For many years, U.S. leaders have been transferring our nation’s independence to the United Nations. Their goal, and certainly the goal of the UN’s founders and current leaders, is a world government dominating the planet. If the process continues, nations will continue to exist but only on paper. All power will have been ceded to the “House that Hiss built” (Alger Hiss being the traitorous American correctly cited as the most important founder of the world body).
When President Obama decided to unleash American war planes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria (and create a new war for our country), he didn’t ask Congress for a formal declaration of war as called for by the U.S. Constitution. He completely bypassed Congress and pointed to the October 16, 2002 congressional authorization for war against Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Neither the fact that the Hussein government no longer exists nor the further fact that ISIS and al-Qaeda are not the same seems to matter.
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Looking back to 2002 and the run-up to the second war against Iraq, we see that one month prior to getting Congress to approve the action, President George W. Bush spoke at UN headquarters and formally requested Security Council authorization for the conflict he was planning.
One day after the 2003 war against Iraq began, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte informed the president of the UN Security Council via formal letter that the “actions being taken are authorized under existing Security Council Resolutions, including its resolutions 678 (1990) and 687 (1991).” Those resolutions were already more than two decades old.
Summing up: The war against ISIS, newly named “Operation Inherent Resolve” by the U.S. Defense Department, is actually authorized by United Nations Security Council resolutions issued 23 and 24 years ago. Those resolutions targeted Hussein’s Iraq, which no longer exists, and the same can be said for Saddam Hussein himself. Evidently, the United States can go to war against anyone by referring to older UN resolutions.
There’s an important principle that all Americans should consider. It is that one seeks authorization from a superior, not an inferior. The superior in this instance is the United Nations; the inferior is the United States.
This outrageous transfer of U.S. independence to the UN didn’t begin yesterday. It started when President Harry Truman responded to a UN Security Council resolution in June 1950 and sent U.S. forces to Korea. Knowing that he lacked the required declaration of war, he termed the use of U.S. forces a “police action.” Only a few members of Congress complained that the Constitution was being ignored and our nation’s war power was being transferred to the UN.
Subsequent wars in which U.S. forces have fought and died have always included UN authorization: the Vietnam War by the UN subsidiary SEATO, the 1991 Iraq War by the UN, the 2003 Iraq War by the UN, and the Afghanistan War that’s now directed by the UN subsidiary NATO. There have been other lesser-remembered conflicts such as those in Bosnia and Libya, each given the go-ahead by the UN’s NATO.
All of this amounts to incremental transfer of the power to make war, a fundamental mark of independence, to the world body. Like a silent but menacing thief in the night, UN power continues to grow. The only sensible solution to this enormously dangerous situation is for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. The sooner, the better. Let Congress know.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
