PrintSeptember 30, 2009
Disarmament for All (Except the UN)
In the midst of one of the greatest existential threats of our times, President Obama is pursuing severe reductions in US military strength. His recent statements at the United Nations have merely added fuel to the fire. When combined with his pledge to reduce US nuclear weapons stockpiles by 80 percent, a clear pattern emerges.
These actions would seem irrational, even by Obama's standards, if they weren't in keeping with a 50-year old strategy aimed at unilaterally disarming the United States in order that a "progressively strengthened" UN Peace Force might be established.
This idea has been steadily advanced during both Republican and Democrat administrations alike.
Our nation's 50-year obsession with disarmament began during the Kennedy Administration. Disarmament Adviser to President Kennedy John J. McCloy, who held the distinction of being Chairman of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and Chase-Manhattan Bank, authored Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World, also called State Department Document 7277.[1]
Among the document's many alarming proposals, one stands out:
"The disbanding of all national armed forces and the prohibition of their reestablishments in any form whatsoever other than those required for internal order and for contributions to a United Nations Peace Force...."
President Kennedy presented this document before the UN Assembly in 1961. For all who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and viewed Kennedy as the savior of the Western world, his words are sobering:
The program to be presented to this assembly for general and complete disarmament under effective international control...would achieve...a steady reduction in force, both nuclear and conventional, until it has abolished all armies and all weapons except those needed for internal order and a new United Nations Peace Force.
McCloy followed up by authoring Public Law 87-297, signed by President Kennedy, establishing the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency charged with "‘the identification, verification, inspection, limitation, control, reduction, or elimination, of armed forces and armaments of all kinds...under an effective system of international control.'" [Emphasis added.]
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency General Counsel A. Richard Richstein confirmed in a letter dated 11 May 1982 that "the United States has never formally withdrawn this proposal."[2] Even more chilling is the statement of Dr. William Nary, formerly the Chief Historian of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who said, "The program has not been withdrawn and some of its steps have been implemented." [Emphasis added.]
Incredibly, this abominable plan is still being implemented.
This plan has three phases. In Phase One, the "nuclear threat would be reduced," with nuclear states entering into multilateral arrangements to reduce fissile material, delivery vehicles, etc. Phase One envisions a cap on the armed forces of the two major powers at 2.1 million men each and systematic reductions in conventional armaments.
This phase is virtually complete. Both the former Soviet Union and the United States have dramatically reduced nuclear weapons stockpiles and both possess armed forces of roughly 2.1 million men. Conventional armaments have fallen dramatically. Since 1990, America has gone from 24 air combat wings to 13, and from 1,130 active fighter/attack aircraft to 900. The same is true of the Navy active air component, going from 600 to 400 aircraft, from 500 ships, to 280. And now, with Obama's cuts, the Navy will possesses only 9 aircraft carriers, down from 11 under President Bush.
Phase Two focuses on the establishment of a "permanent international peace force within the United Nations." Since the average American now has so little respect for the United Nations, it is unlikely that a storm of blue-helmeted robots will take charge overtly. But the US military has served as the UN's "peace force" many times in the last few decades. Even Operation Iraqi Freedom was fought under the pretext of enforcing UN resolutions and maintaining the credibility of the United Nations as a force for good.
Phase Three is particularly chilling, describing a cold future where nations have lost meaning and a vast tyranny enforces the will of an unaccountable world organization, envisioned in Freedom from War as the UN:
In Stage III progressive controlled disarmament...would proceed to a point where no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN Peace Force....
The only remaining task in Phase Three is to convert the residue of American military muscle to domestic uses, turning those that served in America's defense against the citizens they were meant to protect. How to get to this point is something of a problem for the patient internationalists pushing for American disarmament. A crisis that cries out for a military solution within the United States might help. The military brass has envisioned just such a crisis possibly breaking out: swine flu. To the keen observer, swine flu seems nothing more than a mild virus, having killed only 1,000 worldwide over the last two years, contrary to the common flu, which kills 36,000 every year.
But the facts don't matter, so long as a credible rationale for enhanced domestic military involvement can be found. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is so sure that swine flu will be the clincher in the case for the military's new raison d'être that he has gone before Congress to request the unheard of authority to post 400,000 active duty personnel in communities all over the United States.
These events begin to make sense once Freedom from War is taken into account.
President Obama is the last piece in a process that has taken 50 years so far. All that remains is the transformation of America's military from defender to enforcer, or as Freedom from War states, "those forces, non-nuclear armaments, and establishments required for the purpose of maintaining internal order...." President Obama's willingness to grovel to the UN should be a warning to all Americans. We need to be watchful, or our children could soon be pledging allegiance to a new flag.
[1] Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 495-516.
