ROBERT E. DUFRESNE
Times Union
Friday, December 22, 2006

After the Republicans suffered their election thumping, President Bush replaced Defense Secretary Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates. So much for progress.

Like Rumsfeld, Gates is a veteran member of the world government promoting Council on Foreign Relations. He supported attacking Iraq despite the fact that Bush's justifications were unsupportable. Gates also previously served on Bush's Iraq Study Group, headed by CFR veterans James Baker and Lee Hamilton. Since the 1940s, every U.S. secretary of Defense, State and Treasury, and hundreds of other high level federal appointees have been council members.

What does the CFR stand for? In the Oct. 30, 1993, Washington Post, ombudsman Richard Harwood stated that the council is "the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States." In 1975, Adm. Chester Ward, who served as Navy judge advocate general and was a council member 16 years, wrote that the council was created for the "purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." In 1953, the congressional Reece Committee concluded that the CFR is "in essence an agency of the United States government" and that its influence is "not objective but directed overwhelmingly at promoting the globalist concept."

Robert Gates says that "the United States is going to have some presence in Iraq for a long time." The CFR-controlled Iraq Study Group Report states that "by the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq." It recommends an international peace conference under a strengthened United Nations, with the United States providing most of the funding and peacekeepers. Thus, U.S. soldiers will continue to be picked off a few at a time for several more years.

An honest assessment of this war would have declared it a terrible mistake from the beginning, repudiated all who were responsible, and called for bringing our troops home as fast as humanly possible. But that is not the CFR plan.

ROBERT E. DUFRESNE

Rensselaer