THE DISARMAMENT OF AMERICA
By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.January 9, 2012NewsWithViews.com
Shortly after U.S. combat soldiers left Iraq, on December 22 the Associated Press reported 14 terrorist attacks in Baghdad killing 69 people, and an Al-Qaeda front group in Iraq claimed responsibility. Then on January 5, 2012, bombings targeting Shiite killed at least another 78 people, so there are growing concerns that Iraqi security forces are not up to the job. The result is that the nation could fall apart in another civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
On December 25 in Nigeria for the second Christmas in a row, Boko Haram (some of whose members have links to Al-Qaeda) launched terrorist attacks. This time, two churches and the UN headquarters there were attacked, killing 39 people. Boko Haram wants to impose Shariah law (Islamic religious law) across Nigeria, including in the Christian south. The death of Osama bin Laden in northwest Pakistan by the U.S. military some months ago clearly has not eradicated the terrorist threat posed by Al-Qaeda.
On the same day as the 14 attacks in Baghdad occurred, the U.S. military admitted partial blame for the NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers about a month earlier. The headline in The Guardian (November 27) read: "NATO braces for reprisals after deadly airstrike on Pakistan border post: Concerns the ISI intelligence agency could use its suspected influence over insurgent groups to launch reprisal attacks." The following day, The International News (Pakistan) reported that Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Gilani "warned the United States that there would be 'no more business as usual' with Washington after [this] NATO attack…. Meanwhile, a top advisor to Afghan President Harmid Karzai warned that Afghanistan and Pakistan could be on a path to conflict."
On top of this, on January 5, Karzai suddenly ordered the U.S. military to turn over full control of the Bagram Prison to Afghanistan within a month, and "an Afghan investigative commission accused the American military of abuse" at the prison, with the head of the commission saying "many of those militant suspects were taken based on intelligence that can't be used in Afghan courts." This is according to a January 8 Associated Press report, which also said Karzai declared that anyone in the prison held without evidence should freed. This would all be a serious blow to U.S. military efforts in the region.
The day before The Guardian article appeared, Newsmax reported that among the concerns of Frank Gaffney (President of the Center for Security Policy) are "the establishment of Sharia law in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria; the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the strengthening of Hamas in Gaza." Gaffney also said: "The world will become substantially more dangerous" if the evisceration of the U.S. military, the undermining of American allies… and the emboldening of its enemies continues under the Obama administration (Newsmax, November 26).
The recent debt ceiling deal will cut about $1 trillion from the defense budget, and according to retired Navy Rear Admiral Greg Slavonic in The Oklahoman (December 14), "Defense Secretary Leon Panetta predicts the Army would shrink to its lowest level since before World War II, the Navy to pre-World War I levels, and the Air Force to its smallest size ever." On January 5, 2012, the Pentagon announced that by 2015 the Army will be reduced from about 550,000 to 523,000 soldiers and the Marines from about 200,000 to 180,000. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged there "will be some risks" with this new strategy. A September 23, 2011 U.S. Congressional Armed Services Committee Republican Budget Impact Analysis stated, "We believe potential cuts to the military pose a serious threat that would break the back of our armed forces…." What should be understood is that this "evisceration" is part of a plan developed long ago.
Writing early in this nation's history, Alexis DeToqueville in Democracy in America (1840) warned of how despotism may appear in the world, and said: "...every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields in obedience, it is to himself he yields it…. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing their faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity."
With more and more American military bases closing, analysts are pointing to that as one of the objectives of Blueprint for the Peace Race (May 1962) by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. At the beginning of this document is a quote by President John F. Kennedy (September 25, 1961), stating his goal "…to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved." The document was the successor to the State Department's Freedom From War (Sept. 1961), and according to William Nary (historian of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) in January 1991, the Blueprint disarmament proposal had not been withdrawn. Perhaps relevant to this is the fact that in Renewing the United Nations: Programme for Reform (July 1997), published by the UN, one finds that "The United Nations Centre for Disarmament Affairs is being reconstituted as the Department for Disarmament and Arms Regulation. A high priority for this Department will be to develop strategies and policies to prevent the proliferation of all types of weapons and to control the flow of conventional weapons to areas of conflict." [emphasis added]
Perhaps a height of irony was reached on July 3, 1997 when The Washington Post printed the following notice: "Independence Day parade starts at Seventh Street and Constitution Ave, NW,…; American Roots concert at 4 p.m…. with the Staple Singers, Paquito d'Rivera and the United Nations Orchestra… on the grounds of the Washington Monument." [emphasis added]
Some say the plan to disarm America had its origin in World Peace Through World Law by Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn in 1958. The plan, however, began much earlier. In 1939, Clark wrote an initial draft for a global government titled A Federation of Free Peoples. The next year, through his close friend Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, he was responsible for the appointment of another friend, Henry Stimson, as Secretary of War. Frankfurter was a leftist who said, "The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes." And Stimson was a member of the Skull & Bones society and initiated George H.W. Bush into the same fraternity in the late 1940s (Bush, as U.S. president, would promote the New World Order). During World War II, Clark became a confidential consultant to Stimson and advised the selection of Robert Lovett (Skull & Bones member and CFR leader) and John J. McCloy (CFR chairman 1953-70) for War Department posts. It would be McCloy on June 23, 1961 who, as Special Advisor on Disarmament to President Kennedy, would send to the White House a draft of a bill to create the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
After World War II, various world federalist organizations met in February 1947 and founded the United World Federatalists (UWF, later called World Federalist Association, WFA). Clark would become the organization's Vice-President, and in his Plan for Peace (1950), he wrote in its Foreword: "The thesis of this volume is that disarmament is the crux of the problem of world order, and that only disarmament in all arms and by all nations will suffice… creation of a limited world government… including a plan for disarmament by stages and for a United Nations Peace Force." A 3-stage plan with an increasingly strong UN Peace Force would be exactly what Freedom From War and Blueprint for the Peace Race would call for over a decade later.
Another early Vice-President of the United World Federalists was Rhodes scholar Robert Lee Humber who, like Clark, in the late 1930s was devising a proposal for world federal government. His "Declaration of the Federation of the World" (first passed by the North Carolina State Legislature on March 13, 1941, and then by 19 more state legislatures) stated: "…the nations of the earth will be united in a commonwealth of free peoples, and individuals, wherever found, will be the sovereign units of the new world order…. Nationalism [has] reached its apogee in this generation and yielded its hegemony in the body politic to internationalism…. It is better for the world to be ruled by an international sovereignty of reason, social justice and peace than by diverse national sovereignties…. There is no alternative to the federation of all nations except endless war…. No nation should be excluded from membership in the Federation of the World that is willing to suppress its military, naval and air forces, retaining only a constabulatory sufficient to police its territory and to maintain order within its jurisdiction." The concept expressed in this last sentence would be incorporated almost exactly in Freedom From War and Blueprint for the Peace Race two decades later.