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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com UN/ - 20 September 2006 -- Just before he spoke today to the United Nations General Assembly, George W. Bush sent a discreet message to both the United Nations and the US Congress by quietly withholding payments, for the fifth consecutive year, to the United Nations 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. Missing from this year's speech was 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 worldview. This time
around, 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. Bush's
message was mainly addressed to the ostensible
silent majority of moderates in the 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 But while
Annan identified the core of many of the
problems in the Middle East, Bush's simplistic
assessment of "the bright future in the
broader Neither the
elections in "Some
have argued that the democratic changes we're
seeing in the In fact, his
argument is against himself: Most of his critics
will adduce that the actual and threatened
military intervention of the 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 forty-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 Bush's
invocation of the envoys of 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
for a long month of bombing and shelling from His remarks
on (After the
speech, Bush was spared close confrontation with
reality in the form of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad because the latter skipped the heads
of state lunch, since wine was being served
there. Reformed imbiber Bush suffered in
silence.) The one
redeeming aspect of Bush's cartoonish tour of
the 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 blocs and acquiescence in building the wall. Although
some UN observers looked hopefully for signs of
a realization that economic sanctions against
the democratically elected Palestinian Authority
has been counterproductive, they were not, in
fact, very visible. Hanan
Ashrawi, mentioned as possible foreign minister
of a new coalition Palestinian Authority,
criticized Bush's "very simplified view of
the Ashrawi
summed up the American 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 why 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 USAID administrator Andrew
Natsios as presidential special envoy to 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." And
if one were cynical, one would wonder whether
the interest in Darfur would outlast Bush's need
to mobilize conservative Christians, for whom ~~~~~~ MaximsNews.com, An Independent Voice from the U.N., provides commentary and analysis from leading world figures: King Abdullah II (Jordan), HRH Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein (Jordan), Sir Brian Urquhart, Hans Blix, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, Anwar Ibrahim, Bianca Jagger, Shashi Tharoor, Kerry Kennedy, Ian Williams, Stephen Schlesinger, Sen. Timothy E. Wirth, Marc Morial, Barbara Crossette, Amb. Jayantha Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), Amb. Pierre Schori (Sweden), Amb. William H. Luers, Mehri Madarshahi, Gloria Feldt, Jeffrey Laurenti, Rodney D. Smith, Rory O'Connor, Genevieve Stamper, Max Stamper and others.
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