Conservatives want the UN out of the US:
A right-wing Republican group launched a television campaign calling for the United Nations to be kicked out of the United States, alleging the world body is a "safe harbor" for terrorism.
California-based Move America Forward wants the world body's New York headquarters shut down and its officials expelled from the country because it failed to support the US-led war on Iraq.
"The UN has become an apologist and defender of terrorist organizations and their agents," claims a 60-second commercial, which also cites the oil for food scandal involving alleged fraud in Iraqi oil sales.
The spot, which backs a "Get the UN out of the US" petition drive, claimed that "billions of dollars" intended for UN humanitarian aid was used to pay the families of "Palestinian terrorists" and to buy weapons for Iraq-based terrorists.
"It's time we sent a message to the UN: We are not going to tolerate your conduct anymore. We tell other countries not to harbour organisations that support terrorists, why then do we harbor the UN here in America?," the commercial added.
The advertisement, which Move America Forward officials said would begin airing nationally next week, calls for Americans to sign a petition calling for the United Nations to be booted off US soil.
Not surprisingly,
The Freepers love it and are actively supporting this campaign.
Much, much more after the jump.
Move America Forward claims to be run by a non-profit organization:
Move America Forward's claims to be a "non-partisan, not-for-profit organization" committed to backing the US war on terror and supporting its troops.
Here is the reality on
Move America Forward:
Move America Forward is a front organization for the political public relations firm
Russo Marsh and Rogers, which has strong ties to the Republican Party.
Move America Forward's internet address was initially registered to Russo Marsh and Rogers, but after the registration information was exposed and discussed on the internet, the details were immediately changed to exclude any mention of RM+R [1]. Move America Forward operates out of the same offices as RM+R and calls to the two organizations are answered by the same telephonist [2].
In the 2001/02 electoral cycle, Russo Marsh and Rogers received $2,475,223 in payments from Republican politicians, and no payments at all from Democrat politicans [3]. Move America Forward was launched in June 2004.
It baffles me how an organization like this is able to maintain not for profit status. This is clearly a partisan Republican outfit working to further neo-conservative goals.
Of course, there is nothing new about conservatives attempting to weaken international institutions. Many claim that one of the central goals of the crypto-fascists at the Project for a New American century is to weaken international institutions and, in so doing, force other nations into greater reliance on the United States. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this effort is how what the US seeks to do to other nations is very much in line with Phillip Agre's argument about the domestic conservative economic project. Agre claimed that conservatives rail against all forms of government without distinguishing between tyrannical and democratic forms, in an attempt to force people into greater reliance on an aristocratic, corporate oligarchy:
The idiocy of the neo-conservative plot to weaken international institutions as a means to increase relative American power is obvious to anyone willing to look at reality, rather than rely entirely on ideology and theory (note: this does not include conservatives). As Cliff DuRand writes, if we actively work to dismantle the international institutions within which we participate, our national influence over other countries will actually significantly decline:
One of the consequences of this however, is that US unilateral interventionism is weakening the very transnational governance institutions it had so carefully constructed over the last half century and on which its hegemony rested. In no small degree, US power has rested on the consent of other states that saw its leadership as exercised in a common interest. Now it is as if, seduced by the illusion that that power is its own, the US feels free to pursue its particular interests in an unbridled way. In so doing it is weakening both its own power and that of the emerging institutions of the global system. As Leo Panitch has pointed out, "an American imperialism that is so blatantly imperialistic risks the very appearance of not being imperialist -that appearance which historically made it plausible and attractive." [Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "Global Capitalism and American Empire," The New Imperial Challenge, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds., Merlin Press, 2003, p. 31.]
If we weaken the UN and kick it out of the US, then we will successfully reduce our own ability to control the UN and the influence that brings with it. With a weakened UN and NATO, other countries will not become more reliant on the US. Instead, they will become more reliant on the EU, Russia (
as is happening already in many former Soviet Republics) or a rising China. Weakening international institutions, the most powerful of which we helped to create and over which we maintain tremendous influence, would do nothing but relatively weaken our own international power.
Then again, maybe weakening international institutions in order to make other nations more reliant on the US is not the plan at all. Maybe it is not so much an effort to transform the new world order as it is an attempt to internally transform America. By severely decreasing our ability to coordinate, negotiate and rely upon international institutions such as NATO and the UN on military matters, while simultaneously developing a permanent set of threats, such as "the war on terror," and "rogue states" which demand constant military readiness, perhaps the neo-conservative plan is actually to militarize American society itself. If we come to believe that are in perpetual need of overwhelming military strength, but cannot rely on anyone else for any help in providing that military strength, and that we have enemies opposing this plan within our own borders, we can justify even greater expansions of the military industrial complex and creeping fascism at home. Jean-Philippe Deranty claims that this is precisely the neo-conservative project:
It is impossible to understand the war waged by the USA against Iraq outside the larger framework of the neo-conservative project that was formulated and came to prominence with Ronald Reagan 's electoral victory in 1980. The men around George Bush Junior who today organise the implementation of this project have been working on it for more than 20 years. Most of them were already active in the Reagan administration, some like Donald Rumsfeld, were employed in the Ford administration even before 1976. This project--which is authoritarian in essence--involves a double strategy: to impose conservative values on American society through military mobilization, and to entrench American supremacy abroad through the use of unmasked and unbridled force. The fact that the arms industry profi ts hugely from neo-conservative policies should not hide the more important fact that they are driven by deep ideological convictions. Those beliefs are a mix of ultra-nationalism, extreme social conservatism, fascination for violence, religious fundamentalism and an absolute faith in the virtues of deregulated capitalism. In this ideological construct, war represents far more than just a strategic instrument. It is a model of ethics, an economic strategy, a religious calling,2 an aesthetic value. War is the metaphysical foundation of the neoconservative project, whose particular colours taint all aspects of their rhetoric and practice.
You can also see it in the work of Ann Coulter,
according to Conceptual Guerilla:
The invasion of Iraq -- which is not related to any "war on terror", but is the first salvo in a new American international order -- has been sold as "protecting" Americans from the bogey man of an attack on the US using weapons of mass destruction. But its real purpose is to unite ordinary, politically unsophisticated Americans against what Ann Coulter recently called the "enemy within" -- progressives -- and at the same time to weaken the UN and other international institutions.
You can also see it in the military strategy of Paul Wolfowitz in the immediate wake of the end of the Cold War,
via The Nation:
When alluding to this shift, Pentagon officials speak of replacing the "threat-based strategy" that long governed US military planning with what they describe as a "capabilities-based approach." This means that the Defense Department will no longer organize its forces to counter specific military threats posed by clearly identifiable enemies, but instead will acquire a capacity to defeat any conceivable type of attack mounted by any imaginable adversary at any point in time--from now to the far-distant future. Put differently, this is a mandate for the pursuit of
permanent military supremacy.
The pursuit of permanent supremacy is not a new endeavor. Ever since the end of the cold war, policy-makers have sought to convert America's sole- superpower status into an immutable fact of life. In the most explicit expression of this outlook, the Pentagon's draft "Defense Planning Guidance" for fiscal years 1994-99, drawn up in February 1992, called for a concerted US effort to preserve its sole-superpower status into the foreseeable future. "Our first objective," the highly classified document stated, "is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union."
This statement, attributed in part to Paul Wolfowitz (then the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and now the Deputy Secretary of Defense), provoked a worldwide outcry when excerpts were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The campaign against the United Nations that I used to open this piece is not an example of me cherry-picking particularly distasteful conservative messages. Turning the American people against the rest of the world in order to justify an increasingly radical right-wing government is at the very core of the conservative project. There is nothing unusual about this new advertising campaign against the United Nations. That is simply what conservatives do, as it is part of their plan to continue their plan to transform American society.
