Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
Recent
Stories
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
30, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Handmaid
in Babylon: Annan, Vieira de Mello and the UN's Decline and Fall
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"One has to be careful," said
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late August, "not to
confuse the UN with the US." If the Secretary General had
taken his own advice, then maybe his Brazilian subordinate, Sergio
Vieira de Mello, might not have been so summarily blown to pieces
in Baghdad two days earlier. As things are, the UN still craves
the handmaid role the US desperately needs in Iraq as political
cover.
Whichever group sent that truck bomb
on its way decided that Vieira and his boss were so brazen in
moving the UN to play a fig-leaf role in the US occupation of
Iraq that spectacular action was necessary to draw attention
to the process the process. So the UN man handpicked by the White
House paid with his life.
To get a sense of how swift has been
the conversion of the UN into after-sales service provider for
the world's prime power, just go back to 1996, when the United
States finally decided that Annan's predecessor as UN Secretary
General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had to go.
In a pleasing foreshadowing of Annan's
plaintive remark cited above, Boutros-Ghali told Clinton's top
foreign policy executives, "Please allow me from time to
time to differ publicly from US policy." But unlike Annan
he did so, harshly contrasting western concern for Bosnia, whose
conflict he described as "a war of the rich" with its
indifference to the genocide in Rwanda and to horrifying conditions
throughout the third world. Then, in April 1996,he went altogether
too far, when he insisted on publication of the findings of the
UN inquiry which implicated Israel in the killing of some hundred
civilians who had taken refuge in a United Nations camp in Kanaa
in south Lebanon.
In a minority of one on the Security
Council the US insisted on exercising its veto of a second term
for Boutros-Ghali. James Rubin, erstwhile State Department spokesman,
wrote his epitaph in the Financial Times: Boutros-Ghali was "unable
to understand the importance of cooperation with the world's
first power." It took another foreign policy operative of
the Clinton era to identify Annan's appeal to Washington. Richard
Holbrooke later recalled that in 1995 there was a "dual
key" arrangement, whereby both Boutros-Ghali and the NATO
commander had to jointly approve bombing.Boutros-Ghali
had vetoed all but the most limited pinprick bombing of the Serbs,
for fear of appearing to take sides. But when Boutros-Ghali was
travelling, Annan was left in charge of the U.N. key. "When
Kofi turned it," Holbrooke told Philip Gourevich of the
New Yorker, "he became Secretary-General in waiting."
There was of course a further, very terrible service rendered
by Annan, in which, in deference to the American desire to keep
Sarajevo in the limelight, he suppressed the warnings of the
Canadan General Romeo Dallair that appalling massacres were about
to start in Rwanda.
Of course even in the UN's braver days,
there were always the realities of power to be acknowledged,
but UN Secretaries General such as Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant,
were men of stature. These days UN functionaries such as Annan
and the late Vieira, know full well that their careers depend
on American patronage. Vieira was a bureaucrat, never an elected
politician, instrumental in establishing the UN protectorate
system in Kosovo.
Then he was the beneficiary of an elaborate
and instructive maneuver, in which the US was eager to rid itself
of the inconvenient Jose Mauricio Bustani, another Brazilian,
from his post as head of the Organization for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons, the Chemical Weapons Convention's implementing
organization. Bustani was no US catspaw but adamant in maintaining
his organization's independence, and admired round the world
for his energy in seeking to rid the world of chemical weapons.
When UNSCOM withdrew from Iraq in 1998,
hopelessly compromised and riddled with spies, Bustani's OPCW
was allowed in to continue verification of destruction of WMDs.
The US feared Bustani would persuade Saddam Hussein to sign the
Chemical Weapons convention and accept inspections from Bustani's
organization, thus allowing the possibility of credible estimates
of Iraq's arsenal that might prove inconvenient to the US. Brazil
was informed that if it supported the ouster of Bustani, it would
be rewarded with US backing for Vieira's elevation to the post
of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, replacing another object
of US disfavor, Mary Robinson.
Vieira was duly appointed. Then, earlier
this year, the imperial finger crooked an urgent summons for
him to come to Washington for inspection by Condoleezza Rice.
Vieira made all the right. Desperate for UN cover in Iraq, the
Bush White House pressured Annan to appoint Vieira as UN Special
Envoy to Iraq.
Vieira installed himself in Baghdad where,
in cooperation with the US proconsul Paul Bremer, his priority
together a puppet Governing Council of Iraqis, serving at the
pleasure of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The council
was replete with such notorious fraudsters as Ahmad Chalabi.
It was formed on July 13. Nine days later Vieira was at the UN
in New York, proclaiming with a straight face that "we now
have a formal body of senior and distinguished Iraqi counterparts,
with credibility and authority, with whom we can chart the way
forward.we now enter a new stage that succeeds the disorienting
power vacuum that followed the fall of the previous regime."
Though it did not formally recognize
the Governing Council, the UN Security Council eagerly commended
this achievement. The Financial Times editorialized on August
19: "America's friends, such as India, Turkey Pakistan and
even France, which opposed the war, should stand ready to help.
But they need UN cover." In Baghdad, the next day, in the
form of the truck bomb, came an answer. Two days later, Kofi
Annan counselled on the dangers of confusing the UN with the
US.
If he meant what he said Annan should
obviously resign forthwith as the man who has done more than
any figure alive to equate the two. But who would imagine Africa's
Waldheim being capable of that?
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|