predictable failure of U.S. "unilateral" action in Iraq has set the stage for the Bush administration's audacious proposal, the Global Peace Operations Initiative, to create a huge new UN army of "peacekeepers." (See story on page 10.) On the surface, the administration's recent, open embrace of the UN appears to be a dramatic shift in policy. In reality, the change is a matter of appearances, with the growing quagmire in Iraq making it easier for the administration to push for UN empowerment more openly and aggressively.

* Depleting U.S. military forces. When President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, 2003, 138 U.S. troops had been killed. But the death toll has continued to escalate. U.S. forces suffered 135 casualties in April 2004. By the end of May the death toll for U.S. forces in Iraq had passed the 800 mark. Thousands of American troops have been seriously wounded or injured. Many units have been stretched to the breaking point. In his May 25, 2004 syndicated column, Colonel David Hackworth noted that in Iraq and Afghanistan "the Army is trying to do the work of 14 divisions with 10 under-strength, active-duty divisions." To deal with the severe shortage, the colonel reported, the Army is extending the duty tours of 44,000 soldiers under "stop-loss" orders that arbitrarily keep a soldier in service beyond his enlistment date. This is driving many of the most valuable professionals out of the services. A Special Forces (SF) senior noncommissioned officer (NCO) told Col. Hackworth:

   There's a tidal wave of folks getting
   out.... The number of senior SF NCOs
   leaving is amazing.... I predict that the
   exodus will devastate the senior NCO
   corps at a time when experience and
   stability are most needed.

The Iraq War has taken a huge bite out of our military budget and eaten up a considerable share of our military assets and resources, leaving us ill-prepared to handle other threats in an increasingly hostile world.

* Bankrupting the U.S. economy When President Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsey suggested in 2002 that a war in Iraq could cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was asked to resign. The White House then trotted out Mitch Daniels, who was at that time director of the Office of Management and Budget. He estimated that the cost for the war would be more on the order of $50 billion to $60 billion. The price tag has already climbed to more than $150 billion, and on May 12 of this year Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate hearing that the Pentagon would need an additional $25 billion for Iraq operations beyond what he had requested the previous week. Mr. Lindsey's $200 billion figure, far from being outrageously high, could turn out to be a lowball total.

* Converging with our enemies. The administration has used the so-called war on terrorism (of which the Iraq War is the centerpiece) as an excuse to pump billions of dollars and already strained military resources into the former Soviet states of Central Asia: Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan--all still-closed regimes run by "former" Communists. We have established bases in these countries and have been training their military, even though these regimes have terrible human rights records and are likely to use our largesse against us as well as their own people--as did Saddam Hussein, who was the beneficiary of similar U.S. aid programs in the 1980s.

* Building the globalist empire. In addition to those countries mentioned above, new U.S. bases have been established in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe. Other U.S. bases throughout the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Asia and the Mediterranean have been expanded.

* Discrediting the U.S. throughout the world. Following the 9-11 attacks on America, we had the sympathy of much of the world on our side. We were the aggrieved victims and could count on global moral support for an appropriate retaliatory attack on our part against those responsible for these heinous acts. However, the calculated exploitation of 9-11 to attack Iraq, and the naked exposure of the administration's deception concerning claims of Iraq's supposed arsenal of WMDs, have devastated U.S. credibility worldwide. Few will trust any information or danger warnings issued by our government in the future. This damaged trust will have serious repercussions for our security and global goodwill for the future.

* Inflaming the Muslim world against the U.S. The facts on the ground (the expansion of U.S. military bases and deployment of U.S. military forces in the Arab-Muslim world), coupled with the imperialistic rhetoric of the U.S. foreign policy elite, have caused many people in the oil-producing world to believe that the U.S. war on Iraq is more about taking over Middle Eastern oil than fighting terrorism. The shocking revelations concerning the gross abuses by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison have fanned the flames on an already raging fire. The images of American servicewomen sexually humiliating naked Muslim male prisoners could hardly be worse in terms of reinforcing the belief among many of the world's one billion Muslims that America is a sinkhole of depravity that should be wiped off the face of the earth. The Abu Ghraib photos undoubtedly have served as an enormous recruitment boon not only for Osama bin Laden but for terrorist groups worldwide.

* Boosting the International Criminal Court (ICC), As with virtually every UN program that the Bush administration has criticized, its opposition to the ICC has been conditional, not absolute. The Abu Ghraib prison abuses have reignited the campaign for U.S. ratification of the ICC treaty. It is likely that the Bush administration could drop its objections to the treaty, to show a U.S. "good faith" atonement for U.S. offenses in Iraq. Even if President Bush does not move to have the U.S. join the ICC, pressure generated by Iraq War-related events will build for the next Republican or Democrat administration (John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, for instance, both ICC backers) to do so.

* Shredding the Constitution. In addition to seriously violating the U.S. Constitution by launching the invasion of Iraq without a congressional declaration of war, the administration has used the so-called war on terrorism to justify assaults on our basic rights and our system of constitutional checks and balances. The Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act are just two of the major pieces of legislation that have included serious attacks on the privacy and rights of U.S. citizens. These and other measures are, de facto, nationalizing our police and destroying states' rights--in the name of homeland security.

Without question, if many of these measures had been proposed by President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, they would have been denounced (and rightly so) by Republicans and conservatives as dangerous moves to establish a federal Gestapo; but President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are praised for enacting these police-state measures.

* Discrediting conservatism and boosting the Radical Left. By allowing the administration to co-opt conservative rhetoric to push policies and programs that harm the constitutional order and threaten liberty, many conservatives have aided the Bush administration in discrediting political conservatism. People concerned about the encroaching power of the State and the loss of freedom see no help coming from Republicans, or conservatives in general. Unfortunately, many will end up drifting leftward, where the American Civil Liberties Union and other radical-left advocates are putting on their usual pretense of standing for the Constitution and individual rights. In fact, the "failure" of the Bush administration's supposed "go it alone" foreign policy could result in Bush's replacement by Kerry, who would also pursue the internationalist agenda.

* Entrenching the one-world Establishment. Especially since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the top levels of both the Democrat and Republican Parties have come under the control of a global power elite working to create a "new world order"--global government under the UN. Although these Republican and Democrat administrations have differed in style and rhetoric, as well as on some substantive foreign and domestic policy issues, they have carried forward this "new world order" agenda with unbroken and uncanny consistency. This has been accomplished by a coterie of one-world Insiders who have dominated each administration, most notably distinguished by their membership in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The CFR's subversive influence over the past several decades is difficult to overstate. CFR members have been the architects of our most harmful and destructive policies. Three days after the 9-11 attacks, the CFR convened a meeting in Washington, D.C. at which former senator Gary Hart (an ultra-liberal internationalist, leading CFR member and former Democrat Party presidential candidate) made an important and revealing statement. Hart declared: "There is a chance for the President of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father--a phrase his father used I think only once, and it hasn't been used since--and that is a new world order." The CFR contingent in the current Bush administration--numbering in the hundreds--has been doing precisely that. It includes Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer, all key engineers of the Iraq fiasco that is propelling us further toward that CFR-envisioned "new world order" under an empowered UN. That is the real mission that they intend to accomplish.

Changing Course

It should be obvious that if we "stay the course" along these lines we cannot hope to survive much longer as a free republic. We must chart a new course that will steer our ship of state back into the moral and constitutional course from which it has been diverted. Regarding war powers, U.S. military forces must be used only to protect America, not to serve as storm troopers for the UN, no matter bow noble-sounding or compelling the pretext.

This course change can only be effected by cleaning out the internationalist subversives who have permeated our government institutions. Rotating through the CFR Republican-Democrat internationalist cabal at the White House will not accomplish that. It must begin by building an informed, constitutionalist core among the electorate so that strong constitutionalists can be elected to Congress--and once there use their constitutional powers to oppose and expose the conspiratorial elites who are destroying our freedom.