A Double-Faced Tirade On Iraq

The last time -- and only time -- the United States came before the United Nations to accuse a radical Third World government of threatening the security of the United States through weapons of mass destruction was in October 1962. In face of a skeptical world and Cuban and Soviet denials, U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson presented dramatic photos clearly showing the construction of nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. While the resulting U.S. military blockade and brinkmanship was not universally supported, there was little question that the United States had the evidence and that the threat was real.

Despite vastly improved reconnaissance technology in the subsequent forty years, President George W. Bush, in his long-anticipated speech before the United Nations, was unable to present any clear proof that Iraq currently has weapons of mass destruction or functioning offensive delivery systems.

Yet lack of credible evidence was only one of the problems with the president's speech.

For example, his comparison with the League of Nation's failure to stand up before Japanese, Italian and German aggression in the 1930s is completely anhistorical. The Axis powers were heavily industrialized countries that had conquered vast stretches of Europe, Asia and Africa. Today's Iraq, by contrast, is an impoverished Third World country that for twelve years has been under the strictest sanctions in world history and has long since been forced to withdraw from neighbors it once briefly occupied.

President Bush also asserted that Iraq was poised to march on other countries back when it seized Kuwait in 1990 -- a charge originally made by his father -- to demonstrate the need for unilateral American initiatives. This claim, however, has long since been disproven by subsequently released satellite photos that showed less than one-third the number of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait than claimed by the United States and that -- rather than massing on the border as alleged -- they were actually digging in to defensive position around Kuwait City.

Virtually every delegate representing the world's nations present at the President's speech must have recognized the brazen act of hypocrisy in citing findings by the UN Human Rights Commission on Iraq, whose reports criticizing the human rights records of American allies have often been summarily dismissed by U.S. officials.

Double standards were most apparent, however, in President Bush's stress on the importance of enforcing UN resolutions.

The list of UN Security Council resolutions violated by Iraq cited by President Bush pales in comparison to the list of UN Security Council resolutions currently being violated by U.S. allies. Not only has the United States not suggested invading these countries, the U.S. has blocked sanctions or other means of enforcing them and even provides the military and economic aid that helps make these ongoing violations possible.

For example, in 1975, the UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding that Morocco withdraw its occupation forces from the country of Western Sahara and that Indonesia withdraw its occupation forces from East Timor. However, then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan later bragged that, "The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999 after 24 years of U.S.-backed occupation. Moroccan forces still occupy Western Sahara, however, with the Bush Administration supporting Morocco's defiance of subsequent UN Security Council resolutions that simply call for an internationally supervised referendum by the Western Saharan population to determine the fate of their desert nation.