All right, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I went a little bit over into the break there with Karen Kotowski because she's got great things to say.
Wish I'd had more time, but on now to our next guest.
It's the heroic Will Grigg from the blog Pro Libertate, which you can find at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And he's also the author of the book Liberty in Eclipse.
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How's things?
Scott, thank you so much.
It's a pleasure and an honor to be with you, and it's a privilege to be following Karen.
She's one of my heroes.
Yeah, isn't she great?
She really knows a lot.
Wonderful.
Great writer, too.
She is.
All right, so let's talk about this piece, The War Machine on the East River.
Apparently, it's not for Congress to decide whether America launches an aggressive war or intervenes in a civil war.
I don't know if those things are different.
Maybe you can help clarify.
It's up to the United Nations Security Council, and I guess in this case, as long as the Russians and the Chinese don't veto it, then that's an American declaration of war.
Is that basically how it works?
It's treated as the equivalent of a declaration of war, and that really is the premise of the UN Participation Act, which was passed in December of 1945 in anticipation of having a standing military command council within the United Nations.
The details of that arrangement have never been worked out to anybody's satisfaction, but in broad outline, this was accepted by the Truman administration as the equivalent of a standing declaration of war.
By virtue of ratifying the idea that the President of the United States could enter into an agreement with the Security Council to provide troops for the use by the Security Council in settling international disputes or what they call peace enforcement actions, Congress had effectively alienated the power over declaring war to the President of the United States, working through such machinery as the Security Council or subsidiary organizations, the UN such as NATO.
Truman really was a bit of a shyster when it came to creating precedents that are apparently considered binding to this day.
He managed to use the UN Participation Act to justify the deployment of U.S. troops to Europe without congressional funding or authorization to carry out NATO functions, and then he used America's involvement in NATO to justify the deployment of troops to Korea in anticipation, or actually after the beginning of the Korean conflict, which has been our longest ongoing military conflict.
We don't have a final peace settlement, peace agreement in the Korean War.
It's been going on for six decades.
We have a ceasefire, but that's been our longest de facto war.
It was declared by the United Nations, and it's been managed by the United Nations ever since, and that really is sort of the controlling precedent for all these ventures and coercive murderous humanitarianism through this purported peace body headquartered there on the East River in New York City.
Well, something must be terribly reactionary and backwards about you, because everybody on Earth agrees that we need a place where all the people can get together and talk things out instead of having wars all the time, and you just want to have wars all the time, I guess.
It would be great to have that kind of arrangement.
Unfortunately, the UN doesn't meet that description.
The only really important part of the United Nations system that applies to questions of this sort of course is the Security Council, and if you have sufficient Machiavellian guile to put together a coalition of the sort that was assembled last weekend, you don't even really need the active involvement of some of the permanent members in the Security Council in order to put together your so-called Coalition of the Willing.
There was a piece by William Lynde in Salon.com yesterday that pointed out the fact that...
William Lynde or Michael Lynde?
Forgive me, I think it was Michael Lynde, my fault.
I was going to say, they published William Lynde in Salon.com?
That would be a revolution in journalistic affairs, as it were.
No, forgive me, I'm referring to Michael Lynde, and he pointed out that the BRIC nations, which are all represented in the Security Council right now in Germany, did not vote on behalf of war against Libya, and of course you're dealing here with something north of 40% of the human population, if they were represented in that body, which of course they're not.
The United Nations, I like to say, is an organization that lies about everything.
Everything about it is a lie, beginning with its name.
This is not the United Nations we're talking about.
We're talking about an assembly of delegates from regimes, every one of which, from my perspective, is a criminal organization.
And so when you have the five permanent members of the Security Council adjudicating disputes, it's like the Commission in New York City, the Mafia Commission, where you have the representatives of the five boroughs authorizing hits against each other, and you have to get the Commission to sign off on action of that sort.
In a way, that's in microcosm of what the United Nations Security Council represents here.
And this is not a peace organization.
It's not created for the peaceful settlement of disputes.
That's the sort of thing, in my opinion, that is best handled through bilateral diplomacy, because when you get in a room with people who start talking in very strong and strident terms about the deficiencies of another party, that tends to exacerbate conflicts rather than palliating them.
That's the sort of a thing that I think you should best avoid.
If you're trying to find ways of amicably resolving disputes, you do so quietly, perhaps dealing with a neutral third-party arbitrator.
Diplomacy of that sort existed long before the UN or the League of Nations.
And some of the most admirable things done in the history of American diplomacy, granted that's a very short list, occurred long before we were involved in multilateral organizations.
But the UN was always created for the express purpose of consolidating power and deploying it coercively against regimes or movements that are considered the enemies of the self-designated international community.
And so it is now and always has been a war machine.
Well, the international community at this point basically just means the United States and its satellites.
So at this point, is the UN just a fig leaf for the American empire, or is there more to it than that?
Well, at this point, that's a pretty apt description, and it has been really since the United States became the functional heir to the British Empire at the end of World War II.
Churchill and FDR, of course, are the ones who created the notion of the United Nations when they signed the Atlantic Charter and they started referring to the Allied side in World War II as the United Nations.
That term was insinuated into most of the war propaganda of the era.
And then the permanent organization, of course, inherited that name and tried to borrow some of the prestige of the United Nations during World War II.
And it was supposed to be a great power condominium in which the Anglo-American elite, aided by such worthies as Joseph Stalin, would be carving up the world and running it more or less as they saw fit.
And now, of course, we've reached a point where the American empire is going the way of all previous empires.
We're going to become one of a collection of Ozymandias-like statues to human folly.
And so I don't know what's going to happen with the mechanism of the United Nations organization.
The fact that the BRIC coalition apparently is at least somewhat at loggerheads with the Anglo-American and French element on this question, that's potentially very significant.
You might be seeing a fracture point develop here that could end up, heaven only knows, perhaps leading to some kind of a fission within the organization.
That's one possibility that might happen as this grand economic unraveling accelerates.
We might actually see some type of structural change in terms of how the United Nations operates or structural change in terms of the body itself.
But historically, the UN has always been the proverbial fig leaf for Anglo-American and American imperialist ambitions.
There's no getting around that fact right now.
Well, yeah, and it seems like this is part of how the Bush regime overplayed their hand.
Instead of going along and saying, yes, it's all for collective security.
I mean, they did say Saddam's in violation of UN resolutions and that kind of thing.
But they really could have made the Iraq war and, for that matter, the Afghanistan war exercises in UN world policing and nation building and that kind of thing, which probably would have helped them keep more people on board for it.
They could have cut deals with, say, the French and the Russians.
You guys get the Kurdish oil.
We get to steal the stuff in the south, that kind of thing.
But they didn't do it that way.
They just said, no, we don't need the UN Security Council.
We have the National Security Council.
We can do whatever we want.
Now it seems like Obama's recognizing that it's a lot easier to get these things done if he can get the French and the British to, I don't understand how, but establish legitimacy by agreeing?
I think that what's happened with Obama is that his situation is somewhat straightened by virtue of what he inherited from his predecessor.
I don't think that there's any measurable material difference between Obama and Bush in terms of outlook and priorities.
There may be slightly different tastes involved in terms of what element of corporatist socialism you favor.
And different constituencies, of course, are attached to those different figures.
But in terms of the material result, there's not that much difference.
But you're right about the fact that the Bush regime overplayed its hand.
Their policy in Afghanistan and Iraq is almost some kind of real-life equivalent of a Tolstoyian fable of unchecked greed and self-destructive ambition because if they had been just a little bit conscious of the necessity to underplay their opportunities and to placate some of the demands of some of their potential coalition partners, things would have turned out a lot better for them.
But that's not the nature of empire.
Empire is an omnivorous proposition, and it really doesn't recognize any natural restraints that are not imposed on it from without in terms of its appetite.
It always seemed really strange to me looking back on the Iraq war, well, even then.
My chant was, one, two, three, four, we don't want your UN war because I thought that's what it was about.
I thought that, of course, they'll have to pretend to be a bit conservative and anti-UN for this and that reason.
But ultimately, when Bush claimed that he was trying to strengthen the UN by enforcing its mandates, I thought that that actually was a big part of the agenda.
And then when it turned out not to be, I guess I kind of had to figure out what it was.
Well, and then I learned all about the neocons and the separate government that they created in order to get us into that war and all that kind of thing.
But I guess it seems like we're back on that path of basically the collective security thing, right?
Make every problem in the world everybody else's problem, and by doing so, bestow it somehow with this legitimacy that I guess you were denying with your analogy to the mob families in New York earlier.
The assumption is that if you kill enough people, your reputation as humanitarian will be secure, I guess.
Right, and if you get enough people to join in on the killing, too.
People will say about the first Gulf War, George Bush Sr. created a real coalition and got the French and the Syrians to help and all this stuff, as though when the French and the Russians agree with you about a war, then that's what makes it legit.
And I guess it does, right?
That's the U.N. law.
And I guess the technicalitarian might argue with you, Will, that hey, the Constitution says when Congress ratifies a treaty like the U.N. Charter, then it's the supreme law of the land.
Constitution notwithstanding, anything wrong with that argument?
There are a number of things wrong with that argument.
The first of which is the people who, of course, with the architects of the Constitution explicitly said that you cannot, by a treaty, nullify provisions of the Constitution.
That's one very obvious part of that argument that is flawed.
Another obvious part is that the Constitution, the small c Constitution used in that clause of the United States Constitution, refers to state constitutions, not the one that was under construction in Philadelphia.
The idea is that the constitutions of states would be, in some sense, subordinate to international agreements reached by the general government in Washington, D.C.
You couldn't alter the terms or the structure or the power allocation contained in the United States Constitution through treaty.
But by entering into treaties, the states that are parties of the federal union would be governed by them.
In that sense, the treaty power would be a function of the supremacy clause of the Constitution, but it wouldn't be used to nullify, for instance, Article I, Section 8 language dealing with the exclusive privilege of the Congress to declare war on behalf of the United States government.
Now, as somebody who is a rather newborn market anarchist, I have insurmountable difficulty accepting the proposition that 535 people in Washington, D.C. have the moral authority to commit anybody to pay for or participate in a war of any kind.
So I don't think that it's wholesome to say that Congress has the right to do this.
They do have the right, I suppose, acting on behalf of this entity that calls itself the United States government to commit that government to war.
But the useful aspect of that allocation of power in the Constitution is that you can hold your elected representative accountable in your congressional district if he decides that he's going to commit the government of the United States to a war.
If, on the other hand, you alienate that function to a group of people who are just part of a 15-member enclave in the Security Council of the United Nations, if you alienate that power to them, they're utterly beyond accountability.
And so you have a situation now where you have basically an immaculate procedure for taking the United States to war in the name of collective security.
And the moral assumption, as you pointed out, Scott, appears to be that if you democratize responsibility and diffuse the moral accountability and broaden its compass, that any atrocity can be made legitimate simply by inculpating as many people as possible in the name of collective security, which is a moral abomination from any perspective I look at it.
But then again, I'm not a positivist.
I'm not an internationalist.
I'm somebody who believes in individual liberties protected by law.
And that's not the vision that the United Nations was meant to advance.
It was always supposed to be about the collective security of regimes at the expense of those they purportedly govern.
And it's really the closest thing I've seen to the realization of this demented dream of having all of humanity ruled by somebody who could treat them as if they had one neck, that they could all be executed simultaneously, as Caligula spoke of during one of his frenzies.
Oh, but all Rome had but one neck.
And that more or less is the way that the United Nations operates in principle, the way that the mechanism is set up.
Whatever language is used to gussy up this apparatus, that's what's inside the package.
Well, no, it's not even a treaty anyway, is it?
You already said it was the UN Participation Act.
We got bare majorities in both houses, right?
Exactly.
And in the debate over the ratification of the UNPA, there were many explicit comments, some of which I quote here, to the effect that this represented a statutory transfer of power to the United Nations that was entirely illegitimate constitutionally.
But once the words are on paper and the signatures have all been placed on the appropriate lines, it's been sealed and delivered, supposedly this creates a legal platform for people like Truman and his successors to claim authority that the Constitution does not give them and that even the United Nations Charter doesn't explicitly recognize.
I mean, there are elements within the involution of the United Nations Charter which is written in a way deliberately intended to defy clear understanding.
Even if you take a look at the details of the UN Charter, as Michael Lynn recently did, pointing out how the UNPA really didn't do what its advocates and many of its critics said that it did.
The point is that in terms of the way that they acted, by acting they made precedents that are supposedly binding now on us and supposedly liberating the president seeking to entangle us in these wars.
They have the form in broad outline and they just dismiss the details saying it doesn't really matter.
We've now been given a type of legitimacy.
The consensus has been achieved.
It's been ratified by all the appropriate bodies.
Don't take a look at the fine print.
It doesn't really matter anyhow.
We're not going to pay attention to it.
The process has been done.
It is now as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
You just have to put up with it for as long as it lasts.
Right.
Yeah, it's the same thing with everything from the Federal Reserve Act to the Patriot Act too.
Exactly.
Once you get the thing passed, you can pretty much do whatever you want in the name of the thing.
Yeah, the big bailout in 2008, the October Revolution of 2008 where we suddenly are throwing trillions of dollars into the banking system.
The October Revolution.
I like that because it was a coup up there.
It really was.
And they didn't really take a look at the details of what was going on with this so-called bailout.
And Congress later on went back, revisited, and showed how in practice the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, Goldman Sachs, door, repeat myself twice, were doing things they weren't authorized to do by the statute.
But it didn't matter by that point because they'd been given permission to do what they were going to do and they'd created facts on the ground.
The same thing happened with the UNPA.
The same thing happened with Truman's tercanery in Korea.
The same thing happened in 1990 and 1991 with Bush I.
And Bush II, in a way, was playing an interesting double game.
It was obviously done by his adult handlers because he wasn't clever enough to do anything of the sort.
For the benefit of claiming the authority to do what he did in Iraq, he invoked the Security Council resolutions.
He had the entire right wing jabbering away about the imperative necessity of enforcing the will of the Security Council.
I remember Sean Hannity talking about what an outrage it would be if Security Council resolutions weren't worth the paper they were written on.
And how this was an objective worthy of the blood of Americans and Iraqis.
And then, of course, after the fact, you end up with all this great power nonsense being promoted by the neocons, the militarists in Washington, in a way that pretty much undermined, perhaps fatally, the power and prestige of Washington.
Well, now here's the biggest fait accompli of all, which is we're bombing Libya.
We're involved in Libya.
Now that thing, like the Patriot Act, is going to go wild from here.
I don't see how this is going to end well.
I think that it's interesting, as Jason just pointed out this morning, and at war.com, that the Congress adjourned, and within hours the Security Council committed the country to war.
Within a couple of days, we've got Tomahawk missiles being flung, and American pilots being rescued after their planes have crashed, and such like, in combat operations in Libya.
Congress not only wasn't involved in this decision, or wasn't notified, they weren't even in session when this happened.
And that really is an ominous permutation of what's happened, but it is not out of step with the precedents.
It's a logical extension of what's been done since that dreadful day in December of 1945 when both houses of Congress passed the UNPA.
Many of them knowing the consequences that would ensue.
Alright, well there you have it.
The great Will Gregg.
The book is Liberty in Eclipse.
The website is freedominourtime.blogspot.com for Pro Libertate.
The war machine on the East River is the latest one.
Thanks very much, Will.
Appreciate it.
Take care, Scott.
Thank you.
