Our military's intervention in Kosovo is merely one more step on the road to a new world army in support of world government.
by William Norman Grigg
The New American - May 10, 1999 issue
"Now that we're in, we have to win." Senator John McCain (R-AZ), an aspiring presidential candidate and former Vietnam War POW, has been reciting this nicely symmetrical slogan — on television and in editorials published by Time and USA Today — since the NATO-led war in Kosovo began. To "win," McCain wrote in the April 12th issue of Time, we must be prepared to use all necessary means: "We must bring the full weight of American air power to bear on Serbian forces in Kosovo and Serbia proper by striking all important targets, including commercial enterprises, government buildings and power grids. Civilian casualties are inevitable...." American casualties on the ground are inevitable as well, concedes the senator, but this should not deter us from mobilizing "our infantry and armored divisions for possible ground war in Kosovo."
Toward what end would all of this blood be shed? Senator McCain provided no specific answers, beyond his insistence that it would be unthinkable to close the century "with the greatest defensive alliance in history in tatters after losing a war in Europe...." In other words, Americans should be prepared to kill Serb civilians, and to endure the loss of their loved ones, in order to preserve NATO. But the truth behind McCain's rationale is even more sinister. NATO, it must be recalled, is a military affiliate of the United Nations.
Alliance Genesis
The North Atlantic Treaty specifically describes itself as "a Treaty of alliance within the framework of the Charter of the United Nations" organized in the fashion prescribed by Article 51 of the UN Charter. In a March 1949 speech in Washington, DC, Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained that NATO "is designed to fit precisely into the framework of the United Nations" and described the alliance as "an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations." As shall be demonstrated, the NATO victory for which Americans are being ordered to fight and die would be a victory for the cause of an emerging UN-dominated world government. Under such a framework, the U.S. military would become an arm of the United Nations, not the U.S. government, and would be deployed accordingly.
When the UN Charter was being drafted, concerns over potential meddling by the world body in the internal affairs of nations were addressed by the inclusion of Article 2, Section 7 of the document, which specified that the UN cannot intervene "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state...." However, the UN's position, summarized in Clintonesque fashion, is that the extent of permissible interference depends on what the meaning of the word "essentially" is.
William G. Carr, a consultant with the U.S. delegation to the UN's founding conference in San Francisco, wrote in his 1946 book One World in the Making that "it seems clear that no nation which signs this [UN] Charter can justly maintain that any of its acts are its own business, or within its own jurisdiction, if the Security Council says that these acts are a threat to peace." UN staff member Moses Moskowitz elaborated on this point in an article published in the April 1949 issue of the American Bar Association Journal. "Once a matter has become, in one way or another, the subject of regulation by the United Nations … the subject ceases to be a matter being 'essentially within the domestic jurisdiction' of the member states," insisted Moskowitz. "As a matter of fact, such a position represents the official view of the United Nations, as well as of the member states that have voted in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."
World Government in Focus
The announced rationale for NATO's aggressive war on Yugoslavia was to deter human rights abuses committed within that nation against the ethnic Albanian residents of Kosovo. This is not the first time that the UN or its subsidiaries have mounted an aggressive military action in defiance of the Charter's "domestic jurisdiction" clause. The UN-mandated military missions in Somalia and Haiti were justified as actions carried out within the borders of "failed states." In Kosovo, the UN's NATO affiliate has sought refuge in the concept that a "humanitarian emergency" justifies a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, with a functioning — albeit corrupt and despicable — government.
One of the tacit objectives of the war in Kosovo is the creation of a UN-dominated framework of "world law," including an International Criminal Court (ICC) with the means to enforce its decrees. Addressing an August 11, 1997 ICC Preparatory Committee meeting, Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, the Canadian jurist who presides over the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, declared that the envisioned UN court must be able to employ "an element of compulsion" in order to "redress gross violations of human rights and international law." NATO's war on Yugoslavia provides a very potent precedent in the use of military "compulsion" on behalf of "international law."
Jane Holl, executive director of the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Violence, has stated that in the Kosovo War, NATO is "building toward a world legal order." Robin Wright of the Los Angeles Times elaborated on this point in a March 29th news analysis: "NATO intervention in the conflict between the Yugoslav government and the restive ethnic Albanians in its Kosovo province effectively declares that a nation's performance on human rights supersedes its right to sovereignty and non-interference. This precedent could have sweeping implications in virtually any form of disorder in any part of the world."
It logically follows that a world body must be entrusted to evaluate each nation's conformity to "international law" and "human rights" standards, and to decide if sovereignty must be "superseded" in order to uphold the values of the "international community." This point was made with stunning clarity in an op-ed column by Andrew Marr in the March 28th issue of the left-wing London Guardian-Observer. In the war with Yugoslavia, wrote Marr, "We are not fighting to prevent the quick slaughter or 'cleansing' of Albanian Kosovars.... [I]f we are fighting for a big thing, it is presumably to enforce subordination of nationalism … to international law and global humanitarian values." The motivation for the Kosovo War, wrote Marr, is an idea that "was present at the short-lived League of Nations. It spoke at the Nuremberg trials and, more confidently, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention of 1948, then at the Geneva Conventions of 1949.... And what is this idea? It is world government."
"This, after all, is why we are today attacking a sovereign nation, Yugoslavia, which has a legally elected government and which threatens none of its neighbors," continued Marr. NATO-ordered bombing attacks on Yugoslav targets, and the anticipated deployment of ground troops to subdue Serb opposition, are part of the epic "struggle against nationalism … in favor of supra-national authority." Were the UN equipped with a fully operational ICC, and the means to enforce that court's decrees, the world would have been spared the bloodshed of the Kosovo War, Marr insisted: "[I]t is the lack of such a strong, UN-backed court, reaching deep into sovereign states, which has left NATO with the primitive (and I fear, hugely self-destructive) tactic of lobbing missiles into Serbia."
But he urged globalists to take heart. Thanks to the efforts of the World Federalist movement, "we are more than half-way there." "Yes, there is a federalist plot, and yes, it is working," Marr gleefully observed. "On one hot night in Rome last July, this new, sovereignty-sapping court was agreed [to] after an intense negotiation among 160 countries and scores of non-government groups." Seventy-eight nations, including Russia, Britain, and France, have signed the ICC statute. Of the approval of the ICC statute and its subsequent acceptance by scores of governments, the Times of India wrote that "not since the establishment of the UN itself have so many countries voluntarily yielded ground on such a fundamental aspect of state sovereignty."
In All Points Illegal
The danger lurking behind the temptation to swap sovereignty for "human rights" protections, explained attorney Jeff Tuomalla, is that "this proposition is based upon a false antithesis." Tuomalla, a member of the Marine Corps Reserve and a former professor of international law at Regent University in Virginia, explained to THE NEW AMERICAN that "the best guarantee of human rights is a multiplicity of independent and sovereign nation-states in which the government is ruled by law. This is what our Founding Fathers understood when they referred in the Constitution to 'the law of nations.' They understood that while individual rights are universal, the greatest danger to those rights would be an unchecked central government, whether national or international in scope."
"Under the version of 'international law' we see at work in Kosovo," Tuomalla continued, "there are no protections against a despotic world government. The war itself is patently illegal under not only the U.S. Constitution, which remains the law of the land, but also under the UN Charter and NATO treaty. We obviously cannot entrust the protection of individual rights to international bodies that brazenly violate their own laws."
He also pointed out that by ratifying the UN Charter, the United States dangerously undermined our constitutional system, and that our involvement in an aggressive war against Yugoslavia is symptomatic of that subversion. "The Founders divided the war powers between Congress and the President very carefully," Tuomalla explained. "The President can act in a defensive capacity to deal with unexpected threats. But offensive war — and there are circumstances in which offensive war can legally be waged to redress a legitimate injury to our nation — requires a declaration of war by Congress."
When the U.S. ratified the UN Charter, according to Tuomalla, "we submitted to Article 2, Section 4 of that document, which essentially forbids us to prosecute an offensive war, even when such a war serves a legitimate national interest and has been formally declared by Congress. Article 51 does recognize the right of a nation to 'individual or collective self-defense if attacked,' but only as an interim measure until the Security Council 'has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.'"
In essence, Tuomalla maintained, the UN Charter is "an attempt to delegate to the UN the war powers assigned to Congress and the President by our Constitution." In the Kosovo War, he concluded, "We can see how badly our constitutional system has been compromised. We were ordered into an offensive war by a foreign official, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, on behalf of objectives that have no basis in either our national interest or in existing international law."
War Against Sovereignty
The war in Kosovo is a war against the principle of national sovereignty. Andrew Marr pointedly concluded his Guardian-Observer column by asking if "the U.S. will one day regret" fighting the war when its submerged purpose becomes widely understood. This very perceptive question, posed by a left-wing proponent of world government, should be asked of our representatives in Congress — and it should have been carefully addressed by Congress before that body acquiesced in the Clinton Administration's decision to involve our nation in the NATO-led war.
It is true that we must win the Kosovo War — which means that we have to defeat the threat to our sovereignty and national well-being that is behind this illegal war. The only way America can "win" in the Kosovo War is to pull out of it immediately — and then to withdraw our nation from both NATO and the United Nations.
by William Norman Grigg
The New American - May 10, 1999 issue
"Now that we're in, we have to win." Senator John McCain (R-AZ), an aspiring presidential candidate and former Vietnam War POW, has been reciting this nicely symmetrical slogan — on television and in editorials published by Time and USA Today — since the NATO-led war in Kosovo began. To "win," McCain wrote in the April 12th issue of Time, we must be prepared to use all necessary means: "We must bring the full weight of American air power to bear on Serbian forces in Kosovo and Serbia proper by striking all important targets, including commercial enterprises, government buildings and power grids. Civilian casualties are inevitable...." American casualties on the ground are inevitable as well, concedes the senator, but this should not deter us from mobilizing "our infantry and armored divisions for possible ground war in Kosovo."
Toward what end would all of this blood be shed? Senator McCain provided no specific answers, beyond his insistence that it would be unthinkable to close the century "with the greatest defensive alliance in history in tatters after losing a war in Europe...." In other words, Americans should be prepared to kill Serb civilians, and to endure the loss of their loved ones, in order to preserve NATO. But the truth behind McCain's rationale is even more sinister. NATO, it must be recalled, is a military affiliate of the United Nations.
Alliance Genesis
The North Atlantic Treaty specifically describes itself as "a Treaty of alliance within the framework of the Charter of the United Nations" organized in the fashion prescribed by Article 51 of the UN Charter. In a March 1949 speech in Washington, DC, Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained that NATO "is designed to fit precisely into the framework of the United Nations" and described the alliance as "an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations." As shall be demonstrated, the NATO victory for which Americans are being ordered to fight and die would be a victory for the cause of an emerging UN-dominated world government. Under such a framework, the U.S. military would become an arm of the United Nations, not the U.S. government, and would be deployed accordingly.
When the UN Charter was being drafted, concerns over potential meddling by the world body in the internal affairs of nations were addressed by the inclusion of Article 2, Section 7 of the document, which specified that the UN cannot intervene "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state...." However, the UN's position, summarized in Clintonesque fashion, is that the extent of permissible interference depends on what the meaning of the word "essentially" is.
William G. Carr, a consultant with the U.S. delegation to the UN's founding conference in San Francisco, wrote in his 1946 book One World in the Making that "it seems clear that no nation which signs this [UN] Charter can justly maintain that any of its acts are its own business, or within its own jurisdiction, if the Security Council says that these acts are a threat to peace." UN staff member Moses Moskowitz elaborated on this point in an article published in the April 1949 issue of the American Bar Association Journal. "Once a matter has become, in one way or another, the subject of regulation by the United Nations … the subject ceases to be a matter being 'essentially within the domestic jurisdiction' of the member states," insisted Moskowitz. "As a matter of fact, such a position represents the official view of the United Nations, as well as of the member states that have voted in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."
World Government in Focus
The announced rationale for NATO's aggressive war on Yugoslavia was to deter human rights abuses committed within that nation against the ethnic Albanian residents of Kosovo. This is not the first time that the UN or its subsidiaries have mounted an aggressive military action in defiance of the Charter's "domestic jurisdiction" clause. The UN-mandated military missions in Somalia and Haiti were justified as actions carried out within the borders of "failed states." In Kosovo, the UN's NATO affiliate has sought refuge in the concept that a "humanitarian emergency" justifies a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, with a functioning — albeit corrupt and despicable — government.
One of the tacit objectives of the war in Kosovo is the creation of a UN-dominated framework of "world law," including an International Criminal Court (ICC) with the means to enforce its decrees. Addressing an August 11, 1997 ICC Preparatory Committee meeting, Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, the Canadian jurist who presides over the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, declared that the envisioned UN court must be able to employ "an element of compulsion" in order to "redress gross violations of human rights and international law." NATO's war on Yugoslavia provides a very potent precedent in the use of military "compulsion" on behalf of "international law."
Jane Holl, executive director of the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Violence, has stated that in the Kosovo War, NATO is "building toward a world legal order." Robin Wright of the Los Angeles Times elaborated on this point in a March 29th news analysis: "NATO intervention in the conflict between the Yugoslav government and the restive ethnic Albanians in its Kosovo province effectively declares that a nation's performance on human rights supersedes its right to sovereignty and non-interference. This precedent could have sweeping implications in virtually any form of disorder in any part of the world."
It logically follows that a world body must be entrusted to evaluate each nation's conformity to "international law" and "human rights" standards, and to decide if sovereignty must be "superseded" in order to uphold the values of the "international community." This point was made with stunning clarity in an op-ed column by Andrew Marr in the March 28th issue of the left-wing London Guardian-Observer. In the war with Yugoslavia, wrote Marr, "We are not fighting to prevent the quick slaughter or 'cleansing' of Albanian Kosovars.... [I]f we are fighting for a big thing, it is presumably to enforce subordination of nationalism … to international law and global humanitarian values." The motivation for the Kosovo War, wrote Marr, is an idea that "was present at the short-lived League of Nations. It spoke at the Nuremberg trials and, more confidently, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention of 1948, then at the Geneva Conventions of 1949.... And what is this idea? It is world government."
"This, after all, is why we are today attacking a sovereign nation, Yugoslavia, which has a legally elected government and which threatens none of its neighbors," continued Marr. NATO-ordered bombing attacks on Yugoslav targets, and the anticipated deployment of ground troops to subdue Serb opposition, are part of the epic "struggle against nationalism … in favor of supra-national authority." Were the UN equipped with a fully operational ICC, and the means to enforce that court's decrees, the world would have been spared the bloodshed of the Kosovo War, Marr insisted: "[I]t is the lack of such a strong, UN-backed court, reaching deep into sovereign states, which has left NATO with the primitive (and I fear, hugely self-destructive) tactic of lobbing missiles into Serbia."
But he urged globalists to take heart. Thanks to the efforts of the World Federalist movement, "we are more than half-way there." "Yes, there is a federalist plot, and yes, it is working," Marr gleefully observed. "On one hot night in Rome last July, this new, sovereignty-sapping court was agreed [to] after an intense negotiation among 160 countries and scores of non-government groups." Seventy-eight nations, including Russia, Britain, and France, have signed the ICC statute. Of the approval of the ICC statute and its subsequent acceptance by scores of governments, the Times of India wrote that "not since the establishment of the UN itself have so many countries voluntarily yielded ground on such a fundamental aspect of state sovereignty."
In All Points Illegal
The danger lurking behind the temptation to swap sovereignty for "human rights" protections, explained attorney Jeff Tuomalla, is that "this proposition is based upon a false antithesis." Tuomalla, a member of the Marine Corps Reserve and a former professor of international law at Regent University in Virginia, explained to THE NEW AMERICAN that "the best guarantee of human rights is a multiplicity of independent and sovereign nation-states in which the government is ruled by law. This is what our Founding Fathers understood when they referred in the Constitution to 'the law of nations.' They understood that while individual rights are universal, the greatest danger to those rights would be an unchecked central government, whether national or international in scope."
"Under the version of 'international law' we see at work in Kosovo," Tuomalla continued, "there are no protections against a despotic world government. The war itself is patently illegal under not only the U.S. Constitution, which remains the law of the land, but also under the UN Charter and NATO treaty. We obviously cannot entrust the protection of individual rights to international bodies that brazenly violate their own laws."
He also pointed out that by ratifying the UN Charter, the United States dangerously undermined our constitutional system, and that our involvement in an aggressive war against Yugoslavia is symptomatic of that subversion. "The Founders divided the war powers between Congress and the President very carefully," Tuomalla explained. "The President can act in a defensive capacity to deal with unexpected threats. But offensive war — and there are circumstances in which offensive war can legally be waged to redress a legitimate injury to our nation — requires a declaration of war by Congress."
When the U.S. ratified the UN Charter, according to Tuomalla, "we submitted to Article 2, Section 4 of that document, which essentially forbids us to prosecute an offensive war, even when such a war serves a legitimate national interest and has been formally declared by Congress. Article 51 does recognize the right of a nation to 'individual or collective self-defense if attacked,' but only as an interim measure until the Security Council 'has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.'"
In essence, Tuomalla maintained, the UN Charter is "an attempt to delegate to the UN the war powers assigned to Congress and the President by our Constitution." In the Kosovo War, he concluded, "We can see how badly our constitutional system has been compromised. We were ordered into an offensive war by a foreign official, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, on behalf of objectives that have no basis in either our national interest or in existing international law."
War Against Sovereignty
The war in Kosovo is a war against the principle of national sovereignty. Andrew Marr pointedly concluded his Guardian-Observer column by asking if "the U.S. will one day regret" fighting the war when its submerged purpose becomes widely understood. This very perceptive question, posed by a left-wing proponent of world government, should be asked of our representatives in Congress — and it should have been carefully addressed by Congress before that body acquiesced in the Clinton Administration's decision to involve our nation in the NATO-led war.
It is true that we must win the Kosovo War — which means that we have to defeat the threat to our sovereignty and national well-being that is behind this illegal war. The only way America can "win" in the Kosovo War is to pull out of it immediately — and then to withdraw our nation from both NATO and the United Nations.