Protests at the UN as Washington threatens wider Middle East war
nowar | 20.09.2006 14:45 | Analysis | Anti-militarism | Sheffield | World
On 19th September Bush addressed the UN, see NYC IMC for reports of the protests which resulted in at least 16 arrests:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76231.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76232.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76253.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76270.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76272.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76275.html
Read on for an analysis of the impending war with Iran, and see also:
The Next Phase of the Middle East War
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2006/09/350072.html
The Pentagon's "Second 911"
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2006/08/347527.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76231.html http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76232.html http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76253.html http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76270.html http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76272.html http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/76275.html Read on for an analysis of the impending war with Iran, and see also:
The Next Phase of the Middle East War
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2006/09/350072.html The Pentagon's "Second 911"
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2006/08/347527.html
A belligerent Bush addresses the UN
Washington threatens wider Middle East war
By Bill Van Auken
20 September 2006
In a speech to the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, US President George W. Bush delivered a remarkably belligerent warning to the peoples of the Middle East that Washington intends to continue and even widen its campaign of military aggression.
The dominant message in the speech was contained in the implicit threats made against Syria and Iran that they could soon face the same fate as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Such are the traditions of UN diplomacy—and the spinelessness of the world’s governments—that the body’s delegates politely applauded as Bush absurdly postured as the liberator of the Arab masses. His government’s policies of unprovoked aggression, military occupation and torture stand in direct violation of the UN charter and constitute war crimes for which he and other top US officials deserve to stand trial.
Several thousand anti-war demonstrators marched through the streets of Manhattan and then rallied in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN as Bush was making his speech.
Inside the UN, Bush served up his usual concoction of lies, threats and hypocrisy in a speech that closely tracked many of the same themes and rhetoric contained in the series of propaganda addresses he has delivered in the US in recent weeks in an attempt to shore up plummeting support for the Iraq war.
Inevitably, in his first sentence the US president invoked 9/11, once again exploiting the terrorist attacks of that day to justify all of the lawless acts committed by Washington in the five years since. He once again proclaimed that the world was engaged in the “great ideological struggle” of the 21st century, pitting the Bush White House against “extremists,” a category in which he lumped together Al Qaeda terrorists, the Lebanese mass movement Hezbollah, and Hamas, which currently leads the Palestinian government in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Invoking the “death and suffering” inflicted upon American civilians five years ago before such an international audience clearly raises the following question: what about the far greater death and suffering unleashed upon the world by US militarism in 9/11’s aftermath?
According to a recent UN report, over 100 Iraqis are being killed every day under the US occupation, meaning that Iraq suffers the equivalent of 9/11 each and every month. Since the US invaded the country three-and-a-half years ago, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Many thousands more civilians have been killed in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the death toll among US troops in the two occupied countries has now surpassed the number of deaths inflicted on September 11.
Bush’s speech was aimed at portraying his government as having been spurred to action by the shock of 9/11 to “defend civilization and build a more hopeful future.” He insisted that Washington is striving for “a world beyond terror,” whose “principles...can be found in the first sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document declares that the ‘equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom and justice and peace in the world.”
With good reason, the American president did not linger over this declaration, which includes the following injunction: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Bush had come to the UN fresh from his battle with prominent members of his own party in the US Senate for passage of a bill to “clarify” US obligations under the Geneva Conventions by explicitly permitting forms of torture that those treaties outlaw.
The declaration’s ban on torture is followed immediately by this assertion: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”—an assertion that the Bush administration has explicitly repudiated with its demand to try and sentence to death so-called “enemy combatants” in military tribunals based on secret evidence and without right of appeal.
And the declaration further states, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” Bush addressed the UN just one day after a Canadian government commission issued a blistering report on the case of Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar, who was arrested by US authorities without cause or evidence and then sent to Syria for 10 months of torture and interrogation—only one of the known cases involving the infamous practice of “extraordinary rendition.”
Having cast himself as the apostle of freedom and universal human rights, Bush no less improbably portrayed the conditions in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan as indicative of a “bright future” beginning “to take root in the broader Middle East.”
The reality on the ground in both countries makes it clear that the US wars launched to dominate the oil supplies of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf have created a humanitarian catastrophe and a political and military fiasco for Washington itself.
On the eve of Bush’s appearance at the United Nations, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, recently returned from a tour of the Middle East, warned that Iraq is in danger sliding into a “full-scale civil war.” Last week he said that leaders of the region had told him that the US invasion and occupation had been a disaster that has destabilized the entire Middle East.
On the day that Bush delivered his address, the commander of US forces in the region, Gen. John Abizaid, indicated that the present US troop levels in Iraq could not be reduced at least until the middle of next year because of both the escalating sectarian violence and the growing number of attacks on the occupation forces themselves. The announcement follows the leaking of a Marine intelligence report acknowledging that the US military had effectively lost the battle for control of the key western province of Anbar.
In Afghanistan, the US-led occupation has lost control of much of the country as nationalist resistance to foreign domination has grown, and casualty rates for occupation troops have quadrupled in the last two years.
Thus, Bush’s singling out the presence in his audience of the besieged US stooge Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani as examples of democracy’s supposed forward march was both pathetic and absurd.
Bush’s descriptions of the rest of the Middle East combined gross insults with shameless hypocrisy. He dismissed charges that US militarism has destabilized the region, proclaiming that “the stability we thought we saw in the Middle East was a mirage.” He declared the region “a breeding ground for extremism” in which people were “fed propaganda and conspiracy theories” and were prepared “to blow themselves up in suicide attacks.”
He then lectured the region’s governments, declaring, “We know that when leaders are accountable to their people, they are more likely to seek national greatness in the achievements of their citizens rather than through terror and conquest.”
How would Bush know this? He is a president who has repeatedly rejected any suggestion that he is accountable to the broad sentiments of the American people against the war in Iraq. And his entire tenure in the White House has been dominated by the use of mass terror and wars of conquest aimed at furthering the US imperialist hegemony.
The rest of his speech consisted of his speaking “directly to the people across the Middle East,” that is, over the heads of their governments as the leader of an imperialist state seeking to re-colonize the region.
To the people of Iraq, he declared, “We will not abandon you in your struggle to build a free nation”—meaning the US occupation will continue indefinitely; to the people of Afghanistan, “We will continue to stand with you to defend your democratic gains”—same as the above.
To the people of Lebanon, Bush sent his condolences that their “homes and communities [were] caught in the crossfire” between Israel and Hezbollah—this after a month-long US-backed Israeli bombing campaign that killed over 1,100 Lebanese and turned entire villages and neighborhoods as well as much of the country’s infrastructure into rubble.
Finally, he turned to Iran and Syria. In relation to the first, he declared that the “regime” in Teheran had “chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.” He invoked the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program. He concluded, “We look to the day when you can live in freedom—and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.”
The message was one of “regime change,” as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “freedom” friendship and partnership that the Bush administration has in mind is the kind that existed when the Shah’s dictatorship ruled Iran through repression and torture while defending US interests in the region.
On the eve of Bush’s speech, Time magazine published a report indicating that US plans for war against Iran are well-advanced. It cited a “prepare to deploy” order issued to a US naval battle group consisting of submarines, a cruiser and mine-sweeping ships for October 1 as well as the Pentagon’s reworking of contingency plans for blockading Iran’s Persian Gulf oil ports.
The report states that “from the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran—over its suspected quest for nuclear weapons, its threats against Israel and its bid for dominance of the world’s richest oil region—may be impossible to avoid.”
While making it clear that, given the crisis confronting the US military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the risks of a ground invasion are too high, the report indicates that a massive air assault is being prepared.
“A Pentagon official says that among the known sites there are 1,500 different ‘aim points,’ which means the campaign could well require the involvement of almost every type of aircraft in the U.S. arsenal: Stealth bombers and fighters, B-1s and B-2s, as well as F-15s and F-16s operating from land and F-18s from aircraft carriers,” Time reports.
It continues, “GPS-guided munitions and laser-targeted bombs—sighted by satellite, spotter aircraft and unmanned vehicles—would do most of the bunker busting. But because many of the targets are hardened under several feet of reinforced concrete, most would have to be hit over and over to ensure that they were destroyed or sufficiently damaged... U.S. submarines and ships could launch cruise missiles as well, but their warheads are generally too small to do much damage to reinforced concrete—and might be used for secondary targets. An operation of that size would hardly be surgical. Many sites are in highly populated areas, so civilian casualties would be a certainty.”
In other words, Washington is making advanced preparations for yet another massive war crime.
Bush’s message to the Syrian people was no less threatening. He charged that its government had turned the country into “a crossroad for terrorism” and “a tool of Iran.”
The American president’s annual message to the UN General Assembly serves to bring the world face-to-face with the explosive force of US militarism.
The launching of new wars of aggression, under conditions in which both countries recently conquered by US troops are spiraling out of control, may seem irrational in the extreme. But the buildup toward another round of “shock and awe” pursues a definite, if twisted, logic of military aggression.
Having failed in its attempts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into secure US semi-colonies, thereby assuring a firm US grip on the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin, Washington is driven to expand its campaign of conquest. It is therefore using Iran’s nuclear program as a new pretext for employing military power to assert its domination over these oil-rich regions and Iran itself, which boasts the world’s third largest reserves of oil and second largest of natural gas, and lies at the strategic crossroads of the two regions.
This bloody enterprise, defended by Bush at the UN, is the consensus policy of the American ruling elite as a whole. This is made clear by the bellicose attitude taken by the Democrats, many of whom have criticized the Republican administration from the right for failing to take enough of a hard line against Teheran and for allowing US troops to be bogged down in Iraq when they could be needed against Iran.
Representative of this trend is New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, who proclaimed earlier this year, amid reports of contingency plans for nuclear strikes against Iranian targets, “We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”
Washington threatens wider Middle East war
By Bill Van Auken
20 September 2006
In a speech to the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, US President George W. Bush delivered a remarkably belligerent warning to the peoples of the Middle East that Washington intends to continue and even widen its campaign of military aggression.
The dominant message in the speech was contained in the implicit threats made against Syria and Iran that they could soon face the same fate as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Such are the traditions of UN diplomacy—and the spinelessness of the world’s governments—that the body’s delegates politely applauded as Bush absurdly postured as the liberator of the Arab masses. His government’s policies of unprovoked aggression, military occupation and torture stand in direct violation of the UN charter and constitute war crimes for which he and other top US officials deserve to stand trial.
Several thousand anti-war demonstrators marched through the streets of Manhattan and then rallied in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN as Bush was making his speech.
Inside the UN, Bush served up his usual concoction of lies, threats and hypocrisy in a speech that closely tracked many of the same themes and rhetoric contained in the series of propaganda addresses he has delivered in the US in recent weeks in an attempt to shore up plummeting support for the Iraq war.
Inevitably, in his first sentence the US president invoked 9/11, once again exploiting the terrorist attacks of that day to justify all of the lawless acts committed by Washington in the five years since. He once again proclaimed that the world was engaged in the “great ideological struggle” of the 21st century, pitting the Bush White House against “extremists,” a category in which he lumped together Al Qaeda terrorists, the Lebanese mass movement Hezbollah, and Hamas, which currently leads the Palestinian government in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Invoking the “death and suffering” inflicted upon American civilians five years ago before such an international audience clearly raises the following question: what about the far greater death and suffering unleashed upon the world by US militarism in 9/11’s aftermath?
According to a recent UN report, over 100 Iraqis are being killed every day under the US occupation, meaning that Iraq suffers the equivalent of 9/11 each and every month. Since the US invaded the country three-and-a-half years ago, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Many thousands more civilians have been killed in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the death toll among US troops in the two occupied countries has now surpassed the number of deaths inflicted on September 11.
Bush’s speech was aimed at portraying his government as having been spurred to action by the shock of 9/11 to “defend civilization and build a more hopeful future.” He insisted that Washington is striving for “a world beyond terror,” whose “principles...can be found in the first sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document declares that the ‘equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom and justice and peace in the world.”
With good reason, the American president did not linger over this declaration, which includes the following injunction: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Bush had come to the UN fresh from his battle with prominent members of his own party in the US Senate for passage of a bill to “clarify” US obligations under the Geneva Conventions by explicitly permitting forms of torture that those treaties outlaw.
The declaration’s ban on torture is followed immediately by this assertion: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”—an assertion that the Bush administration has explicitly repudiated with its demand to try and sentence to death so-called “enemy combatants” in military tribunals based on secret evidence and without right of appeal.
And the declaration further states, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” Bush addressed the UN just one day after a Canadian government commission issued a blistering report on the case of Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar, who was arrested by US authorities without cause or evidence and then sent to Syria for 10 months of torture and interrogation—only one of the known cases involving the infamous practice of “extraordinary rendition.”
Having cast himself as the apostle of freedom and universal human rights, Bush no less improbably portrayed the conditions in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan as indicative of a “bright future” beginning “to take root in the broader Middle East.”
The reality on the ground in both countries makes it clear that the US wars launched to dominate the oil supplies of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf have created a humanitarian catastrophe and a political and military fiasco for Washington itself.
On the eve of Bush’s appearance at the United Nations, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, recently returned from a tour of the Middle East, warned that Iraq is in danger sliding into a “full-scale civil war.” Last week he said that leaders of the region had told him that the US invasion and occupation had been a disaster that has destabilized the entire Middle East.
On the day that Bush delivered his address, the commander of US forces in the region, Gen. John Abizaid, indicated that the present US troop levels in Iraq could not be reduced at least until the middle of next year because of both the escalating sectarian violence and the growing number of attacks on the occupation forces themselves. The announcement follows the leaking of a Marine intelligence report acknowledging that the US military had effectively lost the battle for control of the key western province of Anbar.
In Afghanistan, the US-led occupation has lost control of much of the country as nationalist resistance to foreign domination has grown, and casualty rates for occupation troops have quadrupled in the last two years.
Thus, Bush’s singling out the presence in his audience of the besieged US stooge Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani as examples of democracy’s supposed forward march was both pathetic and absurd.
Bush’s descriptions of the rest of the Middle East combined gross insults with shameless hypocrisy. He dismissed charges that US militarism has destabilized the region, proclaiming that “the stability we thought we saw in the Middle East was a mirage.” He declared the region “a breeding ground for extremism” in which people were “fed propaganda and conspiracy theories” and were prepared “to blow themselves up in suicide attacks.”
He then lectured the region’s governments, declaring, “We know that when leaders are accountable to their people, they are more likely to seek national greatness in the achievements of their citizens rather than through terror and conquest.”
How would Bush know this? He is a president who has repeatedly rejected any suggestion that he is accountable to the broad sentiments of the American people against the war in Iraq. And his entire tenure in the White House has been dominated by the use of mass terror and wars of conquest aimed at furthering the US imperialist hegemony.
The rest of his speech consisted of his speaking “directly to the people across the Middle East,” that is, over the heads of their governments as the leader of an imperialist state seeking to re-colonize the region.
To the people of Iraq, he declared, “We will not abandon you in your struggle to build a free nation”—meaning the US occupation will continue indefinitely; to the people of Afghanistan, “We will continue to stand with you to defend your democratic gains”—same as the above.
To the people of Lebanon, Bush sent his condolences that their “homes and communities [were] caught in the crossfire” between Israel and Hezbollah—this after a month-long US-backed Israeli bombing campaign that killed over 1,100 Lebanese and turned entire villages and neighborhoods as well as much of the country’s infrastructure into rubble.
Finally, he turned to Iran and Syria. In relation to the first, he declared that the “regime” in Teheran had “chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons.” He invoked the United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Iran halt its uranium enrichment program. He concluded, “We look to the day when you can live in freedom—and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.”
The message was one of “regime change,” as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “freedom” friendship and partnership that the Bush administration has in mind is the kind that existed when the Shah’s dictatorship ruled Iran through repression and torture while defending US interests in the region.
On the eve of Bush’s speech, Time magazine published a report indicating that US plans for war against Iran are well-advanced. It cited a “prepare to deploy” order issued to a US naval battle group consisting of submarines, a cruiser and mine-sweeping ships for October 1 as well as the Pentagon’s reworking of contingency plans for blockading Iran’s Persian Gulf oil ports.
The report states that “from the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran—over its suspected quest for nuclear weapons, its threats against Israel and its bid for dominance of the world’s richest oil region—may be impossible to avoid.”
While making it clear that, given the crisis confronting the US military in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the risks of a ground invasion are too high, the report indicates that a massive air assault is being prepared.
“A Pentagon official says that among the known sites there are 1,500 different ‘aim points,’ which means the campaign could well require the involvement of almost every type of aircraft in the U.S. arsenal: Stealth bombers and fighters, B-1s and B-2s, as well as F-15s and F-16s operating from land and F-18s from aircraft carriers,” Time reports.
It continues, “GPS-guided munitions and laser-targeted bombs—sighted by satellite, spotter aircraft and unmanned vehicles—would do most of the bunker busting. But because many of the targets are hardened under several feet of reinforced concrete, most would have to be hit over and over to ensure that they were destroyed or sufficiently damaged... U.S. submarines and ships could launch cruise missiles as well, but their warheads are generally too small to do much damage to reinforced concrete—and might be used for secondary targets. An operation of that size would hardly be surgical. Many sites are in highly populated areas, so civilian casualties would be a certainty.”
In other words, Washington is making advanced preparations for yet another massive war crime.
Bush’s message to the Syrian people was no less threatening. He charged that its government had turned the country into “a crossroad for terrorism” and “a tool of Iran.”
The American president’s annual message to the UN General Assembly serves to bring the world face-to-face with the explosive force of US militarism.
The launching of new wars of aggression, under conditions in which both countries recently conquered by US troops are spiraling out of control, may seem irrational in the extreme. But the buildup toward another round of “shock and awe” pursues a definite, if twisted, logic of military aggression.
Having failed in its attempts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into secure US semi-colonies, thereby assuring a firm US grip on the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin, Washington is driven to expand its campaign of conquest. It is therefore using Iran’s nuclear program as a new pretext for employing military power to assert its domination over these oil-rich regions and Iran itself, which boasts the world’s third largest reserves of oil and second largest of natural gas, and lies at the strategic crossroads of the two regions.
This bloody enterprise, defended by Bush at the UN, is the consensus policy of the American ruling elite as a whole. This is made clear by the bellicose attitude taken by the Democrats, many of whom have criticized the Republican administration from the right for failing to take enough of a hard line against Teheran and for allowing US troops to be bogged down in Iraq when they could be needed against Iran.
Representative of this trend is New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, who proclaimed earlier this year, amid reports of contingency plans for nuclear strikes against Iranian targets, “We cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”
nowar
Comments
Hide the following 5 comments
Chavez, Chomsky and the infiltration of IM UK
20.09.2006 16:10
The 911 nutters here describe Noam Chomsky as a "high-level agent of state-propaganda",
and such ludicrous comments are allowed to stand as 'news' by IM volunteers.
So IM911, is Chavez an agent of Bush too ? Is it fair to say that everyone except fellow 911 nuts can now be condemned as agents of Bush ? Or can we deduce that many of the 911 conspiracists, and that at least some of the IM voluteers, are themselves US agents at worst, useful fools and hypocrites at best ?
Chomsky and Chavez or the IM911ers ? Which side are you on ?
je t'accuse
Venezuela's Chavez says Bush planned 9/11 attacks
20.09.2006 20:56
In a recent speech Chavez said:
The hypothesis that is gaining strength, which was said on television last night, and which could soon blow up, was that it was the same U.S. imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack, or act, against its own people and against citizens all over the world.
Watch the video and read the whole transcript here:
no masters
Rise Up Against the Empire
21.09.2006 00:30
Noam Chomsky, one of the most prestigious American and world intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, and this is one of his most recent books, 'Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States.'" [Holds up book, waves it in front of General Assembly.] "It's an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what's happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet.
The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads. I had considered reading from this book, but, for the sake of time," [flips through the pages, which are numerous] "I will just leave it as a recommendation.
It reads easily, it is a very good book, I'm sure Madame [President] you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house.
The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.
"And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here." [crosses himself] "And it smells of sulfur still today.
Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.
I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world.
An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: "The Devil's Recipe."
As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.
The world parent's statement -- cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything.
They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons.
What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy.
What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?
The president of the United States, yesterday, said to us, right here, in this room, and I'm quoting, "Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror and martyrdom."
Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him.
The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over. And people are standing up.
I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations.
Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.
The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace."
That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes.
But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.
It wants peace. But what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela -- new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?
He spoke to the people of Lebanon. Many of you, he said, have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire. How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut with millimetric precision?
This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire.
This is imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal, the empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon. That is what happened. And now we hear, "We're suffering because we see homes destroyed.'
The president of the United States came to talk to the peoples -- to the peoples of the world. He came to say -- I brought some documents with me, because this morning I was reading some statements, and I see that he talked to the people of Afghanistan, the people of Lebanon, the people of Iran. And he addressed all these peoples directly.
And you can wonder, just as the president of the United States addresses those peoples of the world, what would those peoples of the world tell him if they were given the floor? What would they have to say?
And I think I have some inkling of what the peoples of the south, the oppressed people think. They would say, "Yankee imperialist, go home." I think that is what those people would say if they were given the microphone and if they could speak with one voice to the American imperialists.
And that is why, Madam President, my colleagues, my friends, last year we came here to this same hall as we have been doing for the past eight years, and we said something that has now been confirmed -- fully, fully confirmed.
I don't think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let's accept -- let's be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless.
Oh, yes, it's good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches, like Abel's yesterday, or President Mullah's . Yes, it's good for that.
And there are a lot of speeches, and we've heard lots from the president of Sri Lanka, for instance, and the president of Chile.
But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world. And that is why Venezuela once again proposes, here, today, 20 September, that we re-establish the United Nations.
Last year, Madam, we made four modest proposals that we felt to be crucially important. We have to assume the responsibility our heads of state, our ambassadors, our representatives, and we have to discuss it.
The first is expansion, and Mullah talked about this yesterday right here. The Security Council, both as it has permanent and non-permanent categories, (inaudible) developing countries and LDCs must be given access as new permanent members. That's step one.
Second, effective methods to address and resolve world conflicts, transparent decisions.
Point three, the immediate suppression -- and that is something everyone's calling for -- of the anti-democratic mechanism known as the veto, the veto on decisions of the Security Council.
Let me give you a recent example. The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented.
Fourthly, we have to strengthen, as we've always said, the role and the powers of the secretary general of the United Nations.
Yesterday, the secretary general practically gave us his speech of farewell. And he recognized that over the last 10 years, things have just gotten more complicated; hunger, poverty, violence, human rights violations have just worsened. That is the tremendous consequence of the collapse of the United Nations system and American hegemonistic pretensions.
Madam, Venezuela a few years ago decided to wage this battle within the United Nations by recognizing the United Nations, as members of it that we are, and lending it our voice, our thinking.
Our voice is an independent voice to represent the dignity and the search for peace and the reformulation of the international system; to denounce persecution and aggression of hegemonistic forces on the planet.
This is how Venezuela has presented itself. Bolivar's home has sought a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council.
Let's see. Well, there's been an open attack by the U.S. government, an immoral attack, to try and prevent Venezuela from being freely elected to a post in the Security Council.
The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.
And I would like to thank all the countries that have kindly announced their support for Venezuela, even though the ballot is a secret one and there's no need to announce things.
But since the imperium has attacked, openly, they strengthened the convictions of many countries. And their support strengthens us.
Mercosur, as a bloc, has expressed its support, our brothers in Mercosur. Venezuela, with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, is a full member of Mercosur.
And many other Latin American countries, CARICOM, Bolivia have expressed their support for Venezuela. The Arab League, the full Arab League has voiced its support. And I am immensely grateful to the Arab world, to our Arab brothers, our Caribbean brothers, the African Union. Almost all of Africa has expressed its support for Venezuela and countries such as Russia or China and many others.
I thank you all warmly on behalf of Venezuela, on behalf of our people, and on behalf of the truth, because Venezuela, with a seat on the Security Council, will be expressing not only Venezuela's thoughts, but it will also be the voice of all the peoples of the world, and we will defend dignity and truth.
Over and above all of this, Madam President, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. A poet would have said "helplessly optimistic," because over and above the wars and the bombs and the aggressive and the preventive war and the destruction of entire peoples, one can see that a new era is dawning.
As Silvio Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?
What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.
We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.
Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.
President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier.
And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists.
And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner.
And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.
And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to.
And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace.
Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I'm here today.
But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.
We mentioned Cuba. Yes, we were just there a few days ago. We just came from there happily.
And there you see another era born. The Summit of the 15, the Summit of the Nonaligned, adopted a historic resolution. This is the outcome document. Don't worry, I'm not going to read it.
But you have a whole set of resolutions here that were adopted after open debate in a transparent matter -- more than 50 heads of state. Havana was the capital of the south for a few weeks, and we have now launched, once again, the group of the nonaligned with new momentum.
And if there is anything I could ask all of you here, my companions, my brothers and sisters, it is to please lend your good will to lend momentum to the Nonaligned Movement for the birth of the new era, to prevent hegemony and prevent further advances of imperialism.
And as you know, Fidel Castro is the president of the nonaligned for the next three years, and we can trust him to lead the charge very efficiently.
Unfortunately they thought, "Oh, Fidel was going to die." But they're going to be disappointed because he didn't. And he's not only alive, he's back in his green fatigues, and he's now presiding the nonaligned.
So, my dear colleagues, Madam President, a new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the south. We are men and women of the south.
With this document, with these ideas, with these criticisms, I'm now closing my file. I'm taking the book with me. And, don't forget, I'm recommending it very warmly and very humbly to all of you.
We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations.
And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We've proposed Venezuela.
You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.
May God bless us all. Good day to you.
Hugo Chaves
Homepage:
http://www.counterpunch.com/chavez09202006.html
the cult among us
21.09.2006 13:20
What, no Alex Jones ?
Or alternatively, if Chavez is right and Chomsky isn't an high-level agent of state-propaganda", why are 911ers here allowed to publish their unjustified OPINION that he is on the newswire ?
IM911 is definitely damaged goods until this gets sorted out.
je t'accuse
Because...
21.09.2006 17:03
Chomsky's politics are clearly far, far, far better but he is not infallible, as Callinicos has pointed out:
"in the US the mainstream of the anti-war movement (including figures as principled as Chomsky) made the fatal error of putting their efforts in defeating Bush in 2004 by backing the pro-war Democrats under John Kerry, a mistake from which they are only beginning to recover."
On 9/11 Chomsky admits that during the Soviet era Bin Laden was:
"recruited, armed, and financed by the CIA and their allies in Pakistani intelligence"
A year after 9/11 Chomsky said:
"Nevertheless, despite the thin evidence, the initial conclusion [that the guilty parties were Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network] about 9/11 is presumably correct."
Thin evidence? And yet he still presumes that his initial conclusion is correct... he isn't going to win any prizes for critical thinking is he...
A year later he wrote, in reference to the 90's and the WTC bombing that:
"the US intelligence agencies that had helped to recruit, train, and arm them from 1980 and continued to work with them even as they were attacking the US"
He finally addresses the LIHOP and MIHOP positions two years later:
"here's a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn't try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they'd have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever."
The only conclusion one can draw from this is that he has failed to properly look at the evidence collected by projects such as the Complete 911 Timeline:
Oh, and yes, the "high-level agent of state-propaganda" accusation is daft.
nowar