From Consortium News
President Trump speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 19, 2017.
(Image by (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)) Details DMCA
In discussing President Trump, there is always the soft prejudice of low expectations -- people praise him for reading from a Teleprompter even if his words make little sense -- but there is no getting around the reality that his maiden address to the United Nations General Assembly must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in America's relations with the global community.
Trump offered a crude patchwork of propaganda and bluster, partly delivered as a campaign speech praising his own leadership -- boasting about the relatively strong U.S. economy that he mostly inherited from President Obama -- and partly reflecting his continued subservience to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, perhaps most importantly, Trump's speech may have extinguished any flickering hope that his presidency might achieve some valuable course corrections in how the United States deals with the world, i.e., shifting away from the disastrous war/interventionist policies of his two predecessors.
Before the speech, there was at least some thinking that his visceral disdain for the neoconservatives, who mostly opposed his nomination and election, might lead him to a realization that their policies toward Iran, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere were at the core of America's repeated and costly failures in recent decades.
Instead, apparently after a bracing lecture from Netanyahu on Monday, Trump bared himself in a kind of neocon Full Monte:
--He repeated the Israeli/neocon tripe about Iran destabilizing the Middle East when Shiite-ruled Iran actually has helped stabilize Iraq and Syria against Sunni terrorist groups and other militants supported by Saudi Arabia and -- to a degree -- Israel;
--He again denounced the Iranian nuclear agreement whose main flaw in the eyes of the Israelis and the neocons is that it disrupted their plans to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, and he called for "regime change" in Iran, a long beloved dream of the Israelis and the neocons;
--He repeated the Israeli/neocon propaganda about Hezbollah as a terrorist organization when Hezbollah's real crime was driving the Israeli military out of southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an Israeli occupation that began with Israel's 1982 invasion;
--He praised his rush-to-judgment decision to bomb Syria last April, in line with Israeli/neocon propaganda against President Bashar al-Assad and partly out of a desire to please the same Washington establishment that is still scheming how to impeach him;
--He spoke with the crass hypocrisy that the neocons and many Israeli leaders have perfected, particularly his demand that "all nations ... respect ... the rights of every other sovereign nation" -- when he made clear that he, like his White House predecessors, is ready to violate the sovereignty of other nations that get in Official Washington's way.
A Litany of Wars
Just this century, the United States has invaded multiple nations without U.N. authorization, based on various "coalitions of the willing" and other subterfuges for wars of aggression, which the Nuremberg Tribunals deemed the "supreme international crime" and which the U.N. was specifically created to prevent.
Not only did President George W. Bush invade both Afghanistan and Iraq -- while also sponsoring "anti-terror" operations in many other countries -- but President Barack Obama acknowledged ordering military attacks in seven countries, including against the will of sovereign states, such as Libya and Syria. Obama also supported a violent coup against the elected government of Ukraine.
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