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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780895260888 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2004 |
| Pages: | 196 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
INSIDE THE ASYLUM
Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You ThinkBy JED BABBIN
REGNERY PUBLISHING, INC.
Copyright © 2004 Jed BabbinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-89526-088-3
Chapter One
WELCOME TO THE ASYLUM"The UN is now a central problem for the world, because we take too much notice of it." -British historian Paul Johnson
IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF JOHN KERRY AND HILLARY CLINTON HAS its way, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and French president Jacques Chirac will hold a veto over American foreign policy. The Kerry-Clinton Democrats believe that America's national security and foreign policy should be made subservient to the United Nations and Old Europe in the name of "multilateralism." Gone will be George W. Bush's decisive "unilateral" defense of American interests. Instead, we will have multilateral inaction, terrorism treated as a matter for the police and the courts, and our own foreign policy dictated by the UN and the elites of Old Europe. We've been down this road before, during the presidency of Bill Clinton-and we learned that it leads to failure. It leads us farther from security for our nation, and farther from victory against terrorists and the nations that support them.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing, in the same way, over and over again and expecting different results. In the asylum that the United Nations has become, thisform of insanity is not suffered by all the inmates. The most severe cases are the democratic countries that always want to give the UN another chance to be what it was supposed to be: a forum for nations of good will to meet and settle disputes peacefully without resort to war. Instead, today's UN is a diplomatic version of the Mad Hatter's tea party, where good is evil, right is wrong, and every dictator and despot is given the same rights and privileges as the leaders of free nations. For the United States, the UN is a quagmire of diplomacy in which wars can be lost but not won, alliances can dissolve but not be formed, the birth of nuclear terrorism is being watched but not aborted, and no adult supervision is imposed on a Third World playground where anti-Americanism is the favorite game.
The UN General Assembly is a gaggle of has-beens and never-wases that believes raiding the U.S. Treasury is its right. The Security Council-supposed to be the strongest force for peace-is interested only in tying down the world's remaining superpower, the United States, and making any American action taken without UN permission illegitimate in the eyes of the world.
President Bush's policy of preempting terrorists-attacking them before they can attack America-depends on more than the superiority of American arms. It depends on surprise, hitting terrorists where they lurk before they have a chance to run. That means the UN is the enemy of preemption. Every time we engage in endless, pointless UN debates, we give up the crucial advantage of surprise. The terrorists know that, and so do our so-called "allies" in Europe.
America and its real allies have toppled two terrorist regimes in spite of the UN, not because of it. If American foreign policy were subordinated to the judgment of the Security Council, the Taliban would be negotiating from its stronghold in Kabul, Saddam would still be in power in Iraq, and the threat of al-Qaeda would be tolerated as the cost of doing business in the twenty-first century. The UN can't aid the fight against terror because its members-in thrall to the rogue nations among them-can't even agree what terrorism is. The UN has become a tool for outlaw nations, their European trading partners, and the tin-pot dictators of the world to constrain American action everywhere, especially in the global war against terrorism. By delaying justice and denying its approval to the forces of good in the fight against evil, the UN functions as a shield for the enemies of freedom.
As I'll show later on, the UN isn't content with its Lilliputian attempts to tie down the American Gulliver. It is also an errand boy for the despots of the world. The UN not only turns a blind eye to terrorism, but is actually quite comfortable with it, admitting terrorists to the community of nations, tolerating their development of nuclear weapons, and-in at least one of its largest agencies-putting members of terrorist organizations on its payroll.
Hezbollah-the terrorist organization that has more American blood on its hands than any other except al-Qaeda-is entrenched adjacent to UN "peacekeeper" bases on the Israeli-Lebanese border. On page 155, there is a picture taken from an Israeli Defense Force position called Post Tziporen. The picture shows something Israelis see every day, but the media and the world ignore: two flagpoles about fifteen feet apart; on one, the blue UN flag, and on the other, the yellow flag of Hezbollah, bearing an AK-47 assault rifle held in a clenched fist.
An Israeli soldier who served at that IDF post in 2003 described to me what he saw there, how the UN and Hezbollah men go about their daily routines side by side. The Hezbollah-identified by the uniforms and ski masks they wear-use the same telephones, drink the same water, and get along quite nicely with the UN "peace monitors." At Post Tziporen, UN tolerance of terrorism is visible to the naked eye. But this is only one small part of the problem. The UN's tolerance of-and even support for-terrorism is embedded in the minds of all, from the lowliest "peacekeepers" to the highest appointed officials. This acceptance is insidious and pervasive.
Tolerance of terrorism is only one of the UN's unstated noxious norms. Another is financial corruption. The UN's Oil-for-Food program was supposed to allow Saddam Hussein's Iraq to sell oil only for food and medicine to supply the needs of the Iraqi people. But the corruption of the UN allowed Saddam to skim billions of dollars to buy arms, to buy UN Security Council votes, and to bribe politicians and UN officials at the highest levels. Under the UN's supervision, even the small portion of money truly spent on medicine and food was wasted. Much of the food wasn't even, in the words of one program investigator, "fit for pigs."
The UN is not only financially corrupt, but is also morally and intellectually so. During the Iraq campaign, beginning in March 2003, there was, all too often, graphic proof of Iraqi abuse, torture, and murder of American prisoners of war. Did UN secretary-general Kofi Annan condemn Iraq for these atrocities? No. About a week into the war, he admonished both sides to treat prisoners of war humanely. Annan's perverse moral relativism is but a symptom of the disease infecting both the UN and Old Europe.
Our national security will be greatly reduced-and our foreign policy chained to false friends and true enemies-if the UN and Old Europe again annex American foreign policy through the tool of the Democratic Party. As former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick told me, "The issue is whether the UN should have any role in U.S. decisions on the use of force." She added, "There is no ground in the UN Charter or in precedent to support the position that the Security Council is the only source of legitimacy for the use of force.... The importance of American sovereignty over American action is of the utmost importance." According to Ambassador Kirkpatrick, "We must never agree that the U.S. needs the permission of the Security Council or any non-American entity to take action to protect our security. That is an irreducible responsibility and obligation of our government, which of course is responsible to the Congress and the American people as specified in our Constitution."
For the UN to be an arbiter of legitimacy, it would have to first be able to distinguish between right and wrong, between good and evil. But its charter and its membership preclude that. How can any group granting the worst despotisms in the world and the freest and greatest democracies the same standing and rights be a judge of right and wrong? The UN, by its charter, equates Syria with the United States, China with Britain, and the Sudan (where chattel slavery is still practiced) with Israel. What Kofi Annan and the UN demand is that the legitimacy of the decisions and actions of free nations be dependent upon the approval of the despotisms. It is a fraud on the world, and will continue as long as we tolerate it.
What the United States needs to do is reform its alliances to fit reality, rather than the past, and end its membership in the UN. The nations of the West are no longer united by the threat of Soviet expansionism, and the emasculated nations of Old Europe-the EUnuchs-have sunk to a level of decadence unseen since the 1930s. Europe's core values concerning morality, freedom, and defending the West have diverged from where we as Americans stand. Old Europe has returned to a policy of appeasement, refusing to see the threats being born around it, and choosing to abandon the military capacity to deal with them. Old Europe sees America only as an obstacle to its own economic growth, and as a danger to its elegant diplomacy of inaction. While Americans shed blood to fight terrorism, the shopkeepers of Old Europe make special trade deals with terrorist nations.
France, the self-appointed leader of Old Europe, challenges American action on every economic, diplomatic, and military front in order to support its false claim to global power. France is not a global power. It only plays one on television and in the UN. Those who follow France's leadership-Germany, Belgium, and the others who flock to the banner of the European Union-are allying themselves to thwart American decisions in the UN, in NATO, and in the diplomatic fight against such terrorist-sponsoring states as Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Given Old Europe's cowardice and greed, NATO's usefulness might be over. And so is the usefulness of the UN.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein-accomplished only because America finally lost patience with the UN-America's crisis of confidence in the UN has grown acute. The Security Council, having passed seventeen resolutions seeking Saddam's disarmament, was utterly incapable of doing what the UN Charter says it should: enforce its resolutions to keep the peace. If the UN cannot be relied upon to fulfill its own purpose, why should American taxpayers spend more than $7 billion every year to sustain it?
Even UN secretary-general Kofi Annan knows that something has to give. In September 2003, he told the Security Council, "Excellencies, we have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the UN was founded." This book will demonstrate that America, too, is at a crossroads. And the path we need to take leads us out of the UN.
Excerpted from INSIDE THE ASYLUM by JED BABBIN Copyright © 2004 by Jed Babbin. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| Chapter 1 | Welcome to the Asylum | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | The UN: Handmaiden of Terrorism | 7 |
| Chapter 3 | "Kofigate": The UN Oil-for-Food Program | 23 |
| Chapter 4 | Quagmire Diplomacy | 33 |
| Chapter 5 | Secretary-General Kofi Annan: A Symptom of the UN Disease | 39 |
| Chapter 6 | The UN Bureaucracy: Nice Work If You Can Get It | 49 |
| Chapter 7 | The UN's Fatal Flaws | 57 |
| Chapter 8 | Clinton's Classroom | 71 |
| Chapter 9 | UN Reform: A Fool's Errand | 79 |
| Chapter 10 | The Death of Old Europe | 93 |
| Chapter 11 | The EUnuchs and Their Union | 109 |
| Chapter 12 | NATO and the EUnuch Military | 119 |
| Chapter 13 | Forward Together, or Not | 139 |
| Acknowledgments | 145 | |
| Appendix | 147 | |
| Notes | 177 | |
| Index | 185 |