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“We were right to go into Iraq”

At last. George W. Bush starts telling it like it is, instead of issuing defensive justifications that only reinforce the petty slights and slanders that give rise to them.

We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.

This is exactly what some of us have been saying for a long time. Finding WMDs was never the point. We knew Saddam had the capability, otherwise he could not have done this. We knew he could not be trusted on WMDs because he kept doing this. We knew he sensed no moral obligation to stay on his own ground because he did this. And we knew Bin Laden had declared war on the West, and we knew Saddam was sympathetic to that cause because… well,

Bin Laden: Any chance you could help out with this next big attack on the States I was thinking about, Mr Saddam?
Saddam: Certainly not! What you are suggesting is immoral! Live and let live, that’s my philosophy!

As if.

So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.

The only reason the game of Hunt-the-WMDs got so much publicity was that America used it in their attempt to appease the United Nations; Saddam’s non-compliance with weapons inspections was supposed to be the legitimate (ie UN-friendly) reason for launching war, therefore, finding WMDs after the event would have “justified” the invasion with hard evidence.

Bad idea. The UN is evil too. It issues terrorism-encouraging statements that inspire people to blow up public-transport users. The UN would not have approved war on Iraq if Saddam had invited the UN and Bin Laden round together for chicken a-la-king, raspberry pavlova and an after-dinner game of launch-the-nuke. It would have suggested waiting a bit longer in case the decimation of California was a mistake rather than a precedent.

No more Mr Nice Guy, please, Mr Bush. The UN is not our friend.

37 comments to “We were right to go into Iraq”

  • tex

    For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

    Paul Wolfowitz
    May 28, 2003

    Oh, BTW….what’s a “weapon of mass murder?”

  • jk

    WILSON LIED!!!!

    Thanks for the great post.

  • Jake

    Don’t be so hard on the UN.

    If Saddam had not paid so much to so many, the UN might have taken a stand against terrorism..

  • Dale Amon

    “…what’s a weapon of mass murder?”

    Aeroplanes seem to do nicely on the lower end of the scale… I hope we don’t get to see the upper end.

    It’s not a matter of if… it is a matter of when and how often and how big. The best we can hope to accomplish is spread the destruction of our cities out in time far enough that we might rebuild faster than they can destroy.

    I am actually quite stunned we have managed this long without taking another big hit in the US, or a first one in the UK. It can’t last, but we have at least bought a lot more tomorrows for a lot of our own people.

  • Jacob

    “If Saddam had not paid so much to so many, the UN might have taken a stand against terrorism..”

    You kidding yourself ? The UN to take a stand against evil ? Never. Never. Never.
    It’s a matter of principle with then, not money. The US pays 25% of their budget and that provides a lot of plush jobs for everybody, but the US never gets from them anything but abuse and contempt. As I said – a matter of principle, of ideology.

  • Foobarista

    But wait! Saddam was a SECULAR dictator, who
    would have nothing to do with religious fanatics.
    And as a careful student and emulator of Stalin, he
    would have been committed to absolute fealty to a
    principle at the expense of his own power.

    (disclaimer: sarcasm was intended…)

  • JohnD

    Great post.

    I would go as far as to say that no war since WW2 was as morally justifiable as the war in Iraq.

    Bush did the right thing.

    The lunatic Euro-left and M.Moore Democrats are already frying in their own pathetic greasy rethoric lies.

  • Tim Blake

    Exactly what you’ve been saying “for a long time”, Alice Bachini?

    “had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder”

    Why? Because Saddam committed atrocities against his own people.

    Er, how? With US support.

    In the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld and other officials in the first Bush administration treated Hussein as a valued ally while he gassed Kurds and launched human wave assaults against Iran. Rather than face these realities about Iraqi human rights violations, the White House prefers to dwell on false stories or on stories that are selectively told to omit mention of the U.S. role.

    Western countries had long supported Saddam Hussein’s regime, even through his most heinous crimes, and then denounced him for (the relatively minor in comparison) invasion of Kuwait. In April 1988, Iraqi troops gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja and thousands of innocent civilians died. This atrocity however did not cause Western support for the Iraqi regime falter – instead it was stepped up.

    According to the Associated Press, Saddam used chemical weapons to kill an estimated 190,000 Kurds between 1983 and 1988–along with 50,000 Iranian soldiers, about one in 10 casualties on the Iranian side during the war. All the while, the Reagan administration downplayed Saddam’s poison gas massacres–even claiming at one point that its preferred enemy, Iran, was responsible.

    Part of the reason for Washington’s silence about Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction (in the past) was that U.S. corporations helped to supply them. Throughout the 1980s, the Iraqi government bought the ingredients for its biological weapons program legally–from suppliers in the U.S. and Europe.

    Strains of anthrax, botulinum and other toxins came from a company in Rockville, Md.–or from the U.S. government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When Iraq provided a report on its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs to United Nations inspectors at the end of 2002, the U.S. tried to censor information about American corporate suppliers.

    But a German newspaper revealed that Iraq’s report implicated 24 major U.S. corporations–including Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Sperry, Rockwell, Dupont and Bechtel–for selling chemicals and weapons to Iraq while Saddam was Washington’s allies. And this was only the tip of the iceberg. From the early 1980s, some of the biggest names in Corporate America–Amoco, Mobil, Westinghouse and Caterpillar, to name a few–joined a U.S.-Iraq Business Forum to lobby Washington to strengthen its ties to the Iraqi government.

    Shouldn’t we be trying the US and these corporations for crimes too?

    The Bush administration claims that it wants to see Saddam Hussein put on trial for his many crimes. But what about his co-conspirators? Will those who helped Saddam rise to power, supplied his weapons and supported his dictatorial rule be punished?

  • Amy

    Mr Bush is a “Mr Nice Guy”??

    Don’t kill me to death with this joke. You mean, Mr Fake Guy, right?

    Super-powerful with his Weapons of Mass Deception!

  • JohnD

    I didn’t know Trolls got up this early. 6 am?

  • Shawn

    Saddam was never an ally of the US. He was throughout the 1980’s an ally of the Soviet Union.

    The US turned a blind eye towards him in the 80’s because Iran was seen as a more immediate threat. Wrong but understandable at the time. Musch of the Western world did the same thing, not just the US as Tim implies.

    The three largest suppliers of weaponry to Saddam in the 1980’s were France, Germany and the USSR. The US’s contribution, wrong though it was, was so small that it rates only 11th place, not even in the top ten of those countries that supplied Iraq.

    Tim should get another argument.

  • Luniversal

    “Finding WMDs was never the point.”

    And Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania.

  • Jacob

    And Tim,
    Since errors were possibly commited in the past, it is now imperative that we stand back and let Saddam and his psychopatic sons murder his people, and threaten his neighbors. God forbid that those errors be corrected now.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Tim Blake makes some perfectly valid points. To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment, let me say that various western powers — including Britain — have a lamentable record when it comes to either propping up various vile dicatorships, or turning a blind eye to them. Reagan’s record was not good in this regard. Remember that the Gipper’s own administration condemned Israel for its justifiable (IMHO) air raid on the Osirak nuclear installation in 1981.

    But surely, as Tim Blake ought to realise, that only increases the west’s moral responsibility for undoing its previous sins. I have never quite understood those who argue that because we did bad things 10 or 20 years ago, we are not entitled to do the right thing now. George W. Bush pretty much admitted this point in a speech in Britain several months ago, which got scant press coverage at the time.

    Yes, we have a bad record in the Middle East. Getting rid of Saddam’s vile regime is a good way to atone for past misdeeds.

  • MusselsfromBrussels

    The UN is evil too. It issues terrorism-encouraging statements that inspire people to blow up public-transport users

    The UN is “evil”??? It issues terrorism encouraging statements??? Can you please explain this?

    Funny, I always thought it was the policies of the state of Israel that encouraged terrorism, policies like military occupation, collective punishment, curfews, checkpoints, etc, etc.

  • Allow me to address your second paragraph first:

    You have “always thought” that Israel was to blame because your knowledge of the Israel/Palestine issue is limited and this has prevented you from reasoning logically about things.

    1) There is no “military occupation” of Palestine. The Palestinians have never had a state and in any case Israel is well within its rights to keep the land it has won as a result of numerous armed engagements with hostile foreign powers.

    2) Israel is not following a policy of “collective punishment” – it carries out the occasional assassination of terrorist leaders and restricts the rest of its activities to destroying terrorist infrastructure (e.g. tunnels and safehouses).

    3) Curfews and checkpoints do not “encourage terrorism”. Each person is responsible for their own actions and should realise that some restriction of freedom is inevitable if terrorist attacks are to be prevented. I find it odd that you don’t seem too concerned about the human rights of the Israeli citizens who are routinely murdered by Palestinians.

    And now briefly to the UN:

    Yes, the UN is an “evil” institution. It is a mouthpiece for countries who abuse the freedoms of their citizens. It accepted bribes from Iraq and turned a blind eye to the murder of citizens by Saddam’s regime.

    The UN has a long and shameful history of inaction in precisely those areas of the world that most need helping out. Most of the money contributed to the UN with the aim of providing charity for the poorer countries of the world also seems to find its way into the pockets of those working for the UN.

    I do hope that the US and the UK continue to ignore its protestations and do what is best for their citizens and for the oppressed citizens of the world.

  • A_t

    Jacob Martin, of your impressive list of reasons why the UN is evil, have any not applied to the US government.

    Does this mean the US government is also evil?

  • toolkien

    If finding weapons of mass destruction was never the point, then what was Powell doing at the UN?

    Bush’s statesmanship has left a lot to be desired. He all but set the groundwork for attacking Iraq by Nov. 2002, and certainly could not have ratcheted down from there. I assume Rumsfeld et al played into the calculations. THEN overtures were made to the European powers/UN to, if not lend support, to at least pass a resolution giving the attack a thumbs up. I assume that Powell was behind this calculation. But it put the horse after the cart. In an effort to persuade the UN crowd, satellite photos and other ‘intelligence’ was trotted out, and all the eggs went into one basket, and Bush allowed it to go there. If there wasn’t ample enough evidence to go after Saddam for just being Saddam, his attacking of neighbors, his less than forthright interaction with inspectors over the last decade, non-compliance with resolutions, etc etc then we didn’t have a leg to stand on.

    As for complicity with terrorists, it is much more than Saddam. By the same logic we should attack many of the Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia). But we know that it about economic resources and contracts. It is about resources for Europe and resources for the US. Otherwise who would care about the region at all?

    In an ideal world of the Lew Rockwells we should not have Statist programs of military adventures around the globe, and I agree in theory, but the practical reality of Democrats and Republicans tying us all together via Force, I am presented a fait accompli when it comes to economic health of the ‘collective’ and the Force necessary to ensure it. Until this reality changes, and a society of individual liberty is forth coming, I am forced to be interested in assuring the flow of resources at the macro-level. For Britain and the US, Iraq was more of an economic threat than a straight terrorist threat. Not so for France et al. Which, of course, is the prime reason that an organization like the UN is worthless.

    So I agree with attacking Iraq, but the justification for doing so by the administration was ass-backwards and tangential. Either we had a solid case to go in with or without the UN’s approval and should have maintained it. Adhering terrorism and WMD together versus being honest and stating that it was for protecting resources, and then having slight or no evidence of either, only made Bush look foolish (of course the Dems, based on the intel, were saying the same things, but are, in a 1984-ish slight of hand, making out like it was all Bush).

    But if the case were put forth as a legitimate trade of ‘blood for oil’, an unknown situation regarding WMD, and the need for ‘national’ resources, then the embarrasing questions would arise about how the goods made from the resources were distributed (market) versus how the resources were acquired (collective) and the logic of Statism, from the pre-existing Forced collective/reallocation that makes extra-territorial Force necessary (otherwise the force would necessarily have to be internal), would come undone for both the Dems and the Repubs. The logic that Forced collectivization necessitates Force be used somewhere along the line would be laid bare for all to see. And if we don’t want the State falling on us for the resources, we need to fall on others.

    The Pols want it both ways. They want to the great giver on the one hand, making it appear as if it comes from nowhere, and taking credit along the way. But meanwhile the other hand wrings the necks of enemies, the taxpayer, the businessman, and others who would lay claim to resources (albeit via Force (e.g. Saddam)). They don’t ever like to caught doing the dirty business that provides the resources for the give-aways (unless its the domestic businessman of course, that’s the one exception).

  • Paul

    Alice,
    Good article. I agree but hope
    that it hasn’t affected the general will to stick boot in Iran if necessary.

  • lemuel

    toolkien, you should start your own blog!
    nice, nice, very nice.

    btw: isnt this a false dilemma logical fallacy:?

    Bush: So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.

  • Jacob

    Here is another reason why the UN stinks:

    The whole problem of alegedly false pretexts (WMD) was created when Bush decided to invoke the UN. The whole UN is based on lies and twisted logic, so he had to invent false pretexts and use twisted logic in order to try to persuade false allies and twisted countries (France, China, etc.).
    A big reward he got for all this trying to be nice to the UN – first – no UN support, second: an outcry about using “false” pretexts, third: lost time giving Saddam the opportunity to ship out his WMD and hide them, probably in Syria or Iran.

    Serves him right, for pandering to such a corrupt and evil UN, and refusing to acknowledge the reality about it.

  • Raiden

    To A_t:
    I don’t recall the US persecuting its own civilians at any time in the recent past or taking bribes from Iraq. Also, the US gives money, through the UN and others by it’s own choice, while the UN spends money given to it by its constituent nations, and often deos so in a corrupt fashion.

    On a point mentioned before, one of the ways the UN has supported terror has been its refusal to endorse a resolution calling for Israeli children not to be targeted by terrorists 9though it managed to pass the same resolution word-for-word with Palestinian children the target.

  • Ironchef

    It was morally “right” to remove a dictator, yes. But was it worth it? (to Yanks & Brits) Still no. It still didn’t make my life better.

  • lemuel

    The US should have probably heeded foreign policy ideals of Sen. Robert Taft.

    Btw: His Foreign Policy for Americans is available here.

  • A_t

    “I don’t recall the US persecuting its own civilians at any time in the recent past or taking bribes from Iraq”

    I don’t recall the UN doing either of these things either! Firstly, it’d be hard to prosecute civilians when you have none; you’re talking about the member governments… & sure some of them are evil. The question is, would you rather there was somewhere central everyone who holds power (not *should* hold power in some ideal world) can discuss things, or not.

    As for taking bribes from Iraq… is there evidence that the UN was doing so at an organisational level?

    The main point of my earlier comment was obviously not to pretend that the US government are evil, but to point out the ridiculousness of saying “evil” when what you mean is “big, inefficient beaurocracy with some corrupt elements in it”… Find me a big beaurocracy, from Oil companies to national governments, which doesn’t have some corrupt elements. Doesn’t mean the entire institution is fundamentally flawed, let alone evil. This “find a few flaws & denounce the whole enterprise” thing is used on all sides; Anti-capitalists can easily dig up a few ruthless executives, a few weak souls who took bribes, & use this as evidence that the entire capitalist system is riddled with corruption (it probably is), evil & in danger of collapse (it definitely isn’t!).

    Oh, & Jacob, I dig the way you place a parliamentary democracy with a strong record on personal freedom & the biggest oppressive dictatorship in the world together in one “twisted” category. Good to know you’ve got your perspectives straight!

  • MusselsfromBrussels

    Jacob Martin:

    A_T nicely summed up why the UN isn’t evil. As to the Israel/Palestine thing, you are wrong on all points, though I’m not sure its worth my time refuting all your points in a lengthy manner…

    You said:

    1) There is no “military occupation” of Palestine
    2) Israel is not following a policy of “collective punishment
    3) Curfews and checkpoints do not “encourage terrorism

    Maybe we should just leave it at the fact that millions of Palestinians would disagree with you, on all your above points.

    You find it odd that I seem “unconcerned about the human rights of the Israeli citizens who are routinely murdered by Palestinians”. I am concerned, but I feel that Israel brings it on herself insofar as her policies are unjust and oppressive. Likewise, I find it odd that you seem so unconcerned about the violations of human rights of Palestinians by Israel as evidenced by your previous post.

  • Joe

    Shawn:
    It doesn’t matter to them – they already drank the kool-aid. Anything that enters the “underground mythology” becomes a fact to that wierd tribe. The them it’s very imprtant that everything that’s unglamorous and requiring any human effort be trashed, simply because they don’t understand it.
    Why do you think they get enraptured with the least plausible solutions to things? Subsisntence farming that will lead to starvation, anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-energy that will lead to poverty and sickness…
    They don’t want the world to end, they want physics to reverse itself to create the world that they want. If that doesn’t work, and it doesn’t they simply resort to hating everything.

  • A victim

    Hey musselsfrombrussels, your argument won’t work with me, an unlucky chap with an even unluckier girlfriend who was blown to pieces on her way to work. Was this under the oppressor Sharon?
    No, it was when Barak was offering the PA more than they had ever been offered and good old Arafat decided to put him under pressure by popping off a few buses.

    Why should you care anyhow, she brought it on herself.

    You so called peace lovers are such a heartless bunch of people.

  • jacob

    A_t,
    “Oh, & Jacob, I dig the way you place a parliamentary democracy with a strong record on personal freedom & the biggest oppressive dictatorship in the world together in one “twisted” category”

    Yes, China and France are twisted, though in different ways.

    France “a strong record on personal freedom ” ?? No, France has a strong record of centralized, bureaucratic government, and restricted freedom, though it is not a dictatorship, and yes, there is freedom.
    But they are twisted in other ways. They always had a totally amoral foreign policy, of doing business with the worst murderers like Saddam, and even supplying him (in the late 1970ies) with the Osirak nuclear reactor, because, you see, Iraq was very energy deprived. And the hatred of America has turned them total nuts.

    Maybe you’re right about France, she isn’t “twisted”, very much, her behaviour is par for the course, some nations behave worse. Still Bush-Blair were mistaken in trying too hard to please her. She makes trouble far beyond her real weight, she is fickle, unreliable, and impotent. Don’t count on her when something needs to be done. Just ignore her.

  • Bill

    Some of the comments on the American role in the Iran Iraq war are misguided. After the Iranian revolution Iran was an avowed enemy of the United States, they had taken over the Teheran US embassy, and were thought to have been behind the bombing of the US embassy in Beruit, and the Marine compound in Lebanon, etc. To my knowledge the US had no role in initiating the Iraqi invasion of Iran and only became involved to a limited extent it did when it looked as if the Iraqis might lose the thing. Given the attitude of the Iranian leadership, what would the correct response be to the threat that they posed to the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and other Gulf state oil supplies? Does anyone actually think the US should have simply stood aloof and allow a situation to develope where Mullahs of Iran might control the Persian Gulf states?

    As to poison gas attacks, both the Iranians and the Iraqis used gas. The Halabja attacks occurred during a battle in the area with Iranian troops, initial reports from “our side” (the Iraqis) indicated that it was the doings of the Iranians. Subsequent reports indicated otherwise, but can critics of US policy now agree that “intelligence” is often contradictory, unclear and sometimes just plain wrong.

    It is immature to suggest that because Saddam was bad the US should have ignored the threat of Iranian expansion. It is also immature to simply look at the negative results of consequences without taking into account contemporary context and what the likely results would have been from inaction.

  • Tim Blake

    Johnathan Pearce:

    “atone for past misdeeds”

    I really, really wish things are really that simple and innocent, nice and rosy. The problem is, we’ve ridden the world of a terrible dictator (so that’s great), but did the US and Britain really invade Iraq for this purpose? Really, these days, you just read the newspapers and you know only a fool would think so. If the US and Britain wanted to be the world’s liberators, they could have done it a long, long time ago and removed Saddam. Why wait until now?

    The Bush administration’s original reason for going to war in Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons of mass destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes that now, not even Bush’s speech writers.

    The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there and, in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.

    Sometimes, the repetition of this democracy-building posture reaches the level of rapturous acclaim.

    David Ignatius, for example, the Washington Post commentator, described the invasion of Iraq as “the most idealistic war in modern times” – fought solely to bring democracy to Iraq and the region. Ignatius was particularly impressed with Paul Wolfowitz, “the Bush administration’s idealist in chief,” whom he described as a genuine intellectual who “bleeds for (the Arab world’s) oppression and dreams of liberating it.”

    Maybe that helps explain Wolfowitz’s career – like his strong support for Suharto in Indonesia, one of the last century’s worst mass murderers and aggressors, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to that country under Ronald Reagan.

    As the State Department official responsible for Asian affairs under Reagan, Wolfowitz oversaw support for the murderous dictators Chun of South Korea and Marcos of the Philippines.

    All this is irrelevant because of the convenient doctrine of change of course.

    So, yes, Wolfowitz’s heart bleeds for the victims of oppression – and if the record shows the opposite, it’s just that boring old stuff that we want to forget about.

    One might recall another recent illustration of Wolfowitz’s love of democracy. The Turkish parliament, heeding its population’s near-unanimous opposition to war in Iraq, refused to let U.S. forces deploy fully from Turkey. This caused absolute fury in Washington.

    Wolfowitz denounced the Turkish military for failing to intervene to overturn the decision. Turkey was listening to its people, not taking orders from Crawford, Texas, or Washington, D.C.

    The most recent chapter is Wolfowitz’s “Determination and Findings” on bidding for lavish reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Excluded are countries where the government dared to take the same position as the vast majority of the population.

    Wolfowitz’s alleged grounds are “security interests,” which are non-existent, though the visceral hatred of democracy is hard to miss – along with the fact that Halliburton and Bechtel corporations will be free to “compete” with the vibrant democracy of Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands, but not with leading industrial societies.

    What’s revealing and important to the future is that Washington’s display of contempt for democracy went side by side with a chorus of adulation about its yearning for democracy. To be able to carry that off is an impressive achievement, hard to mimic even in a totalitarian state.

    Iraqis have some insight into this process of conquerors and conquered.

    The British created Iraq for their own interests. When they ran that part of the world, they discussed how to set up what they called Arab facades – weak, pliable governments, parliamentary if possible, so long as the British effectively ruled.

    Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved the right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of the world’s greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic regime that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country’s fate in the hands of Western corporations.

    Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent – and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.

    An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson’s observation on the world situation of his day: “We believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations.”

  • Michael Harris

    So the United Nations is evil. Obviously, if you want to scare people, you use the word “evil”.

    In December 1987, the United Nations passed its major resolution condemning terrorism in all its forms, and called on all countries of the world to do everything they could to stamp out this terrible plague. It didn’t pass unanimously. One country abstained, namely Honduras, and two countries voted against it, namely the United States and Israel. When the US votes against a resolution, it’s not reported and it disappears from history.

    And the two negative voters explained why. There was a paragraph in the resolution which said that “nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice that right to self-determination, freedom and indepedence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right… particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor… the right of these people to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support.” Both the United States and Israel had to vote against that. They both understood that the phrase “colonial and racist regimes” referred to South Africa, which was a valued ally, while the African National Congress was one of the “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world. So obviously they didn’t have a right to struggle against apartheid. And “foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination” referred to the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which was maintained precisely for the same reason it is now, by unilateral US intervention.

    The US has been blocking a diplomatic settlement of the Israeli occupation for more than 30 years now. The process of preventing a diplomatic settlement has a name. It’s called “the peace process.” The peace process refers to whatever the US happens to be doing, very often preventing political settlement, as in this case. And in this case, it’s unilateral. It’s not a pretty regime, it’s harsh and brutal, and has been from the beginning. Still is. And therefore the US and Israel had the vote against that qualification.

    The United Nations is in a very hazardous position.

    The United States might move to dismantle it. I don’t really expect that, but at least to diminish it, because when it isn’t following orders, of what use is it?

    There would be great strength for a place for the UN, if the United States would allow it, but the United States is destroying the UN. It’s been attacking the UN for 30 years. Ever since the decolonization, when the UN became more democratized, the US has turned against the United Nations, has tried to eliminate it.

    The US is way ahead of any other country in refusing to pay its legally required debts. It doesn’t pay for peacekeeping forces or for anything else. The US has already virtually dismantled UNESCO. It’s now trying to — It is now eliminating the UN development office. It’s attacking the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s going to eliminate UNCTAD because UNCTAD is giving independent economic analysis which is critical of the IMF/World Bank consensus.

    For the people of the United States, a strong UN is very much in their interest. For the top sector of privilege and power, of course, it’s not in their interest, unless it’s their tool. And to the extent it’s not their tool, they want to destroy it.

  • LeoStrauss

    Editors note: Comment deleted. Get lost Scott.

  • The Wobbly Guy

    Well, it’s not as if isolation is ever an option nowadays. The days of the Founding Fathers, travel wasn’t easy, and the world was a huge place to be.

    With airplanes and such, nobody can be isolated in any sense anymore. Even if you keep to yourself, somebody might poke with a stick to see what you’re up to and what you’re made of.

    And the islamists have very sharp and potent sticks, plus even less deterrance to use them.

    TWG

  • Shawn

    “For the people of the United States, a strong UN is very much in their interest.”

    Certainly, if our interest is to betray the blood of the patriots who won our independence, and throw our constitution out the door in favour of slavery.

    The UN is simply the seed of a global socialist government. It’s intentions, clearly indicated in many speeches, policy proposals and charters is the enforcement of trans-national socialism, the disarming of free citizens, the regulation of every aspect of the individuals life including the enforcement of leftist political correctness, centralised control over currently free media (the UN wants control of the internet in order to make it fulfill socialist goals) and so forth.

    A strong UN is not only NOT in the interests of the US or any other free nation, it is an active threat, a clear and present danger to freedom everywhere.

  • Nate

    Michael,

    I don’t even know where to start.

    True the US does not pay it’s “legally required debts”. Of which I am quite thankful. As far as not paying for peace-keeping…I think as a whole, again, I’m rather thankful that we do not. We seem to get a very poor return on such expenses.

    As for post-colonial democritization of the UN, I’m not sure by what metric you’re using for declaring it a democracy. One-vote/One-nation in the GA has some serious problems. (See the bi-cameral compromise in the US for example.) Also, I absolutely refuse to recognize anything even remotely resembling sovereignty for nations that are not representative democracies. Furthermore, is it a bit of bad humor that Libya was given chair of the human rights commission? Libya? I don’t know if should laugh or weep.

    I’d continue…but really, I’m not doing anything other than verbal masturbation. I won’t be persuaded by your rants, nor you by mine. I have other things to do. Good luck in your advocacy for the UN.