Another UN Insult

January 3,  2005

Let me take this opportunity to wish readers of this weekly column a very happy New Year.  I appreciate your willingness to work for liberty by staying informed about the actions of your government, and I hope you will redouble your efforts this year to spread the message of freedom.  Remember to visit my congressional website- www.house.gov/paul - throughout 2005 to find new weekly messages and speeches, which you are free to distribute to your family and friends.

You may have heard one United Nations official comment that America is being stingy with its offer of millions of dollars in aid for tsunami victims.  His attitude toward your money is typical of globalist bureaucrats, who ultimately view the UN as a means for transferring wealth from America to other nations.  Americans are very generous people, and undoubtedly will donate tens or even hundreds of millions to private organizations to help the victims of this terribly tragedy in Asia.  We hardly need the UN to chide us about our supposed lack of generosity. 

The oil-for-food scandal brewing in the United Nations also has provoked long-overdue denunciations of the organization from several pundits and politicians on the right.  Of course most of you didn’t need a scandal to convince you that the UN is anti-American, or that it egregiously wastes our tax dollars.  I’m glad more Republicans are finally catching on to what many Constitutionalists, libertarians, Birchers, Goldwaterites, and religious conservatives have been saying for decades: we should get out of the UN, and get the UN out of America.  I certainly agree with these newly minted critics, having advocated getting out for twenty-five years.  This growing anti-UN sentiment provides an opportunity to make a larger point, namely that participation in the organization is fundamentally incompatible with American sovereignty and the Constitution. 

Obviously, many of those now calling for the U.S. to withdraw from the UN resent its refusal to sanction our war in Iraq.  Few Americans realize, however, that the resolution passed by Congress cited various UN resolutions more than twenty times as justification for invading Iraq-- in contrast to the media images of President Bush “going it alone” and disregarding the UN.  So despite the anti-UN bluster from the right, a Republican president’s stated reason for invading Iraq was that it failed to obey UN resolutions!

This approach gives us the worst of all worlds.  When we play along and cite UN resolutions as justification for our actions, we grant credibility to the ideas of international law and global government-- signaling our willingness to surrender precious sovereignty in the bargain.  Yet we gain little in exchange.  Other nations still consider us only too willing to ignore the international rules when it suits our purposes, and we remain deeply mistrusted by much of the envious world.  America would be far better off simply rejecting global government as a concept, and openly embracing true sovereignty for every nation.