Giving away the store, and the ocean, too

FRANK MIELE

"Thar be dragons beyond here."

That's nautical lingo for slow down and pay attention before you fall off the edge of the world, and was featured on sea maps in the days before Columbus established the "globiness" of the globe.

You can't blame those old-time sailors for being terrified, because although there weren't dragons in the Atlantic or Pacific, there were real dangers if you sailed too far into the unknown. Dragons were just a symbol of peril, albeit a colorful one. It's just too bad that Congress doesn't have a "map-to-English" translator on the payroll. Otherwise, they might figure out that the Law of the Sea Treaty that is being fast-tracked through the Senate this month is the equivalent of one of those dragons that symbolizes the dangers of going too far without a map.

In fact, there are some things which are known about the Law of the Sea Treaty, which goes by the alarming acronym of LOST, and its proponents will tell you in a calm and soothing voice that you have nothing to worry about. Just trust the nations of the world to do the right thing.

Huh? When did that ever happen?

Fortunately, up till now, the United States has avoided the siren song that lures sailors to their deaths. Indeed, LOST has been floating around in one form or another ever since 1970, and was entered into force among the ratifying nations in 1994. The United Nations treaty created an international body which has regulatory power over the high seas and the seabeds. The convention established rules for settling disputes over navigation, fishing and economic development of the open seas and also established environmental standards to be maintained in the world's oceans. It further decreed that oceans are reserved for "peaceful purposes" (presumably in contradistinction to solid land, which as we all know is for military purposes).

What isn't known, and can't be fully known, is how various countries would use the treaty to control, blackmail and humiliate the United States if we were to join it, and how environmental groups would use it to shut down development of ocean resources or otherwise block activities which they find objectionable.

Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., says the United States has no choice but to ratify the treaty because without it, "we are allowing decisions that will affect our Navy, our ship operators, our off-shore industries and other maritime interests to be made without U.S. representation."

The Bush administration agrees, and so does the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Lugar serves on. The panel voted 17-4 last week to approve the treaty.

Unfortunately, they are wrong. One hundred and eighty degrees wrong. In fact, if we JOIN the treaty convention, we will be "allowing decisions that will affect our Navy, our ship operators, our off-shore industries and other maritime interests" to be made with U.S. representation, but without U.S. consent. That is even worse, indeed much worse.

Face it, the United States would be just one of 156 nations participating in the treaty, and our one vote would have just as much weight as the vote of, let's say, land-bound Slovakia. That's promising, isn't it? We could practice the same politics of frustration that we are stuck with in the U.N. General Assembly, where repeatedly the democratic nations are out-voted by the Hugo Chavezes, Fidel Castros, Vladi

mir Putins and Saudi princes of the world. And, of course, if we are a signatory to the convention, we are stuck with it, and with any new interpretation of it that comes along in 10 or 20 years, just as we are stuck with the phony interpretation of the Geneva Convention that claims rogue bandit terrorists have the same rights as prisoners of war from a civilized nation that actually signed the convention.

Ultimately, if and when we ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty, what will be irretrievably lost will be any semblance of U.S. sovereignty. We may as well just go ahead and open the southern border, the northern border and our ports as well, because there won't be any real country left, just an empty semblance of a set of ideals and principals that had been fought for and died for starting in 1776 and then squandered, sold and destroyed one by one till there was nothing left except the now-meaningless piece of paper ironically called the Declaration of Independence.

In the wake of the immigration debate, it is already an open question whether sovereignty means anything to Americans anymore anyway. The amnesty fiasco was averted earlier this year, but the proponents of open borders have not given up the fight yet. Currently, the governor of New York is demanding to give drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Tomorrow it will be a guest worker program. Then an earned right to vote. Then just a white flag of surrender. Bit by bit, the agenda of the United Nations will be imposed on our country until the world's last best hope of freedom and democracy will be just one more cog in the machinery of globalism.

Or… we could take a principled stand. We could continue to do what we have done in the past, protect the high seas for one and all, and at the same time protect our own national interests whenever we need to do so.

As I already noted, Sen. Lugar declared that, without the treaty, "we are allowing decisions that will affect our Navy, our ship operators, our off-shore industries and other maritime interests to be made without U.S. representation."

That is a confession of weakness and foolishness. The United States does not have to abide by treaties to which it is not a signatory. Indeed, if we allow decisions which affect our national security and interests to be made by other nations, then we are damned fools.

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy, a Navy man, declared on board the USS Kitty Hawk that, "Events of October 1962 indicated, as they had all through history, that control of the sea means security. Control of the seas can mean peace. Control of the seas can mean victory. The United States must control the seas if it is to protect your security…"

No one can say it any better today. And if we surrender that control to the United Nations, then we are truly lost.

. Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com