Fact-Checking Bush's UN Address

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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=3665

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"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst."

Notwithstanding the clear moral preference for democracy over dictatorship, this formula fails to withstand closer scrutiny. There are many dictators in the past and present – as nasty as they may have been toward their own people – who have not engaged in acts of aggression against other nations and have not supported terrorists. Furthermore, the United States – one of the world's oldest democracies – has demonstrated through its invasion of Iraq, as well as its earlier invasions of Panama, Grenada, and other countries, that it can certainly be "quick to choose aggression." Similarly, the decision by the Bush administration a few weeks ago to allow into the country a group of right-wing Cuban exiles who had been implicated in a series of attacks against civilian targets – including an attempt to set off a series of explosions in a crowded auditorium at a Panamanian university in 1998, and the blowing up of an airliner in Barbados in 1976 – as well as the active U.S. support for the Contra terrorists who attacked civilian targets in Nicaragua during the 1980s – demonstrate that democracies do indeed allow "terrorists in their midst."

"We're determined to prevent proliferation, and to enforce the demands of the world < demanding that nations > fully comply with all Security Council resolutions."

In reality, U.S. policy is not nearly as categorical as this statement implies. For example, since 1998, India and Pakistan have been in violation of UN Security Council resolution 1172, which calls upon these governments to cease their development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Since 1981, Israel has stood in violation of UN Security Council resolution 487, which calls upon that government to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States has repeatedly blocked the United Nations from enforcing those resolutions, even as it insisted that Iraqi non-compliance with similar resolutions required that the UN authorize an invasion of that country and the overthrow of its government. It appears that the Bush administration, like preceding Republican and Democratic administrations, is only concerned with UN resolutions regarding non-proliferation if the target of the resolution is a government they don't like. Such double standards make a mockery of law-based efforts toward non-proliferation, however, and will likely encourage, rather than discourage, regimes to develop weapons of mass destruction.

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