moderate libertarian
09-15-2011, 10:32 PM
Do you think 9/11 and ongoing multi trillion dollars wars spending/resulting economic crisis would've occured if US had not vetoed following UN Resolution in 1982 and had cut off foreign aid to all middle east dictators/countries including Israel?
While reading news of Obama veto threat of upcoming Palestinian Statehood UN bid on Sep 23rd , came across this old news that relates to another NYT article that was published few days ago.
The Bush administration and British government have repeatedly blamed France's threatened veto for the failure to secure a second UN resolution authorising military action against Iraq.
What Washington has failed to mention is its own veto over many years to block initiatives such as opposition to apartheid South Africa, and even the prohibition of chemical weapons. Below is a partial list of UN resolutions vetoed by the US since 1972.
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon condemned. Shooting of 11 Muslims at a shrine in Jerusalem by an Israeli soldier condemned.
Israel must withdraw from the Golan Heights. Apartheid condemned. Setting up of a world charter for ecological protection.
Prohibition of chemical and bacteriological weapons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/20/iraq.usa
September 8, 2011
The Cycle of Revenge
Bin Laden then reveals the extraordinary fact that the idea for 9/11 originated in his visual memory of the 1982 Israeli bombardments of West Beirut’s high-rise apartment blocks. He recalls his intense reaction to seeing images of the destroyed towers there and formed the following notion: “It occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America.” (“Missile into towers,” he might have whispered; the idea stuck.) The Sept. 11 attacks, which most of us remember as a series of visual images, repeatedly televised and published, originate with an earlier series of images. For Bin Laden, there was a strange kind of visual justice in 9/11, the retributive paying back of an image for an image, an eye for an eye.
Opposites attract — the awful violence of 9/11 is justified by Al Qaeda as an act of revenge that in turn justifies the violence of America’s and Bush’s revenge. My point is that revenge is an inevitably destructive motive for action. When we act out of revenge, revenge is what we will receive in return. The wheel of violence and counterviolence spins without end and leads inevitably to destruction
This is exactly what Bin Laden hoped to bring about. He admits that Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the 9/11 attacks, while estimating that the United States lost, at the lowest estimate, $500 billion in the event and the aftermath. He even does the math, “That makes a million American dollars for every Al Qaeda dollar, by the grace of God Almighty.” He concludes, ominously, “This shows the success of our plan to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy, with God’s will.”
Like it or not (I don’t like it at all), Bin Laden had a point. The last 10 years of unending war on terror has also led, at least partly, to the utter financial precariousness that we see at every level of life in the United States: federal, state, city and individuals laden with debt. We are bankrupt.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/the-cycle-of-revenge/
There is some talk that an Obama veto could be overridden by UN using some special procedures. In looking up, this is the only US veto I found that had been overridden:
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act
President Ronald Reagan vetoed the law but was overridden by Congress (by the Senate 78 to 21, the House by 313 to 83). Reagan stated that he believed that the law's punitive sanctions would lead to more violence and more repression in South Africa[citation needed]. In the week leading up to the vote, President Reagan appealed to members of the Republican Party for support, but as Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. would state, "For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America".[3] This override marked the first time in the twentieth century that a president had a foreign policy veto overridden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act
While reading news of Obama veto threat of upcoming Palestinian Statehood UN bid on Sep 23rd , came across this old news that relates to another NYT article that was published few days ago.
The Bush administration and British government have repeatedly blamed France's threatened veto for the failure to secure a second UN resolution authorising military action against Iraq.
What Washington has failed to mention is its own veto over many years to block initiatives such as opposition to apartheid South Africa, and even the prohibition of chemical weapons. Below is a partial list of UN resolutions vetoed by the US since 1972.
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon condemned. Shooting of 11 Muslims at a shrine in Jerusalem by an Israeli soldier condemned.
Israel must withdraw from the Golan Heights. Apartheid condemned. Setting up of a world charter for ecological protection.
Prohibition of chemical and bacteriological weapons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/20/iraq.usa
September 8, 2011
The Cycle of Revenge
Bin Laden then reveals the extraordinary fact that the idea for 9/11 originated in his visual memory of the 1982 Israeli bombardments of West Beirut’s high-rise apartment blocks. He recalls his intense reaction to seeing images of the destroyed towers there and formed the following notion: “It occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America.” (“Missile into towers,” he might have whispered; the idea stuck.) The Sept. 11 attacks, which most of us remember as a series of visual images, repeatedly televised and published, originate with an earlier series of images. For Bin Laden, there was a strange kind of visual justice in 9/11, the retributive paying back of an image for an image, an eye for an eye.
Opposites attract — the awful violence of 9/11 is justified by Al Qaeda as an act of revenge that in turn justifies the violence of America’s and Bush’s revenge. My point is that revenge is an inevitably destructive motive for action. When we act out of revenge, revenge is what we will receive in return. The wheel of violence and counterviolence spins without end and leads inevitably to destruction
This is exactly what Bin Laden hoped to bring about. He admits that Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the 9/11 attacks, while estimating that the United States lost, at the lowest estimate, $500 billion in the event and the aftermath. He even does the math, “That makes a million American dollars for every Al Qaeda dollar, by the grace of God Almighty.” He concludes, ominously, “This shows the success of our plan to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy, with God’s will.”
Like it or not (I don’t like it at all), Bin Laden had a point. The last 10 years of unending war on terror has also led, at least partly, to the utter financial precariousness that we see at every level of life in the United States: federal, state, city and individuals laden with debt. We are bankrupt.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/the-cycle-of-revenge/
There is some talk that an Obama veto could be overridden by UN using some special procedures. In looking up, this is the only US veto I found that had been overridden:
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act
President Ronald Reagan vetoed the law but was overridden by Congress (by the Senate 78 to 21, the House by 313 to 83). Reagan stated that he believed that the law's punitive sanctions would lead to more violence and more repression in South Africa[citation needed]. In the week leading up to the vote, President Reagan appealed to members of the Republican Party for support, but as Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. would state, "For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America".[3] This override marked the first time in the twentieth century that a president had a foreign policy veto overridden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Anti-Apartheid_Act