WSWS
Bush at the UN: ultimatum to the world
Fri Sep 13 05:37:17 2002
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MEDIA SPIN:
Iraq Likely Has Weapons of Mass Destruction
Associated Press Monday September 9, 2002
http://www.newsminute.com/saddamwmd.htm

Bush at the UN: Washington’s war ultimatum to the world
By the Editorial Board - 13 September 2002

George W. Bush went before the United Nations General Assembly
Thursday to reiterate Washington’s plans for war against Iraq and issue
an ultimatum to the UN itself: rubber stamp American aggression or
become “irrelevant.”

Aside from its arrogant and bullying tone, the entire speech was based on
a glaring contradiction: Saddam Hussein had to be punished and
overthrown because he has flouted the will of the UN, and the United
States will invade Iraq and install a puppet regime whether the UN likes it
or not!

This double standard pervaded Bush’s every utterance. The underlying
premise can be summed up as follows: the imperialist states can do what
they want; the semi-colonial states must do what they are told.

The bellicose substance behind Bush’s talk of world peace and security
was underscored by the Pentagon’s announcement, on the eve of the US
president’s UN appearance, that some 600 officers under General
Tommy Franks would be moved in November from the US Central
Command’s headquarters in Florida to the Persian Gulf state of Qatar,
where they will set up a forward war command. The timing of the
announcement was intended to leave no doubt as to Washington’s
intentions.

Without stating so directly, Bush implicitly demanded that the UN
Security Council adopt a resolution ordering Iraq to allow UN weapons
inspectors to reenter the country within a matter of weeks, and give them
unfettered access to any and all Iraqi installations. Such a resolution
would sanction, in advance, the use of military force should Iraq fail to
comply in full.

At the same time, Bush made it clear that the passage of such a
resolution, whether or not Baghdad complied, would only be a prelude to
a US invasion and the installation of a puppet government subservient to
Washington.

Bush’s speech was a compendium of the lies, distortions and
contradictions that pervade the US brief for war against Iraq. It was
based on the absurd premise that the Iraqi regime represents the world’s
greatest threat to peace and security—a threat so dire and so imminent
that immediate military action is required.

Bush reiterated the US claim that Saddam Hussein is a modern-day
Hitler, declaring the UN was founded so that the “peace of the world”
would never again be “destroyed by the will and wickedness of any
man.” The Iraqi regime was, he said, “exactly the kind of aggressive
threat the United Nations was born to confront.”

It does not take an abundance of critical judgment to perceive the
outlandishness of such assertions. Iraq is an impoverished former colony,
defeated in war and devastated by more than a decade of sanctions. Its
defenses have been decimated since the Gulf War of 1991. The United
States has waged non-stop war—diplomatic, economic and
military—against the virtually defenseless country. It continues to bomb
military and civilian targets in the north and south of Iraq on a nearly daily
basis.

Bush speaks for the most powerful imperialist country in the world,
armed to the teeth with the most advanced and deadly weapons of mass
destruction. It has used its unchallenged military might to devastate far
weaker and smaller countries, laying waste to Vietnam in the 1960s and
1970s, and attacking in the space of two decades a host of other states:
Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan.

It presently has military forces deployed in dozens of locations around the
world, and has spent the past year pounding Afghanistan—killing
thousands of civilians and massacring hundreds of captured Taliban and
Al Qaeda soldiers.

One of the defining features of the German Nazi regime was its virulent
militarism and contempt for international law and world opinion. It is the
Bush administration, in its use of military force as the basic component of
foreign policy, that resembles, more than any other present-day
government, the Hitler regime. Bush’s performance at the UN epitomized
his government’s belligerence and disdain for international law.

Bush made no attempt to provide evidence of Iraq’s alleged buildup of
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. His administration takes the
position that it has no need to do so. The people of the US and the world
are told they must simply accept Washington’s word.

The obvious explanation for this stance is that the US has no serious
evidence to back up its charges. The day before Bush’s UN speech,
senior US intelligence officials admitted that the government had failed to
compile a new national intelligence estimate of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons capacities. The last such cross-agency analysis
was prepared some two years ago. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat
who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested a new
assessment last July, to no avail.

It is instructive to compare the present “believe us or else” posture of the
US government with the approach taken by the Kennedy administration
during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. At that time, the US
ruling elite considered it mandatory, prior to taking any military action
against Cuba, to go before the United Nations and provide clear proof
that Cuba was deploying Soviet missiles. The US ambassador to the
UN, Adlai Stevenson, displayed blow-ups of US reconnaissance photos
showing the missile sites to a meeting of the Security Council.

Lacking such proof, Bush’s brief for war boiled down to two arguments.
First, the Iraqi regime menaced the world because it might turn over its
alleged weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, which might then
use them to carry out attacks even more devastating than those of last
September 11. Iraq might even, in the near future, build a nuclear
weapon. “The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear
weapon is when, God forbid, he uses one,” Bush declared.

In other words, the UN had to sanction a US war to the finish against
Saddam Hussein not because of what the Iraqi dictator had done, but
because of what he might do in the future. This novel justification for war
could, quite obviously, be used by any country to justify a preemptive
attack on any other country.

More concretely, it could—and undoubtedly would—be used by the US
to justify military attacks on a number of other countries which, as every
UN delegate knows, have been targeted by the war cabal within the
Bush administration—in particular, Syria, Iran and Korea.

The second argument consisted of a litany of UN Security Council
resolutions passed after the 1991 Gulf War which, according to Bush,
Iraq had defied. Bush demanded that the UN give its imprimatur to US
military action, in the name of enforcing these resolutions.

The first thing to be said about this argument is that the resolutions
themselves constitute the framework of a victor’s peace, imposed at the
behest of the US and its imperialist allies in the 1991 Gulf War. They
testify to the essential role of the United Nations as a tool of the great
powers.

These measures, imposing stringent economic sanctions and stripping
Iraq of its sovereignty, were designed to starve and humiliate the Iraqis
and cripple the country, so that the US could strengthen its grip on Iraq’s
rich oil resources, with the promise of a share of the booty going to
Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

No such sanctions have ever been imposed on the US or the other
imperialist powers for their acts of subversion and violence against scores
of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In his catalogue of Iraq’s sins, Bush neglected to mention the manner in
which the US distorted and abused the provisions of the UN resolutions
in order to create provocations and launch repeated bombing attacks on
the country. These include the imposition of “no fly” zones in the north
and south of Iraq, implemented without the benefit of UN sanction, and
the infiltration of CIA spies among the UN weapons inspectors, who
helped pinpoint targets for US missiles and supplied intelligence for US
assassination attempts against Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders.

Bush referred euphemistically to Iraq’s “ceasing cooperation entirely”
with the weapons inspectors in 1998, without mentioning that the UN
withdrew its inspectors in advance of the four-day US-British air war
launched in December of that year—an assault that was carried out
without the approval of the Security Council.

Nor did he note that the US unilaterally, in 1998, declared its policy
toward Iraq to be, not simply the enforcement of UN sanctions, but the
removal of the regime—a policy that violates the UN charter.

Bush’s supposed concern for the inviolability of UN authority highlighted
the hypocrisy that pervades the US position. Bush had nothing to say
about its closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, which has flaunted UN
resolutions demanding its withdrawal from the occupied territories for
more than 35 years.

The US, moreover, refuses to be bound by UN resolutions that it finds
inexpedient. It is presently engaged in an open effort to sabotage the
International Criminal Court, newly established by the UN to try war
criminals.

Bush topped off his tirade against Iraq with the standard American
denunciations of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran and use of chemical
weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. He omitted the fact that the US
supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, helped him develop chemical
and biological weapons, and tacitly sanctioned his use of chemical
weapons against Iran and its Kurdish allies in the north of Iraq.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who preceded Bush to the podium
on Thursday, made it clear that the United Nations was prepared to give
the US the legal fig leaf it seeks for a new war against Iraq. Annan, in a
typical display of cringing before Washington, held up the US-led war of
1991 as a model of “multilateral” action. The essence of his remarks was
a plea for the US to continue to use the services of the UN. When
embarking on war, Annan advised Bush, “there is no substitute for the
unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations.”

Annan spoke above all for the lesser imperialist powers such as France
and Japan, and the other Security Council members holding veto power,
Russia and China, which are prepared to pass a resolution authorizing
military action against Iraq in exchange for assurances that Washington
will take their interests in the Gulf and elsewhere into consideration.

Taken as a whole, the opening of the UN General Assembly session
provided a stark warning of the catastrophic implications of the eruption
of American militarism, and the hopelessness of any opposition that bases
itself on appeals to the United Nations or Washington’s imperialist rivals.
There is only one force that can halt the US war drive, and that is the
international working class, mobilized on the basis of a socialist
perspective.
======================================

November 10, 2001 - President Bush Speaks to United Nations
G.W. Bush:
"We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous
conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th;
malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists,
themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance
the cause of terror."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011110-3.html

A Shield Against Weapons of Mass Destruction
http://www.majoritywhip.gov/news.asp?formmode=SingleRelease&gcid=174

United Nations Security Council
The Security Council has primary responsibility, under the Charter, for the
maintenance of international peace and security
http://www.un.org/Overview/Organs/sc.html

Cheney’s brief for war: a mass of lies and historical falsifications
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/chen-s02.shtml

OKLAHOMA BOMBING - 9/11 CONNECTIONS
Is there any evidence that any Arab was on any of the four airliners? Seven of the nineteen
supposed hijackers are alive and well in the Middle East! And what about the Israeli Mossad
officers who were caught videotaping the attack and

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