And We Wonder Why They Don’t Trust Us…
By Hey, remember that time we sold some weapons to terrorist Iran and gave the money to some terrorists in Nicaragua, all the while claiming that we’d never negotiate with terrorist? That was super, wasn’t it?
Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.
The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.
This is the same crew that argued we needed to invade Iraq because the sanction system was going to collapse. Then, immediately after putting together a strong sanction regime against North Korea and carefully reminding everyone of the importance of maintaining such restrictions, we violate it ourselves.
Even John Bolton saw through this one:
“To make it clear to everyone how strongly we feel on this issue we should have gone to the Ethiopians and said they should send it back,” said Mr. Bolton, who added that he had been unaware of the deal before being contacted for this article. “I know they have been helpful in Somalia, but there is a nuclear weapons program in North Korea that is unhelpful for everybody worldwide.”
When Bolton is making sense, things really aren’t looking good. That this deal went through in an effort to facilitate the invasion of Somalia, an operation that is increasingly collapsing into disaster, only adds insult to injury. I guess this helps explain why Chucky Krauthammer and the whole neocon gang don’t believe in multilateralism; they simply don’t plan to ever follow the rules themselves. But it does rather put claims about French, German, and Russian violation of the sanctions regime against Iraq in a truly absurd light.