If it’s a clearer understanding of the post 9/11 world you ” re after, the speech United States President George W Bush did not give to the United Nations this week will shed more light than the speech he did give. What Bush did not say when he addressed the General Assembly on Tuesday – in support of a US resolution before the Security Council calling for an expanded UN role in Iraq – was that he and his generals were wrong to draw a direct link between the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda and Iraq in the aftermath of the terrorist strike in New York on September 11, 2001; to portray Iraq as a repository of ”weapons of mass destruction”; and to defy the UN’s caution and embark on a unilateral and pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein before weapons’ inspectors had finished their job. He then did not go on to say that, having made those miscalculations, he was wrong to assume the invading forces would be welcomed as liberators and that winning the peace would be easier than winning the war; wrong to present the campaign as an effective way to deal with global terrorism; wrong in his estimates of the costs involved – in both lives and cash; wrong in his initial refusal to allow the world body more than a humanitarian role in the reconstruction of Iraq; and wrong in assuming either Iraqis or the world would be content to see the US invasion force running the country to an agenda and on a timetable of its own choosing.
Demonstrably wrong, in fact, on just about every single important count – attested to by the fact that no ”smoking gun” was found linking Iraq to al-Qaeda and the World Trade Centre attacks; no weapons of mass destruction were found; more US soldiers have now died keeping the ”peace” than those killed in action; and that, far from having made the world a safer place, the Iraqi campaign has played a key role in triggering more murderous terror strikes and directly contributed to bringing the Middle East to what the Palestinians have described as the ”Gates of Hell”. Having offered the world the mea culpa that never came, Bush might then have earned a little more sympathy for what was presumably the main reason for his address – an appeal for support from world leaders for a US draft resolution before the Security Council that calls for financial and military help in rebuilding Iraq. So, why didn’t he give the speech? Why did he not admit the obvious and appeal once more for the world’s sympathy and understanding – which he had in abundance after September 11 but had squandered? The answer is that Bush was not, in reality, talking to world leaders, or their representatives gathered in the General Assembly to hear what he had to say.
The Essay on Our Crazy World – Technology, Iraq and Hiv/AIDS
Our world today is a crazy one, in many ways. It is so different to what it used to be. The advancement of technology, coupled with such things as HIV/AIDS or terrorism and America’s retaliation (and the Iraq War), combines to form a mind boggling, and somewhat depressing environment for one to live in. With DVD’s and DVD players, Playstations 1s and 2’s, and even ‘old ...
It is election year, and the president wants to keep his job for another four years. And so he used an occasion that demanded an act of statesmanship and tact on a world stage for bluff and bluster, and went vote-farming in the mean streets of US jingoism. Yet another measure of how the Bush administration has come to subvert the free world’s most powerful office.
