Time to declare our independence from the United Nations  

By Tom DeWeese  

The United Nations is a mess. It now finds itself buried under scandals. It has Oil for Food scandals, sex scandals, power-abuse scandals, smuggling scandals, theft scandals, and unpaid traffic tickets. Rob, rape, and pillage seem to be the UN's modus operandi.  

Yet why is anyone surprised? The UN considers itself above the law of mere nations. And it answers to no one. There is no vote on UN leaders (other than by the culprits themselves). There is no international referendum on its policies. The UN sets its own standards of conduct and it controls its own judge and jury. These, of course, are the very reasons why many have opposed U.S. membership in the UN. And it's why many have feared the UN gaining any sort of power to gain its own ability to tax, field an army, or create a court system. Possessing these three powers drastically changes the UN from a volunteer membership organization to a global governing body.   

Compliant nations simply give the UN a pretense of legitimacy.  The United States government plays to the folks at home by talking tough about the need for "UN reform." Yet not once has the Republican-led Administration or the Republican- controlled Congress taken any steps to withhold funds for UN programs. Instead, the U.S. continues to go along with nearly every policy scheme, international conference and peace-keeping mission, paying the majority of the funds, thus supplying huge amounts of tax-payer money to UN coffers so that business as usual goes on down at UN headquarters.  

There is one public entity to which the UN at least pretends to react. – The court of public opinion. There is a growing awareness, at least in the living rooms of common Americans, that something is very wrong with the UN. The UN's greatest fear is that those Americans might influence our leaders to withdraw from the world body. If that ever happens, then the UN is finished and it knows it.  

Articles are surfacing and pundits are pondering, questioning the future of the UN. To sidestep the obvious that the UN has utterly failed in its stated mission to promote world peace, or to even have a hint of influence in making anyone's life better voices are beginning to suggest the word "reform." Reform the UN; make it more "workable."  American leaders, looking for a way to get around the growing argument to dump the UN may latch on to such a reform movement. But they should be careful what they wish for because they may not get the kind of reform they are expecting.  

The UN is never without a contingency plan for its well-prepared agenda of global governance. A major thorn in the side of those who seek to drive the UN into a position of international power is the Security Council and the veto power of its permanent members. Many say the United States controls the UN with its veto power. Solution: take it away.  

One of the twelve points of the Charter for Global Democracy, which surfaced prior to the UN's Millennium Summit in 2000, was a plan to "reform" the UN by doing away with the Security Council and replacing it with an "Assembly of the People." The Assembly would be made up of "people from the world" in the form of non-elected, non-governmental organizations (NGO's). Take note, these are the same NGO's which write the background material for most of the UN treaties like Agenda 21, the Biodiversity Treaty, Rights of the Child, and even the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty. NGOs are special interest groups (almost all leftist) who are seeking to create the UN as a global government. They are the ones pushing for UN tax schemes, standing armies, and the International Criminal Court. While the average citizen focuses on the Security Council and its dramatic, even heroic image, NGOs have become the driving force in setting UN policy.  

To them it would be a dream come true for the UN to scrap the Security Council, which still pretends to be a place where nations simply air their differences. They would then be free to install the Assembly of the People through which their drive for UN power could accelerate unabated by pesky U.S. vetoes. 

The fact is the UN is not an instrument for guarding the peace. The UN is the source for international unrest and "reform" will not fix it. Most urgently, American leadership must not fall into the trap set by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to allow the UN to take the lead in  rebuilding Iraq . Worse, Blair is also attempting to bully the United States into embracing the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. Such a foolish move would be a disaster to the U.S. economy and would do nothing to cool the planet. 

For the past fifty years, as the UN lived off the perception that it provided a forum where nations could air their differences off the battlefield, more wars were fought than ever before in human history. Instead of removing the threat to peace, the UN has encouraged, even nurtured, regimes that waged violence on their neighbors, and indeed, oppressed and tortured their own people.

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