Shortly after his inauguration, President Clinton was asked by the Wall Street Journal, "What event before 1900 helped shape your vision of American society [and] your view of America's role in the world?" Mr. Clinton replied, "None, because most of the things the U.S. did before 1900 were totally inconsistent with the global role I'd like us to play...." Give Mr. Clinton credit for his candor then and his consistency now. The deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia as part of a NATO "implementation force" (IFOR) under the authority of the United Nations Security Council does indeed represent a critical redefinition of America's role in the world, one that is completely incompatible with the values and ideals of America's Founders.

Without constitutional authority, prior congressional approval, or a mandate from the American public, the Clinton Administration is using American troops to impose a new political order upon a collection of peoples who have displayed no desire to participate in a UN-mandated "multiethnic democracy." Of course, the Administration and the Establishment media have sought to disguise such unpalatable truths by coating them with a cloying glaze of Orwellian language.

In a moment of transparent dishonesty during his November 27th address, Mr. Clinton declared, "In the choice between peace and war, America must choose peace." This was too much for Washington Times columnist Richard Grenier, a former Naval officer and devout anti-Communist who can hardly be accused of "isolationist" sentiments. Grenier observed, "In our role of Bosnian 'peace enforcers' we bear some resemblance to the 'peace fighters' that Peking sent across the border in Korea to clobber us when Gen. MacArthur got too close to the Yalu." In Bosnia, "peace" will be achieved through a military occupation and the imposition of the unworkable constitution created by the Dayton peace agreement. But, as we will see, the implications of the Bosnian venture for America's independence and constitutional system are just as sinister.

From the moment the Bosnian peace accord was initialled in Dayton, supporters of the treaty have insisted that troops must be deployed to Bosnia lest "American credibility" suffer. It matters not to such individuals that President Clinton's promise to deploy American troops was constitutionally invalid. In the new world order, the role of national leaders is to tutor their subjects regarding their "international commitments" and compel acceptance of those commitments. This point was made explicitly in Our Global Neighborhood, the recently published report of the Commission on Global Governance:

[I]nternal political processes within nation-states themselves may ... become obstacles to adoption of international standards.... In the contemporary world, populist action has the potential to strike down the carefully crafted products of international deliberation, usually on the grounds of nationalism.... One of the challenges for governments in an era of democracy is to ensure that the public understands the nature of international law-making processes and supports them.

For supporters of the Clinton Administration's Bosnia policy, the President's commitment to deploy "peacekeeping" troops may be constitutionally untenable, but it carries the weight of law as an international commitment.

On December 3rd, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) stated on ABC's This Week with David Brinkley that phone calls to Capitol Hill were running "100-to-one" against the deployment of U.S. troops to Bosnia. Nevertheless, McCain insisted that he had "no choice" other than to support the deployment, because "the word of the United States has to mean something." Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS) expressed similar sentiments on the Senate floor: "We have the responsibility whenever the President of the United States, whoever that may be, gives his word to the international community.... It's not politically popular, but it's the right thing to do. And sometimes it takes a while for people to understand when you do the right thing."

The preponderance of public disapproval for the President's Bosnia policy was felt more keenly in the House. On December 7th, 201 members of Congress from both parties signed a one-sentence letter to President Clinton which stated simply: "We urge you not to send ground troops to Bosnia." However, one signature conspicuously absent from that letter was the familiar felt-tip scrawl of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), a self-described "internationalist." The Speaker's acquiescent stance toward the Administration offered a clear signal that the President's critics had little choice but to accept the deployment as a fait accompli. This message was understood by House National Security Committee Chairman Floyd Spence (R-SC), who opened a November 30th hearing by stating, "The proverbial train has left the station, and our troops are already on board."

In an attempt to prod recalcitrant legislators into supporting the Bosnia mission, the Clinton Administration made use of a familiar tactic: It sought to create a "bipartisan consensus" on behalf of the venture by enlisting the support of Establishment foreign policy "experts" -- nearly all of whom were associated with the ubiquitous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The Dayton peace agreement and the planned U.S. deployment received early endorsements from Henry Kissinger (CFR), Colin Powell (CFR), and Brent Scowcroft (CFR). By early December the Administration had also secured the public support of former Presidents George Bush (CFR), Gerald Ford (CFR), and Jimmy Carter (CFR).

During a December 5th Washington, DC press conference, seven foreign policy luminaries (Alexander Haig, Frank Carlucci, Ken Adleman, Max Kampelman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Dante Fascell, and Stephen Solarz), all of whom are CFR members, continued the fabrication of a "bipartisan consensus" by announcing the creation of the Committee for American Leadership in Bosnia. On December 6th, President Clinton welcomed a delegation from that committee to the Cabinet Room of the White House, where he thanked them for joining "across partisan lines to make a strong case for America's leadership in Bosnia...."

The Committee for American Leadership in Bosnia presented its "case" to the public on December 7th in the form of "An Open Letter to Congress" published in full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post. After dutifully reciting the talking points assembled by the Clinton Administration, the advertisement concluded: "We urge Congress to provide a clear expression of bipartisan support so that everyone in Bosnia -- especially the young American men and women we send there -- understands our resolve to help bring this tragic and dangerous war to an end."

Committee spokesman Rick Messick, a former chief counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN), explained to The New American that "[Committee organizers] Peter Rodman and Steve Solarz and a couple of other people thought it would be good to show that there is bipartisan support for the President's Bosnia initiative. So people just started calling their friends, and that's what we were able to assemble." To judge by the committee's membership list, it appears that Rodman and Solarz simply posted a sign-up sheet at the CFR's Pratt House headquarters: Of the 45 committee members who signed the full-page ads, 37 are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. By December 8th, according to Messick, the committee -- which had been little more than a collection of signatures and a Wall Street address -- had served its purpose and ceased to exist.

The Republican leadership understood the message: As the New York Times observed, "Republicans long identified with the foreign-policy establishment, like Mr. Dole, Mr. McCain and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, have swung behind the President." On December 13th, with what the Chicago Tribune described as the "reluctant but unflinching aid of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole," the Senate approved a resolution co-sponsored by Dole and McCain supporting the Bosnia deployment.

The Dole/McCain measure effectively stopped a House resolution sponsored by Representative Bob Dornan (R-CA), which called for the de-funding of the Bosnia mission and the withdrawal of American troops which had already been deployed: Dornan's bill was defeated by a vote of 218-210. House Speaker Gingrich was nowhere to be seen during floor debate over the Dornan bill.

Seeking to allay the concerns of the American public and defuse congressional criticism, the Clinton Administration has repeatedly emphasized that the Bosnia deployment is a NATO venture rather than a UN mission. However, the Dayton agreement unambiguously states that NATO is a "peacekeeping" enterprise "under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter," and that the mission was mandated by the United Nations Security Council.

As is documented elsewhere in this issue (see page 17), NATO was designed as a political and military subsidiary of the UN, and it has no rationale for existence apart from the world organization. This was understood at the time of NATO's creation in 1949. A State Department document published in the spring of that year entitled Foreign Affairs Outlines: Building the Peace explained that NATO was designed to "bring about world conditions which will permit the United Nations to function more efficiently." This understanding was also expressed in a March 1949 Washington, DC address by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (CFR). Acheson explained:

[NATO] is designed to fit precisely into the framework of the United Nations and to assure practical measures for maintaining peace and security in harmony with the Charter.... The United States government and the governments with which we are associated in this treaty are convinced that it is an essential measure for strengthening the United Nations....

That the Bosnia mission is a UN enterprise was conceded by Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) during the floor debate over the Dole/McCain resolution. Senator Moynihan, a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, exulted: "I once represented the United States as President of the Security Council. I had not known I would live to see an hour as fine as this...." Moynihan called particular attention to "the importance of the fact that we are doing it in a collective effort anticipated by the UN Charter."

Nor can Americans be reliably assured that U.S. GIs assigned to NATO will always serve under American command. In 1991, Bush Administration Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (CFR) announced a radical restructuring of NATO in which American soldiers would be placed under the command of German, British, and other foreign officers. The subsequent drive to expand NATO to include former Warsaw Pact nations through the "Partnership for Peace" initiative creates the potential for even more unsettling command configurations.

Furthermore, the recently installed secretary-general of NATO, Spanish diplomat Javier Solana, is a devoted socialist, as was his scandal-plagued Belgian predecessor Willy Claes. (Interestingly, Solana was the Clinton Administration's preferred candidate for the post.) When Admiral Leighton Smith stated last September that American fighters conducting bombing raids over Bosnia were "carrying out the mandates of the secretary-general," the individual to whom Admiral Smith referred was either Belgian socialist Willy Claes or Egyptian socialist Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The Clinton Administration has repeatedly emphasized that the IFOR will be commanded by U.S. Army General George Joulwan, the supreme NATO military commander. However, in the NATO chain of command, General Joulwan receives his authority from NATO's highest-ranking civilian official, Javier Solana, who is himself subordinate to UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali.

During the 1960s and '70s, Javier Solana was a member of Spain's Socialist Worker's Party and a supporter of the Soviet Union; he remains a committed friend of Fidel Castro. Before becoming an "ex-Marxist," Solana was also a vehement critic of NATO. However, now that the alliance has dropped its pretense of anti-Communism, Solana has become one of its most energetic supporters. A highly placed NATO official enthused to The European that Solana's appointment "sends a very clear message that we are now more than just a military alliance. We are evolving into a political organization." NATO's political function is to accelerate the consolidation of Europe as a socialist megastate.

In testimony offered before the House Committee on International Relations and National Security on November 30th, Defense Secretary William Perry proudly pointed out that the NATO/UN Implementation Force will include troops from 32 nations, including Russia. "The wide participation in the IFOR is a symbol of the new Europe," Perry emphasized. "The effort will define how security in Europe is going to be handled for decades to come. In effect, we will be defining what post-Cold War Europe is all about and how its security will be assured."

Helping to define European security in Bosnia will be Russian General Leonty Shevtsov, whose last assignment was to carry out the Kremlin's murderous effort to suppress resurgent Chechnyan nationalism.

But then again, suppressing nationalism is one of the chief functions of the new "post-Cold War Europe." This point was made emphatically by former German Chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher, one of Europe's most powerful and influential diplomats, during a recent panel discussion at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University:

The stability of the new world order and the new global challenges require cooperation between all global players.... [W]e have to fight organized crime, international terrorism, and fundamentalist tendencies which are not limited to Islamics only.... Nationalism ... is a main enemy of the nations of Europe, and it can only be avoided by an ever closer cooperation [through the European Union].

In a subsequent syndicated column applauding the Dayton accord, Genscher reiterated the point that nationalism is incompatible with the new world order: "The human tragedy of the conflict in Bosnia has provided shocking proof ... that nationalism and intolerance no longer have a place in Europe."

Nationalism can indeed be intolerant, and Bosnia has presented the tragic spectacle of mutually exclusive ethnic nationalisms engaged in a war of liquidation. However, the dogma of "multi-ethnic democracy" can triumph in Bosnia only through coercion and bloodshed -- and NATO troops are poised to kill recalcitrant Muslims, Croats, and Serbs whose aspirations are incompatible with the constitution created by in the Dayton accord.

The proposed constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina is the handiwork of a cluster of American diplomats and lawyers who gathered at Dayton, Ohio in an environment giddily described by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns as "a living, breathing, international diplomatic biosphere." Most of the architects of the Dayton agreement and the draft constitution for Bosnia-Herzegovina remain anonymous. An official at the State Department's European Bureau explained to The New American, "Apart from the top negotiators at Dayton, we're not releasing any names" of those responsible for the framework agreement. However, he disclosed that "the bulk of the document was drafted by our own legal people here at the State Department, with some help from our European counterparts." It is therefore reasonable to assume that the draft Bosnian constitution represents the distilled wisdom of America's foreign policy establishment -- a troubling prospect, when one examines the establishment's handiwork.

According to its new constitution, the "nation" of Bosnia- Herzegovina will be composed of two political entities, the Republica Srbska and the Moslem-Croat federation of Bosnia. The new nation will not be defined by shared ethnicity, cultural origins, or religious ideals, but by "the Purposes and Principles of the Charter of the United Nations." Article II, paragraph 2 of the Bosnian constitution contains an explicit supremacy clause which makes national law subordinate to international law: "The rights and freedoms set forth in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its Protocols shall apply directly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These shall have priority over all other law." (Emphasis added.) This provision will simplify "harmonization" between Bosnia and the European Union (EU), and the newly created Bosnian Constitutional Court is directed to bring Bosnian laws into conformity with EU standards.

In the fashion of Stalin's Soviet constitution and the UN's "human rights" instruments, the new Bosnian constitution enumerates individual "rights," rather than powers of government. Article II, paragraph 3 contains the heading "Enumeration of Rights," and proceeds through a familiar litany of government-created -- and therefore revocable -- "rights." Furthermore, Article II, paragraph 7 dictates that "Bosnia and Herzegovina shall remain or become party to the international agreements listed in Annex I to this Constitution."

The Annex in question includes every significant UN "human rights" document, including the Genocide Convention, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child -- all of which are similarly predicated upon the assumption that "rights" are conditional gifts of the state, rather than unalienable endowments from God.

Additionally, the constitution provides that Bosnia will be a nation effectively devoid of national sovereignty:

All competent authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina shall cooperate with and provide unrestricted access to: any international human rights monitoring mechanisms established for Bosnia and Herzegovina; the supervisory bodies established by any of the international agreements listed in Annex I to this Constitution [that is, the UN conventions and treaties]; the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ... and any other organization authorized by the United Nations Security Council with a mandate concerning human rights or humanitarian law.

This "transparency" will extend to economic matters as well. The new constitution specifies that "There shall be a Central Bank of Bosnia, which shall be the sole authority for issuing currency and for monetary policy throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina," and that the first Governing Board of the Bosnian Central Bank will be headed by "a Governor appointed by the International Monetary Fund" (IMF). It was the IMF's management of the post-Tito Yugoslav economy which created the wave of hyperinflation which helped precipitate the Yugoslav civil war. (See "New World Order on Display," The New American, October 4, 1993).

Apologists for the Dayton accord may insist that the UN-dominated institutions created by the Bosnian constitution are necessary to prevent future outbreaks of ethnic strife. However, as the December 18th issue of U.S. News & World Report observed, "Far from unifying Bosnia's different ethnic groups, signs are that the accord will spark one final round of self-imposed ethnic cleansing as soldiers and civilians caught on the 'wrong' side of the new ethnic dividing lines scramble to escape to the 'right' side." The largest concentration of people on the "wrong" side are the 60,000-150,000 Bosnian Serbs who live in the suburbs of Sarajevo, which the Dayton accord designates a unified city under Muslim control.

A senior diplomat in Belgrade told Dusko Doder of The European that "Dayton is a botched job. It seems to sanction ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo." A similar warning was issued by General Jean-Rene Bachelet, who until recently commanded French peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. Noting that the agreement requires the disarmament of Serb militias in Sarajevo -- which will leave them defenseless before the majority Muslim government -- General Bachelet predicts that if the Dayton accord is implemented, "We would then see terrible television pictures of French soldiers directing traffic while houses burned." For Serb civilians who reside in Sarajevo, according to Bachelet, the Dayton agreement presents "a choice between a coffin and a suitcase."

As U.S. News pointed out, "It was in the Sarajevo suburbs that the war more or less began." Despite the fact that the French have been assigned the task of "pacifying" Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs have identified the U.S. as their enemy -- a perception which has been strengthened by the announcement that the U.S.-led IFOR will help arm and train the Bosnian Federation's military. Should violence erupt anew in the embattled capital, it will be all but impossible to avoid the involvement of American and British troops -- thus internationalizing what had been an isolated ethnic conflict.

But Sarajevo is not the only flash point. In an analysis of the Dayton accord published in The New Republic, professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Van Evera of MIT observe that the Bosnian Federation is the product of an unnatural union between the Croats and Muslims, and a divorce between these factions "may well occur by war." Furthermore, "Renewed Croat-Muslim fighting could in turn cause a wide unraveling of the Dayton accord by triggering renewed Serb-Muslim and Serb-Croat fighting." Far from producing peace and ethnic harmony, Mearsheimer and Van Evera maintain, the Dayton accords "will lead to a new war, this time with American troops caught in the middle."

Such intractable rivalries cannot be reconciled; they can only be suppressed. Accordingly, the IFOR mission in Bosnia will take the form of a military dictatorship. The Dayton accord decrees that within 120 days of the final signing ceremony, all military units will be demobilized and all troops and heavy weaponry will be confined to barracks facilities. The IFOR may use whatever military force is deemed necessary to compel compliance.

Furthermore, the agreement's provisions for "demilitarization" of the new Bosnian state include the "disbandment of special operations and armed civilian groups" as "progressive measures for regional stability and arms control." The Dayton accord's "Agreement on the Military Aspects of the Peace Settlement" applies to "all personnel and organizations with military capability under its control or within territory under its control, including armed civilian groups, national guards, army reserves, military police, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs Special Police...." The Annex referred to demands that Bosnian authorities, under NATO direction, "disarm and disband all armed civilian groups, except for authorized police forces, within 30 days after the Transfer of Authority [from UN to NATO command]." The Bosnian police force will be constructed under UN supervision.

In addition, pending the establishment of a UN-approved Bosnian police force, the IFOR army of occupation will essentially be a police force with a standing search warrant:

[T]he IFOR shall have the unimpeded right to observe, monitor, and inspect any Forces, facility, or activity in Bosnia and Herzegovina that the IFOR believes may have military capability. The refusal, interference, or denial by any Party of this right to observe, monitor, and inspect by the IFOR shall constitute a breach of this [agreement] and the violating Party shall be subject to military action by the IFOR, including the use of necessary force to ensure compliance....

Even a superficial review of the Bosnian constitution and the functions and powers conferred upon the IFOR mission illustrates why the Bosnia deployment is such a cherished project of the Establishment: The mission is intended to create in Bosnia a microcosm of the new world order. It is an almost literal realization, albeit on a relatively small scale, of the vision expressed in the 1958 manifesto World Peace Through World Law by globalists Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, in which a UN "world police force" would be endowed with "a coercive force of overwhelming power" to impose "world law" upon a disarmed population.

The legal axiom that "hard cases make bad law" certainly makes sense in international affairs. The "world law" dreamed of by the likes of Clark and Sohn will be built upon hard cases like that of Bosnia, and precedents set in such efforts will ultimately have an impact upon America's domestic affairs. Indeed, the ease with which Bill Clinton was able to ignore the constitutional limitations of his office, and the alacrity with which his congressional "opposition" yielded to his usurpation, demonstrate that the effort to create "world law" has already significantly subverted our constitutional system.

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