Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 22, 2011

Rep. Illena Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is among Republican critics of the Obama administration?s new war in Libya. That war was supposedly authorized by a UN Security Council Resolution enacted after Congress had gone into recess.

?Deferring to the United Nations and calling on our military personnel to enforce the `writ of the international community? sets a dangerous precedent,? she protests.

In fact, this isn?t so much a precedent as an outgrowth of precedents going back to December 1945, when the Congress passed the UN Participation Act. That measure, as both critics and supporters acknowledged, would effectively be an open-ended declaration of war permitting presidents to deploy U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world in the service of our supposed obligations to the United Nations.

Since that time, presidents from both parties have made war, with the supposed authorization of the UN or its regional affiliates, in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and now Libya. Rather than promoting world peace, the UN has been an engine of perpetual war.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.