WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE !!! BUT WE WILL PUT IT OUT !!!
Posted on 09/03/2002 6:58:48 AM PDT by dead
Johannesburg: A year ago this month, the world stood still as it watched horrific images of America's iconic buildings on fire. Among the clichés that rolled off the tongues of pundits was that the world had changed forever.
And the world did change. The US became more arrogant and went about conducting foreign policy as if nobody else existed.
Combating terrorism suddenly became the most pressing issue on the world agenda. Xenophobia was legitimised as a security measure. Rogue states were invited back into the mainstream fold, as long as they threw their weight behind the "war on terrorism".
And multilateral institutions such as the UN and international protocols on human rights and the conduct of war were thrown out of the window as the US took charge of Planet Earth.
Whatever the barbaric agenda of the September 11 attackers was, they were successful for they managed to bring a sizeable chunk of the world's population to their level of barbarism.
The response of the US and its allies was wrong and could never be justified. Military action against an enemy whose location was unknown served only to satisfy the bloodlust of Americans.
A more appropriate response would have been to use available institutions to hunt down the criminals and - in the longer term - to remove the conditions that bred the men who flew the planes on September 11.
Instead, the US opted to return to the go-it-alone, either-you're-with-us-or-against-us approach.
That was evident in its conduct during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg this week. Swimming against the tide of world opinion, the US was the spoiler in the talks - even breaking ranks with traditional allies on issues of poverty alleviation and environmental protection.
It rejected the setting of targets for helping the developing world reduce the number of people without adequate sanitation. It wanted a 0% target for the share of renewable energy sources and refused to budge on issues of investment and financing development.
Now the US may think it is acting in its own best interests when it takes these steadfast positions, but that is a shortsighted view, as short-sighted as its blinkered pro-Israel view on the Middle East crisis.
As a result of globalisation, of which the US is the main champion, the world's borders are becoming meaningless. But globalisation has also led to yawning inequalities and the widening of the gap between the world's wealthy and poor people. It is in such conditions of inequality that resentment of the developed world flourishes and demagogues sprout. No matter how many cluster bombs the US drops on suspected terrorist bases, terrorism will be permanently contained only when global injustice is destroyed.
When US Secretary of State Colin Powell interacts with other heads of delegations, he must know that most of the word's people revile terrorism as much as he and his countrymen do.
He must know that they also hate the poverty that his country's policies and the practices of its corporations perpetuate.
Hopefully, he will begin to recognise America's myopia.
He must know that they also hate the poverty that his country's policies and the practices of its corporations perpetuate.
The US is the reason African nations are poor, apparently. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
You forgot the barf alert.
I wouldn't have signed my name to this shit either...
I prefer just removing the breeders...
How could I have been so wrong? Thank God the Johannesburg Sunday Times was here to set the record straight!!
I just wonder it the author wasn't Zimbabwe's Mugabe or Iraq's Hussein!!
WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE !!! BUT WE WILL PUT IT OUT !!!
Yeah the US corporations WANT poor people all over the world because they have money to buy goods and services then... Yess Sir them poor people sher are the best customers... umm... wait a minnit...
Giving anything but sympathy to poor nations only encourages them to become less self sufficient. Darwins theory of survival of the fittest applies. Without any further help, the problem nations will simply go away.
Don't give them a pass on their slave trade.
What the myopic, pro-poverty leftists at the Sunday Times failed to notice, despite their proximity to events, is the amazing frequency with which the United States (alone or nearly so among the rich nations) was standing with developing nations when it "[broke] ranks with traditional allies" and "[swam] against the tide of world opinion."
The global control freaks messed up by letting the poor little brown people come to the summit. They (helped by the United States) threw a monkey wrench into the works by oppossing the left's plan to keep them in their mud huts.
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