Bush Bombs at the United Nations

Certainly not an earth shattering headline, but disturbing nonetheless. The lack of love between George Bush and the United Nations is an old “dog-bites-man” story. Having put haters like John Bolton at the helm of the U.S. delegation, Bush’s in your face “go fuck yourself” hostility to all things UN is no secret.

But today’s performance in New York set a new low even for the Bush Administration. Except for tepid applause when Bush was introduced and when he left the podium, no one clapped. Not even our allies. The world has caught on to the George Bush propaganda game and declines to show him a modicum of respect.

Bush’s efforts to wrap himself in the aura of AIDS prevention, feeding hungry children, rescuing refugees in Darfur, and restoring freedom in Myanmar fell flat. There was a time when the United States could stand proudly before countries like Cuba, Myanmar, Sudan, and Iran and lecture them on human rights and democracy. But in the wake of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret renditions and kidnappings of innocent Arab men, flaunting the UN Declarations on Human Rights, the creation of a million plus refugees in Iraq (and the deaths of hundreds of thousands), and the suspension of habeus corpus America has pissed away its credibility.

America’s moral authority is gone. Our credibility in talking about foreign threats and the need to respect human rights is zippo. What is truly appalling about this development is that we have aligned ourselves in practice with those very regimes we so vigorously condemn. In the past, authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, would justify their right to detain people without worrying about due process because they defined those individuals as terrorists who threatened the state and the security of their people. From their standpoint, all was fair when it came to protecting the nation. Security of the people was paramount, and human rights and civil liberties be damned in the face of perceived threats. More