NEW YORK - While US President George W
Bush's lackluster speech to the United Nations
General Assembly dominated US airwaves, half the
UN press corps was looking for a more topical
subject - where was Thai prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra, whose office back home was surrounded
by tanks? Due to speak on Wednesday initially, he
changed his slot to Tuesday evening, but he did
not turn up for the heads-of-state lunch and later
canceled his speech.
That was more
exciting than the US president's delivery. It was
missing some of the snide
innuendo and challenge of Bush's previous comments
on the United Nations, perhaps reflecting some
injection of reality into his unilateral world
view. This time, the president also refrained from
making ultimatums to the assembled delegations,
threatening action if they did not go along with
his administration's ideas of what was good for
them.
Just before he spoke, the president
sent a discreet message to both the United Nations
and the US Congress by quietly withholding
payments, for the fifth consecutive year, to the
UN Fund for Population Activities. The health of
hundreds of thousands of women and children will
be impaired - and many lives lost - as a result of
his pandering to the most prejudiced elements of
his conservative constituency, those who see no
problems in Wal-Mart building up China's currency
reserves but object to the UN's activities in
China, which they claim, in the teeth of a
complete lack of evidence, help fund abortions.
Bush's message was mainly addressed to the
ostensible silent majority of moderates in the
Middle East. But his words were as cushioned from
the cruelty of the real world as one would expect
from a US administration that is making
Panglossianism a state religion.
Up to a
point, the president was in harmony with Secretary
General Kofi Annan's address to the General
Assembly, in that both dwelt on the Middle East.
But while Annan identified the core of many of the
problems in that region, Bush's simplistic
assessment of "the bright future in the broader
Middle East" was such a caricature as to leave
some listeners chuckling. Neither the elections in
Egypt nor the municipal elections in Saudi Arabia
that he trumpeted offer any conclusive evidence of
the march of democracy.
"Some have argued
that the democratic changes we're seeing in the
Middle East are destabilizing the region. This
argument rests on a false assumption, that the
Middle East was stable to begin with," he said. In
fact, his argument is against himself: most of his
critics will adduce that the actual and threatened
military intervention of the US and Israel are not
infusions of democracy but destabilizing forces in
and of themselves.
But Annan had a firmer
grip on the truth in his address to the assembly
that preceded the president's. "As long as the
Security Council is unable to end this
[Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, and the now nearly
40-year-old occupation, by bringing both sides to
accept and implement its resolutions, so long will
our impartiality be questioned," he said. "So long
will our best efforts to resolve other conflicts
be resisted, including those in Iraq and
Afghanistan."
Bush's invocation of the
envoys of Iraq and Afghanistan seated in the
General Assembly as representing elected
governments, compared with when he spoke five
years ago, may be accurate. But he was silent on
the powerlessness of those governments actually to
govern. The Lebanese in particular are unlikely to
recognize his depiction of their "homes and
communities ... caught in the crossfire" - in
light of the Bush-supported blitz that was
actually mounted against their country. "We see
your suffering," the president said, but he failed
to explain why he did nothing to stop it during a
long month of bombing and shelling by Israel.
His remarks on Iran were also remarkable
for a selective view of reality. "Iran must
abandon its nuclear-weapons ambitions. Despite
what the regime tells you, we have no objection to
Iran's pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear-power
program. We're working toward a diplomatic
solution to this crisis," Bush noted, without
explaining why the UN's nuclear watchdog last week
reprimanded his administration for gross
exaggeration of the very slender evidence of an
actual weapons program.
After the speech,
Bush was spared close confrontation with reality
in the form of Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, because the latter skipped the
heads-of-state lunch, since wine was being served
there. Reformed imbiber Bush suffered in silence.
For his part in the reality check, in his
speech later on Tuesday, Ahmadinejad accused the
West of abusing the UN by refusing Iran the use of
the peaceful nuclear technology that Western
states enjoy. Indeed, as he pointed out, some of
them enjoy not-so-peaceful uses: "Some of them
have abused nuclear technology for non-peaceful
ends, including the production of nuclear bombs,
and some even have a bleak record of using them
against humanity."
In contrast, Iranian
nuclear programs are "transparent, peaceful and
under the watchful eyes of IAEA [International
Atomic Energy Agency] inspectors", he declared,
doubtless heartened by their recent rebuke of
Washington. Bush was not in the hall to listen to
the speech.
The one redeeming aspect of
Bush's cartoonish tour of the Middle East was that
he lowered the "terrorist" word count and more
often replaced it with his latest buzzword,
"extremism". But if this speech was addressed to
the people of the region, it was certainly one of
the most inept ever.
His invocation of a
Palestinian state that has "territorial integrity"
raises many questions, not least concerning his
previous green light for Israeli annexation of
settlement blocks and acquiescence in building the
wall separating the territories. Although some UN
observers looked hopefully for signs of a
realization that economic sanctions against the
democratically elected Palestinian Authority have
been counterproductive, they were not, in fact,
very visible.
Hanan Ashrawi, who has been
mentioned as possible foreign minister of a new
coalition Palestinian Authority, criticized Bush's
"very simplified view of the Middle East". Ashrawi
summed up the US president's speech, describing it
as "more of the same. It contained no concrete
proposals to deal with crucial issues, the
boundaries, the settlement ... Right now Kofi is
speaking out on the issues. I wish he had done it
earlier."
"A broken record" was the
similar description from one UN official. In fact
Annan, in yet another oblique, nuanced and hence
unrecognized critique of the Bush administration,
identified another very tangible reason the
president's invocations of democracy may generate
so much skepticism at the UN.
"Even the
necessary and legitimate struggle around the world
against terrorism is used as a pretext to abridge
or abrogate fundamental human rights, thereby
ceding moral ground to the terrorists and helping
them find new recruits," Annan said.
Bush
was on firmer ground on Darfur, announcing the
appointment of former United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) administrator
Andrew Natsios as presidential special envoy to
Sudan "to lead America's efforts to resolve the
outstanding disputes and help bring peace to your
land". But he pinned the strategy on the UN
peacekeeping troops going in, warning: "If the
Sudanese government does not approve this
peacekeeping force quickly, the United Nations
must act."
It will be interesting to see
what size of stick Natsios is issued for his
negotiations, or what form of diplomacy the White
House can use to persuade China to go along with a
more robust UN involvement. And if one were
cynical, one would wonder whether the interest in
Darfur would outlast Bush's need to mobilize
conservative Christians, for whom Darfur is a
defining issue, to vote for Republican candidates
in the mid-term elections.
Ian
Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War
on Military Families, Veterans and His Past,
Nation Books, New York.
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2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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