Saturday 30th of March 2024

rejecting american exceptionalism .....

rejecting american exceptionalism .....

 

In his farewell speech as Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan delivered a series of "lessons" which could be read as rebukes to the Bush/Cheney doctrine. Given at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, Annan's speech invokes Truman throughout, while conspicuously using Bush's name exactly zero times. The lessons:

·                     First, we are all responsible for each other's security.

·             Second, we can and must give everyone the chance to benefit from global prosperity.

·                Third, both security and prosperity depend on human rights and the rule of law.

·               Fourth, states must be accountable to each other, and to a broad range of non-state actors, in their international conduct.

·               My fifth & final lesson derives inescapably from those other four. We can only do all these things by working together through a multilateral system, & by making the best possible use of the unique instrument bequeathed to us by Harry Truman & his contemporaries, namely the United Nations.

Kofi Annan To US: Serve, Don't Dominate The World

Biting the dust

End of the neo-con dream
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent

The neo-conservative dream faded in 2006.

Iraq was meant to be the showcase for a New American Century

The ambitions proclaimed when the neo-cons' mission statement "The Project for the New American Century" was declared in 1997 have turned into disappointment and recriminations as the crisis in Iraq has grown.

"The Project for the New American Century" has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.