While our eyes and hearts have been averted by the suffering and carnage in New Orleans, John Bolton, our US Ambassador to the United Nations has made his debut there. As we all knew, he has gone in, guns blazing, with a list of 450 changes to a painstakingly negotiated document of proposed reforms, that took a year for the body to come up with, just three weeks before a scheduled summit on that document. Most watching believe is tantamount to the United States decalring war (figuratively) on the United Nations. The setback that the U.S. demands have dealt is staggering. To quote: "The 2005 Millennium Plus Five summit intended to shore up the unmet commitments to those goals. In his reform proposals of March 2005, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan called on governments north and south to see the implementation of the MDGs as a minimum requirement. Without at least that minimal level of poverty alleviation, he said, conflicts within and between states could spiral so far out of control that even a strengthened and reformed United Nations of the future would not be able to control the threats to international peace and security." The U.S. has chosen Bolton to go in and stop these reforms, and cripple the U.N. and it is the poor who will suffer for it.
Please read this entire article. The excerpts don't do it justice. I know what is happening elsewhere is heartbreaking, and I realize we may all be in "tragedy overload". But, I sincerely believe that is what the Bush administration is hoping for, at this point. If they can get us so disgusted that we look away for even a moment, this is the sort of thing they will pull every time.
The next time you stop to wonder why the rest of the world hates us... despises who we are and what we stand for... remember the conduct of Bush and his morally bankrupt administration as they arrogantly push their agenda down the throats of the rest of the world, and in our names!
A Declaration Of WarPhyllis Bennis
August 31, 2005
Excerpt:
The Bush administration has declared war on the world.
The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda that will culminate at the September 2005 United Nations summit don’t represent U.N. reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move that could strengthen the United Nations or international law. The upcoming summit was supposed to focus on strengthening and reforming the U.N. and address issues of aid and development, with a particular emphasis on implementing the U.N.'s five-year-old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Most assumed this would be a forum for dialogue and debate, involving civil society activists from around the world challenging governments from the impoverished South and the wealthy North and the United Nations to create a viable global campaign against poverty and for internationalism.
But now, there’s a different and even greater challenge.
This is a declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort between all three of those elements to challenge the Bush administration juggernaut.> snip
The Bush administration has given the United Nations what it believes to be a stark choice: adopt the U.S. changes and acquiesce to becoming an adjunct of Washington and a tool of empire, or reject the changes and be consigned to insignificance.But the United Nations could choose a third option. It should not be forgotten that the U.N. itself has some practice in dealing with U.S. threats. President George W. Bush gave the U.N. these same two choices once before—in September 2002, when he threatened the global body with "irrelevance" if the U.N. did not embrace his call for war in Iraq. On that occasion, the United Nations made the third choice—the choice to grow a backbone, to reclaim its charter, and to join with people and governments around the world who were mobilized to say no to war. It was the beginning of eight months of triumph, in which governments and peoples and the U.N. stood together to defy the U.S. drive toward war and empire, and in doing so created what The New York Times called "the second super-power."
This time, as before, the United States has threatened and declared war on the United Nations and the world.Entire Article:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050831/a_declaration_of_war.phpTC
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