Daily Times

It says a lot, surely, that United Nation’s (UN’s) latest report on drone strikes spoke at length – almost half of it – about the killing of the famous Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, General Qassem Soleimani, in Iraq in January this year along with an Iraqi commander and about a dozen other people.

More surprisingly still, the UN has finally gathered the will to call a spade a spade, it seems, and denounced the attack as willful murder and an arbitrary killing, which of course is a clear violation of international human rights law. It also said that since the Iraqi government was not informed in advance, the attack also violated the sovereignty of the country.

Yet however much a shift in the UN’s way of doing things all this suggests, the day is sadly very far when any international body would be able to make the US pay for its many war crimes and human rights violations. General Soleimani’s killing provides the perfect example. It happened because Iran did what nobody is supposed to do to a sole superpower; that is defy it. There is no possible way in the world that Iran can be a threat to the American nation, militarily or economically. It is a problem because it stands in the way of Israel’s ambitions in the Middle East, and since most campaigns in Washington are heavily financed and influenced by the powerful Jewish lobby, which is hardly a secret any longer, everybody knows just why Iran has been sanctioned and why its leaders are always in Washington’s crosshairs.

Iraq’s case is different but it teaches the same lesson. The Americans literally destroyed that country because a hunch, which very few people believed at the time and was ultimately proved wrong, that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was used to remove a head of state of an oil rich country that refused to do business with the so called developed western world.

It just didn’t matter that a few million people got killed in the process. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, whatever sort of leader he might have been, was also cut by a crowd in broad daylight for similar reasons. And it’s just a sad, pathetic fact that everybody in the world knows about the real motives behind these wars, which is to secure the world’s resources and exercise influence over key geographical routes, yet everybody is forced to fall in line and pay lip service to all the lies that are used to justify all the barbarity.

The UN’s call about drone strikes, openly questioning America’s decisions, is still a welcome step forward. *