Paradise LOST

Where academia once tried to give us the best and the brightest, now academics seem to be in a race to be first with the worst, of public policy initiatives that is. Such widely disparate misbegotten federal adventures as government disability payments to active alcoholics and the sovereignty-killing North American Union that the chief executives of the U. S., Mexico and Canada deny promoting had their genesis in academic papers and conferences.

Add to this growing roster of ill-advised government policies and programs the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) that the U. S. Senate is getting ready to vote on next month. The appropriately named LOST would cede American sea bed rights to the UN in the hope that it would give them back to us.

Never mind that the list of favors the UN has done for the U. S. is microscopically short to begin with. Perhaps, in view of all of the above, it is not too surprising that academics love this monstrosity.

As Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid notes in investigating why the U. S. Navy supports voting for LOST:

• “My recent report on this matter noted that Navy Commander James Kraska, who handled oceans policy on the Joint Staff of the Pentagon, was among those who paid tribute to Louis Sohn of Harvard, a writer of UNCLOS who co-authored a book, World Peace Through World Law, outlining a plan for transforming the U.N. into a world government.

• “I also discovered a thesis written back in 1996 by a student at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, on the subject of establishing a U.N. Navy.

• “British Professor Gwyn Prins, who served as a consultant in the Office of the NATO Secretary-General, has long advocated such a force.

Here’s the beauty part about dropping such schemes from the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower: When the theories, put in practice, prove a failure, you can still teach them as successes.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.