Sea treaty resurfaces.

ITEM: "Earlier this month," commented USA Today on August 14, "Russia audaciously planted its national flag, encased in titanium, on the seabed below the North Pole.... Russia is laying claim to the area under the Arctic.... The 'new world' beneath the Arctic, along with the rest of the sea and the seabed, are governed by the 1982 U.N. Law of the Sea Convention."

President Bush, editorialized the paper, "who has opposed other international accords, rightly supports this one. He is urging the Senate to ratify the treaty so that the United States would have a 'seat at the table' in the case of deciding this and other sea disputes. It's not a moment too soon." USA Today concluded: "Ratifying the treaty will help the United States assert its stake to Arctic riches and curb Russia's appetite for them."

CORRECTION: "Not a moment too soon"? In actuality, the specter of the Law of the Sea Treaty has haunted us for far too long. Worse than the star of a bad vampire movie, it refuses to die regardless of how many stakes are driven through its heart. Adopted in 1982 as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and more commonly called the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), it was negotiated during the previous decade as part of what was then being called the New International Economic Order--a grandiose plan for a socialist world order long promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations and other one-worlders.

The Reagan administration refused to sign the bureaucratic nightmare, though more than 150 other nations have done so. The treaty took effect in 1994 without the United States on board. The Clinton administration applied a bit of makeup to the treaty's language and signed it, but the Senate again wouldn't bite. In 2004, the Bush administration tried again to get the upper chamber to ratify it. Conservative groups resisted, and it was buried. Or so it seemed. Though unchanged, the treaty was revived this past summer by the administration, which sensed less resistance in the current Senate.

Proponents of the treaty must think we are all born suckers. Were the United States to ratify LOST, we would be buying into a bad deal that would compromise the sovereignty of our nation and effectively place more than two-thirds of the Earth's surface under the control of the anti-American UN. A United Nations outgrowth called the International Seabed Authority (ISA) would be given authorization over all the oceans of the world and everything in and under them, as well as the power to collect taxes, disguised as royalty fees, to be paid directly to the ISA by companies that wanted to mine in the oceans.

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During her testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 18, 2004, former United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick explained, in part, why the LOST deserved to be rejected. The treaty, she noted, "establishes a sweeping claim of jurisdiction over the seabed and all its mineral wealth. It creates an International Seabed Authority in which it vests control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface. Under the LOS Treaty, the power of the Seabed Authority would be vested in an Assembly made up of all participating states and an Executive Council of 36 members elected by the Assembly to represent investors, consumers, exporters of affected minerals, developing states, and all the geographical areas of the world. The formula for representation guaranteed that the industrialized 'producer' countries would be a permanent minority. And they would have a majority of obligations. Most importantly, votes of the Assembly would be on the basis of one vote/one country, with a two-thirds majority binding on all parties."

Under the one nation/one vote principle, the combination of Namibia and South Africa, to cite one example, would have twice the number of seats as the United States. That would also be the case with Sudan and China. Or Myanmar and Guyana. American interests would become subject to the anti-U.S, bloc voting and corruption so familiar in the UN. The governments mentioned above, by the way, are all recent members of the executive body of the Jamaica-based ISA, the 36-nation council.

The administration, as part of its sales pitch, has persuaded various military officials to promote treaty ratification. But, as pointed out by commentator Phyllis Schlafly, "conservatives are smart enough to know that it's impossible for the Navy to oppose the commander-in-chief's position. The notion that our great U.S. Navy needs approval from foreign bureaucrats in Jamaica to enjoy passage through international straits, or for permission to do what our Navy already does (such as move our ships to the waters near Iran), is offensive and insulting to U.S. sovereignty."

This is not conjecture. Such bodies to grant or deny approval to use international waterways are already in place, including the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg.

The State Department, meanwhile, is trying to convince doubters that ratifying this treaty will somehow stymie Russian efforts to claim the North Pole. As it happens, an affiliated UN commission has already ruled against Moscow's claims, apparently without making any impression on Russia. But should the United States bind itself to UN rulings, which obviously are not always in our favor?

In truth, we can best protect our interest without the treaty. As pointed out by Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy and a former Defense Department official:

   Interestingly, the last time the Russians
   attempted to make unwarranted
   claims to the Arctic floor was back
   in 2001. On that occasion, the Bush
   administration successfully demonstrated
   what is true in the case of the
   Lomonosov Ridge [an Arctic underwater
   mountain range], as well: There
   is no scientific basis for Moscow's
   assertions that these seabeds are connected
   to Russia's continental shelf
   and, therefore, part of its territory.
   The Bush team also demonstrated
   that the United States could accomplish
   such a result without being a
   party to LOST--and, therefore, subject
   to its binding dispute resolution
   mechanisms that are stacked against
   this country.

The connivance of the State Department with this monstrosity leads one to understand why vampires should get along quite well with State Department lawyers: professional courtesy. In any event, for the sake of national sovereignty, natural resources, economic commonsense and military necessity, LOST deserves to be lost at sea and never found again.