Washington fury over UN attack on Bush ‘hypocrites’
The deputy secretary-general of the United Nations was last night accused of making “a very, very grave mistake” after calling the Bush administration hypocrites who were feeding a right-wing anti-UN frenzy in middle America.
Washington’s ambassador to the UN responded with undisguised fury to a speech by Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general, in which he accused Washington of using the international body “almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool” while failing to defend it at home.
“Much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors, such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News,” Mr Malloch Brown said in a speech in New York on Tuesday. Depending on the UN while tolerating “too much unchecked UN-bashing and stereotyping” was “simply not sustainable”, he said. “You will lose the UN one way or another.”
John Bolton, the US envoy and an outspoken critic of the UN, called the comments “a very, very grave mistake”. He said he told the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, yesterday morning: “I’ve known you since 1989, and I’m telling you, this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time.” He called on the secretary-general to repudiate the speech.
guardian.co.uk
Not that he’s wrong or anything, just he shouldn’t have said it…
June 9th, 2006 at 11:38 am
I still am amazed as to how so many progressives(I should say white progressives who have not experienced the worst of the system and can’t see it for what it really is) still suck at the teet of some idealist vision they have of the UN. This is a UN that is located in the EMPIRE state, where colonial nations have the most sway and influence, that was created after WWII at the behest of colonial powers to help mange their new world order. Is the UN really “democratic” when it comes to the rights of non-white and “developing” nations?? The conduct of the UN forces in Haiti should make it very obvious as to how this organization deals with some of the worst sufferers of human rights injustices, which the UN claims to uphold and enforce. Like so many products of the “enlightened” western worldview, flowerly rhetoric and lip service to ideals such as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights really just boils down to the raw material of exploitation wearing a new hat. – these symbolic overtures in practice are just used as masks to hide behind.