Not yet, but they are coming, the Bush Defense and State Departments are jointly proposing to establish, with the apparent blessing of the White House, a 75,000-strong army of international "peacekeepers." Called the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), this astonishing scheme calls for recruiting and training primarily Third World peacekeepers, to the tune of over $600 million over the next five years.
It wasn’t until May 15, 2004, when the House Armed Services Committee released its report on H.R. 4200, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005, that a general outline of the GPOI began to emerge. There, tucked away on page 368 of the report, we find the following alarming revelations:
On April 29, 2004, administration officials briefed committee staff on the Global Peace Operations Initiative. In general, the initiative is a joint venture between the Department of Defense and the Department of State to train and equip roughly 75,000 foreign military personnel in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations over five years. The administration further proposes legislative authority for the Department of Defense to spend up to $100 million in operations and maintenance funding on training foreign military forces, either by transferring those funds to the Department of State or conducting the training itself. Over the next five years, the administration estimated that the total cost of the initiative would be $606 million and that the Department of Defense would be responsible for roughly eighty percent of the total....
In general, the committee supports the goals of the Global Peace Operations Initiative. However, it is concerned about the process by which the administration seeks to fund the program and move it forward. Historically, the Department of State has trained and equipped foreign military forces for the United States under title 22 of the U.S. Code, which restricts the kinds of training that can be provided and the countries to which it can be provided.... In this case, however, the administration proposed exempting the Global Peace Operations Initiative from those legal constraints and requested authority to use Department of Defense funding intended to pay for the operations and maintenance of U.S. forces. As a result, any use of the authority could mean depriving U.S. forces of the resources that the administration had requested, and which Congress had authorized and appropriated, for their operations and maintenance.
Incredible! As has been widely reported, our soldiers and Marines in Iraq are suffering from a shameful lack of body armor and shortages of food, water, ammunition and just about every other battlefield necessity. But the Bush administration wants to spend $606 million to train and equip foreign soldiers for UN peacekeeping missions. The money would come mostly from the Defense budget, despite the fact that our own troops are already under-equipped. And, like the Clinton administration’s effort to keep PDD-13 from Congress and the American public, the Bush administration is trying to sneak its subversive GPOI past Congress in stealth mode. It has been extremely stingy about releasing any details of this revolutionary program.
Source:
William F. Jasper