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18th December 2002


Today the UK Government announced plans to put the UK on war alert 'just in case' the US decides to invade Iraq. There is no 'just in case', they will invade, and they will soon. Washington are increasingly making noises about 'irregularities' in the Iraqi's declaration of their existing weapons programmes, a declaration that the rest of the US's so-called allies haven't even been allowed to see (undoubtedly to hide embarrassing evidence regarding America's complicity in the creation of Iraq's WOMD in the first place.)

All this, of course, after America threatened and bullied its way to UN resolution 1414, regarding the re-admission of weapons inspectors, in the first place, by making it quite clear that any non-permanent member of the Security Council daring to vote according to their consciences and their own nation's best interests would find that any military and financial aid from the US would suddenly dry up. Mauritius, for example, who gained a place on the Security Council in 2001 under US sponsorship, are given US aid on the condition that they "[do] not engage in activities contrary to US national security or foreign policy interests", meanwhile all but one of the 10 current non-permanent members are heavily reliant on US aid for various purposes, notably Columbia's receipt of hundreds of millions of $US ,supposedly part of the phoney "War on Drugs."

Sounds far-fetched? Then consider the case of Yemen, who saw their entire $70 million aid budget withdrawn virtually overnight after daring to vote against a US backed resolution regarding the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Yemeni Ambassador was warned before the vote, that "it would be the most expensive 'no' vote you would ever cast"

Of course, when the America's disgraceful voting record at the UN is concerned, perhaps these facts should come as no surprise to us. We are talking, after all, about a nation who consistently uses its veto to back the brutal Israeli repression of the Palestinian people, a nation that has voted against such 'dangerous' resolutions as 38/25 which "reaffirms the sovereign and inalienable right of every State to choose its economic and social system in accordance with the will of its people, without outside interference in whatever form it takes", or 38/124 which "affirms that a primary aim of international co-operation in the field of human rights is a life of freedom and dignity for all peoples and for each human being"

This is also a nation whose Ambassador to the UN at the time of the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia, James Moynihan, later sickeningly boasted in his memoirs "The Department of State desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective. This task was given to me and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."

If the US is the last hope of freedom and democracy, then God help us all.