A War Criminal
Comes To The UN
By Bill Vann
World Socialist
Web
25 September 2003
President
George W. Bushs ignorant and insulting speech to the United Nations
General Assembly September 23 made clear that the US administration
has all but written off any hope of obtaining significant international
support for its colonial venture in Iraq.
Bush came before
the body as an unrepentant war criminal, whose actions had violated
the UN Charter and international law by waging a war of aggression as
criminal and unprovoked as those carried out by the Hitlerite regime
in Germany more than 60 years ago.
Having just last
week publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of a link between the
Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks on New York City and Washington DC, Bush began his speech to
the UN by invoking the ruins of the World Trade Center as the symbol
of an unfinished war.
He likewise peddled
yet again the now universally discredited pretext for the Iraq war,
the claim that the Baghdad regime posed a grave and imminent threat
because of its supposedly immense stockpile of weapons of mass
destruction.
This, just one week
after the chief of the United Nations own inspection agency, Hans
Blix, compared the US and British allegations about such weapons to
the hunt for witches in the Middle Ages and amid reports that the unit
set up by Washington to scour the country for the alleged tons of biological
and chemical weapons materials has halted all searches.
Indeed, Bush himself
referred to the supposedly urgent hunt for deadly weapons that were
about to be handed to terrorists as a sort of archival pursuit. US personnel,
he indicated, are analyzing records of the old regime to reveal
the full extent of its weapons programs. In other words, there
was not a trace to be found of the tons of nerve gas, anthrax, serin
and other deadly agents alleged by Washington.
Did the US presidents
handlers believe that the international diplomats, foreign ministers
and heads of state assembled in his audience at the UN building in New
York are so gullible they dont even read the newspapers?
In reality, his
speech was not written for them. Rather, his words were addressed over
their heads to his political base among the extreme right-wingers and
semi-fascists who dominate the Republican Party. He was promising them
that there will be no turning back from global militarism and plunder.
The US agenda of seizing by force the oilfields of Iraq and a strategic
stranglehold over the Middle East remains in force.
Far from the attempt
at reconciliation that had been predicted by many media pundits, Bushs
speech was every bit as provocative and bellicose as his 2002 State
of the Union address declaring that you are with us or against
us, and his address to the UN last year when he warned the international
organization that it would become irrelevant if it failed
to subordinate itself to the US war preparations against Iraq.
Chaos and gangsterism
Bush told the General
Assembly: Events during the past two years have set before us
the clearest of divides: between those who seek order and those who
spread chaos; between those who work for peaceful change and those who
adopt the methods of gangsters; between those who honor the rights of
man and those who deliberately take the lives of women and children
without mercy or shame.
But a growing majority
of world public opinion sees US militarism as the greatest force for
chaos in the world and equates the Bush administrations methods
with out-and-out gangsterism. The US president unleashed a war that
is widely acknowledged even within US establishment circles as unprovoked
and unnecessary. By conservative estimates at least 10,000 Iraqi civilians
were slaughtered and the number of young conscript troops who lost their
lives may number tens of thousands more. To claim he acted to honor
the rights of man is obscene.
Bush appeared to
gloat over the recent one-sided US military victories, while implicitly
warning the assembled nations of the world that any one of them could
be next.
The former
regimes of Afghanistan and Iran knew [the] alternatives and made their
choices, said Bush, sounding like an assassin bragging about his
latest victims. The Taliban was a sponsor and servant of terrorism.
When confronted the regime chose defiance, and that regime is no more.
He improbably claimed that the US invaded Iraq to defend ... the
credibility of the United Nations, which opposed and refused to
authorize the invasion.
He then proudly
pointed to the presence in the assembly of Hamid Karzai, the US-installed
president of Afghanistan, as representing a free people who are
building a decent and just society. Karzai heads a bankrupt regime
whose authority fails to extend beyond the outskirts of Kabul and which
is widely opposed even there. Meanwhile, US forces are still fighting
a bloody counterinsurgency campaign against a resurgent guerrilla movement.
Bush likewise hailed
the presence at the Iraqi delegations table of representatives
of a liberated country. The camera covering the speech dutifully
panned the room to alight on the frog-like face of Ahmed Chalabi, the
convicted bank embezzler and neoconservative ideologue who was airlifted
by the US military back into Iraq after spending more than 40 years
in exile.
In one passage,
in which he claimed that the US occupation is helping to improve
the daily lives of the Iraqi people, Bush recited a litany of
indictments against the former Baathist government: The old regime
built palaces while letting schools decay... The old regime starved
hospitals of resources... The old regime built up armies and weapons
while allowing the nations infrastructure to crumble.
Bush could just
as easily have been describing the US, where the gap between wealth
and poverty has never been wider, resulting in palaces for the rich
and a growing army of homeless; where schools are falling apart in districts
across the country; where more than 40 million people lack any health
insurance; and finally where a Pentagon budget of over half a trillion
dollars to build up armies and weapons is starving the US
infrastructure and basic social needs for funding.
While Bush pointed
to a handful of minor aid projects as evidence of progress in Iraqunder
conditions in which masses of people have been left without jobs, safe
and reliable power or water supplies or even a modicum of personal securityhe
can only cite tax cuts for the rich as his remedy for the growing social
misery confronting much of the US population.
A threat to the Palestinians
The US president
reprised one of the more improbable justifications that has been given
for the war, largely after the fact: the claim that it will inaugurate
a flowering of peace and democracy in the Middle East. Instead, as US
officials have been forced to acknowledge, Iraq has become a magnet
for people from throughout the Arab world who are determined to fight
against foreign imperialist domination and US military occupation. As
for Middle East peace, the US aggression in Iraq has only emboldened
the Sharon regime in Israel to carry out a wave of assassinations and
repression culminating in the threat to murder the elected president
of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat.
Bush had no words
of criticism for Israel, which has defied United Nations resolutions
demanding an end to its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
for the past 36 years. Instead, he issued an ultimatum to the Palestinian
people who are suffering under this occupation.
The advance
of democratic institutions in Iraq is setting an example that others,
including the Palestinian people, would be wise to follow, Bush
declared. Is this advice or a threat? Given that the Iraqi example
was created with cruise missiles, cluster bombs and massed armor, it
could well be interpreted as a warning that Gaza and the West Bank will
be next if the Palestinians fail to halt all resistance to Israeli occupation
and select leaders acceptable to Washington.
Bushs speech
was greeted with stony silence from the majority of the UN delegates.
Even UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, whose unctuous diplomacy and toothless
criticisms in the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq were
aimed largely at smoothing the way to a UN-sanctioned war, found himself
compelled to criticize the US administration.
Referring obliquely
to the Bush administrations national security doctrine, claiming
Washingtons right to wage a preemptive war against
any nation that it deems as a potential threat, Annan declared, My
concern is that if it were to be adopted, it could set precedents that
resulted in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force,
with or without credible justification.
Annan went on to
point out that the UN Charter allows the use of force only in direct
self-defense, or with the sanction of the international body. Now
some say this understanding is no longer tenable since an armed
attack with weapons of mass destruction could be launched at any
time, he said. This logic represents a fundamental challenge
to the principles on which, however imperfectly, world peace and stability
have rested for the last 58 years.
It was typical of
both Annan and the UN that the secretary generals speech contained
not a single reference to the illegal US war. His elliptical language
seemed to suggest that the problem was merely a difference of opinion
leading to hypothetical acts, rather than a bloody war that claimed
tens of thousands of victims and has led to the subjugation of an entire
nation by armed force.
French President
Jacques Chirac was somewhat more blunt in condemning the US war against
Iraq. No one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept
the anarchy of a society without rules, he said. The war,
launched without the authorization of the Security Council, shook the
multilateral system. The United Nations has just been through one of
the most grave crises in its history.
Chirac has demanded
that the Bush administration cede political control to the United Nations
in Iraq, while setting a speedy timetable for the handing over of power
to an elected Iraqi regime. The French government, speaking on behalf
of much the European ruling elite, has made clear it will not play the
role of financing and reinforcing an occupation that is run from the
top down by US administrators serving US corporate and financial interests.
The French corporate establishment is not prepared to surrender the
extensive financial interests it has in the region without a fight.
Bush dismissed the
French demand, claiming that the transition would unfold according
to the needs of Iraqisneither hurried nor delayed by the voices
of other parties. And who shall determine the needs of Iraqis?
This was spelled out the day before the speech by Secretary of State
Colin Powell, who declared that the US would run Iraq as it sees fit
until such time as we allow the Iraqi people to determine how
they wish to be governed.
Blueprint for economic plunder
In the meantime,
the gangster regime in Washington intends to carry out the systematic
plundering of Iraqi wealth, while using military force to suppress a
growing movement of national resistance.
The Bush administrations
plans were spelled out over the weekend, when Washingtons handpicked
finance minister in the Iraqi Quisling regime unexpectedly unveiled
a blueprint for the countrys economic development.
This economic reform
packagemade public at the International Monetary Fund-World Bank
meeting in Dubai and signed into law by Washingtons proconsul
in Baghdad, Paul Bremeramounts to a US plan for the wholesale
privatization of the Iraqi economy. It imposes investment, trade and
tax policies geared entirely to the interests of US multinationals at
the expense of the Iraqi people.
The precedent for
this plan is the kind of disastrous economic shock therapy
introduced in the former Soviet Union more than a decade ago, leading
to the plummeting of living standards for the vast majority and the
creation of a wealthy criminal elite. In Iraq, however, the process
is to be carried out at the point of a US gun, with the assurance that
the overwhelming share of profits will be reaped by politically connected
American corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel.
The plan calls for
the privatization of everything from electric power, to hospitals and
a myriad of state-owned industries. This process would inevitably involve
a form of brutal triage, in which those few industries considered profitable
would be taken over by US corporations, with the rest shut down and
their workers thrown onto the scrap heap.
It allows for 100
percent foreign ownership in all sectors, save natural resources, and
reduces trade tariffs to a minimum. Foreign companies would be guaranteed
full and immediate remittance of all profits, dividends, interest and
royalties.
While the plan formally
calls for Iraqs vast oil reserves to remain under the control
of the government, the takeover of the rest of the economy by US-based
multinationals will effectively ensure control of oil as well.
Washington is using
its military occupation of Iraq to enforce the kind of economic and
trade relations it has sought to impose on countries throughout the
world by means of financial pressure.
The right-wing cabal
in the Bush White House is determined to conduct a social and economic
experiment in Iraq to determine how far it can carry out policies of
unrestricted free market capitalism backed by overwhelming
military force. It sees in Iraq a field for unrestrained exploitation
and outright looting aimed at bringing about a desperately needed rise
in profits for corporate America.
The speech delivered
by Bush at the UN represents a warning both to the Iraqi people and
working people in the US. Despite the growing resistance to the US military
occupation in Iraqresulting in escalating US casualtiesand
despite the mounting opposition of Americannot to mention worldpublic
opinion to the dirty colonial war being fought there, the administration
intends to press on. No matter how much its strategy in Iraq has been
discredited, it has gone too far in this criminal enterprise to turn
back now.
There is no doubt
that Washingtons predatory economic plans for Iraq will provoke
even broader and more intense resistance to the US occupation. Unlike
the American people, the Bush administration is more than willing to
accept the resulting increase in young American soldiers, reservists
and National Guard members dying daily to secure increased profits for
the administrations corporate backers.
Neither the United
Nations nor Americas erstwhile European allies will halt this
deepening catastrophe. The only force that can bring an end to the war
and occupation in Iraq and the growing global threat of US militarism
is the international working class mobilized independently on a socialist
perspective.