The upcoming General Assembly gives us the chance to reinvigorate that common purpose and refine the UNs ability to meet the challenges of a changed world. President Bush, Secretary Powell and the U.S. Mission to the UN are committed to making this years General Assembly a success, and we look forward to working with your government to that end. I would like to take this opportunity to outline for you our principal goals for this session.

That was the U.S. Delegation's opening for their "goals and intentions" brief to the United Nations last year.

Good call, kids. I've provided some highlights.

Re-energizing international counter-terrorism efforts

Keeping UN discussion of the Middle East constructive, not divisive

Supporting the New Partnership for development, especially with Africa

Working for a more efficient and effective UN Now this actually looks interesting

We look forward to the Secretary-Generals UN reform plan, which we hope will help make the UN leaner and more effective. During consideration of the revised 2002-3 UN budget, as well as the outline for the 2004-5 biennium, we will continue to stress the need for budget discipline. The budget will need to include a clear order of priorities, and identify programs and activities for elimination. Our goal is not cost cutting for cost-cuttings sake, but to direct UN resources away from obsolete, inefficient programs towards higher priorities.

Promoting human rights and democracy

We hope you will join us in seeking strong, accurate human rights resolutions on Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Cambodia, and Burma. We will also seek to co-sponsor resolutions promoting democracy, the rights of women, children, religious minorities, and other issues.

Other Issues

At this years General Assembly, the Sixth Committee will consider a proposal to ban human reproductive cloning. We do not think this goes far enough and would favor a complete ban on human cloning for any purpose. We hope that you will join us in calling for a total ban.

Sincerely,

John D. Negroponte

Recently, I've been trawling forums over here to get a handle on the German perspective on the war in Iraq. I've never physically met a German who supports the United States in Gulf War II, and that certainly isn't much different in the online world, either. Germans are not pacifists, as their image projects. For example, they have absoluttely nothing to say about the French colonialist intrusion the Ivory Coast. Nor are they particularly harsh in their criticism of China over Tibet. They strongly believed in the Bosnia/Kosovo intercessions. So what is it about the US/Iraq issue? Well, here's a few choice words from our "buddies", the germans. Read the bad news

When is it a war?

Huge explosions in the center of this fabled city, in its biggest market; American planes roar overhead; body parts litter the streets. Thousands of innocents die, and a nation seems on the verge of tearing itself apart with grief and rage. It's seeing itself as the innocent victim of an unprovoked war of aggression, racism, and hatred. Calls for revenge ring out among the nation's citizens, the press, the leaders.

Huge explosions in the center of this fabled city, in its biggest market; American planes roar overhead; body parts litter the streets. Thousands of innocents die, and a nation seems on the verge of tearing itself apart with grief and rage. It's seeing itself as the innocent victim of an unprovoked war of aggression, racism, and hatred. Calls for revenge ring out among the nation's citizens, the press, the leaders.

The world community is shocked by the barbarity of the attack, the total lack of justification, the loss of so many innocent lives at the whim of just one man. A few governments around the world support the brutal attack, in spite of the overall opinion of their populations, hungry for a slice of the power and respect its perpetrator commands.

United States, September, 2001. And you don't call that war?

There are four horsemen of the Apocalypse: Famine, War, Pestilence, and Jim. Three of these four are already gaining steam, with War in Iraq, Pestilence in southeast Asia, and Jim Burton in Evansville, Indiana. We have only to fear where a famine will pop up! Then, friends and neighbors, is the Apocalypse upon us!

But on War news, the Anti-war/Anti-american/Anti-Bush crowd is losing steam, and I say good riddance. Peace is all fine and dandy, and definitely what you want in Your Neighborhood, unless, of course, your neighborhood is downtown Basra. One thing you don't hear mentioned in the media, for example, are peace protests in Iraq. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's just not as good for news people as unsubstantiated reports of American Missiles hitting markets in Baghdad. Now that's good news. I just wish there were as many people who were critical of the United Nations' failure to defuse this situation as there were of the United States' failure to win over the Security [sic] Council.

A little history lesson for ya, as if I were the expert on the subject. (Hey, my URL, my forum)

When was the last time, I ask, that the United Nations did anybody any good?

Gulf War? Sorry, not a UN action. That was a coalition led by the US acting on a resolution by the Security Council (sound familiar?)

Bosnia? Buzz, wrong answer. The UN botched that one. NATO had to come in and save the day, led by...guess who! (The US, that's right!)

Somalia? Well, (a) that was indeed a UN-undertaking, from start to finish. And (b) They fucked that one up so badly, that most people still think it was a "unilateral" American operation, because no UN official wanted to mention it after 1997.

Rwanda? Ahh, Rwanda. Rwanda has a long and distinguished history in African culture. Unfortunately, African culture ended about the time the White People from Europe moved in and declared the people to be savages, and sold half the continent into slavery. The U.N. did nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda during the 1990s. Nothing. There's no oil in Rwanda, so there's no reason to pay any attention. They sat there and watched as thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of members of the warring tribes systematically wiped out their ethnically-chosen rivals.

Afghanistan? Well, Afghanistan was all Anglo-American. It was right. It was exactly as illegal or legal as Iraq, but nobody said anything bad about it. Why? Cause there ain't no oil in Afghanistan. Plus, the Russians hate Afghanistan, for obvious reasons.

Ivory Coast? Ivory Coast? What's that? Well, the Ivory Coast is a former french colony, that had themselves a little revolution about 5 years ago. Last year, the french sent in the troops to effect a regime change, i.e. to install a french-friendly government instead of the local-yokels. And, if I might mention it, they had little or (actually) no UN support for their actions. Just for a little side information, this is colonialism. This is imperialism. This a left-over of Europe's bloodthirsty colonial period. Think about that next time you hear anything about American Arrogance and Imperialism.

I'm gonna make an online quiz out of these questions, I tell ya.

You see, there's a big discrepancy in all this: Nobody argues when it's the U.N., and the U.N. don't care unless it's white people. Why has the U.N. never condemned Israel? Because they don't kill whitey. Why don't the U.N. committees condemn Palestine? Well, actually because Palestine isn't and never has been it's own country.

I'm no lawyer, but I've taken a little time to see what the other side is talking about these days, and to figure out for myself whether or not what the Americans and British and Australians and Italians and Spanish and Danish and Dutch are doing is illegal. I think it's documented enough that there are 16 resolutions from the U.N. Security Council that authorize military force against Saddam if he doesn't allow U.N. weapons inspectors to oversee the destruction of weapons*. That alone is enough to "legally" prosecute a war. But sometimes you need overwhelming reasons. Technically, and, dare I say, morally, the U.N. is required to prosecute Saddam under the 1948 Genocide Articles. You see, the segregation, and attempted genocide of the north-Iraq Kurds in 1988 is a crime against the U.N. Genocide Conventions. And those conventions state, under no uncertain terms, that perpetrators of genocide are to be dealt with by member states as criminals, and apprehended. That's not a justification for the War at all. It also isn't meant to be. It's meant to be yet another example of why the current structure of the U.N. does not work.

But, enough about that. It's boring. Like I said, shooting down antiwar sentiment is like shooting ducks in a barrel these days. I'm not really pro-war, but I really see absolutely no problem with going into Iraq and ousting Hussein.

In other news, the french surrendered to the Ivory Republic today.

[*] A common misconception is that the U.N. inspectors were there to find weapons of mass destruction. Actually, that's not the case at all. The existence of the weapons was already documented and acknowledged by the Iraqi regime. The resolutions call for the supervised destruction of the weapons, which are assumed by the U.N. to exist.