US unilateralism - If you're not the US, you don't count

[vox]

Published on Tuesday, April 23, 2002 in the Guardian of London

Diplomacy US Style: The Removal of Jose Bustani Demonstrates George Bush's Contempt for Cooperation

by George Monbiot

Tony Blair might believe he belongs to an international coalition, but George Bush has other ideas. Bush's international war against terrorism has not stopped him from waging a parallel war against cooperation.
Two weeks ago, the US ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna failed, for the first time, to attend a meeting of the comprehensive test ban treaty. This may suggest that America is no longer prepared to abide by the rules against the testing of nuclear warheads. A week ago, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had told the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, in the hope of undermining his credibility. When the CIA failed to discover any evidence of wrongdoing, the deputy defense secretary is reported to have "hit the ceiling".

On Friday, the US government succeeded in dislodging Robert Watson, the chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr Watson had been pressing member nations to take the threat of global warming seriously, to the annoyance of the oil company ExxonMobil. Last year, it sent a memo to the White House requesting that he be shoved.

Yesterday evening, after a week of arm-twisting and secret meetings, the US government forced the departure of Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. As this column predicted last week, this is the first time that the head of an international organization has been dismissed during his term in office. The tactics the US has deployed in the past few days to oust Bustani offer a fascinating insight into the way its diplomacy works.

Read More (http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0423-05.htm)

For those interested in the previous piece that Monbiot mentions, and how this could all be a pretext for a war on Iraq, you can find it here (http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=504). Very interesting reading.

A long memory is important for the Left. This is something that should not be forgotten in the coming months.

vox

[LeonardoDaVinci]

Yeah..I read that article, and to be honest with you it is becoming really alarming how Americans always seem to have it their way. They are undermining what are supposed to be independent and autonomous international organisations to pursue their own agendas while giving the rest of the world the finger.

The simple fact of the matter is that the US just wants to declare war on Iraq. Any fair minded person who suggests that maybe they ought to resolve this (non-existent) stand off peacefully must face the wrath of the USA. Such an insolent fool will have his credibility undermined and thus will be replaced with a more "credible" puppet. What is more alarming is that in our modern day politics there doesn't exist a single country that could stand up and question (let alone oppose) the self-centred, ignorant and antagonistic unilateralism of the US. None of the leaders of the supposedly free democratic world have the balls to stand and shout at George W (aka Dubya) and order him to stop this episode of the Wild Wild West.

I'm not a pacifist nor am I an appeaser. Saddam Hussein is a thug and a tyrant that must be removed from power, the sooner the better. However, I'm sure this can be done without murdering half of the Iraqi population and rendering Iraq a nuclear dumpland for the next century. A scenario which I am sure is not that far off from that drawn up by Bush Junior, Rumsfeld and their lynch mob bandwagon.

Americans must realise that drifting away from the rest of the world and failing to empathise with people impoverished by their country's sulfish policies can only pave the way for more hostility towards the USA.