VI. On Infringement upon Human Rights of Other Nations
In recent years, the United States has been practicing unilateralism in the international arena, indulging itself in military aggression around the world, brutal violation of sovereign rights of other nations. Its image has been tarnished bynumerous misdeeds of human rights infringement in other countries.
The United States tops the world in terms of military expenditure, and is the largest exporter of arms. Its military spendings for the 2004 fiscal year reaches 400.5 billion US dollars, exceeding the total amount of defense budgets of all other countries in the world in summation. The New York Times reported on September 25, 2003, that the United States export of conventional arms accounted for 45.5 percent of the world's arms trade volume in 2002, ranking the first in the world. And according to a Capitol report, the United States sold 8.6 billion US dollars worth of conventional arms to the developing nations, or 48.6 percent of all the arms procured by the developing world in 2002.
The United States has been active in sabre-rattling and launching wars. It is the No. One in terms of gross violation of other countries' sovereign rights and other people's human rights.The United States has resorted to the use of force against other countries 40 times since 1990s. Well-known US journalist and writer William Blum said in his recent book "Rouge State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" that since 1945, the United Stateshas attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, suppressed over 30 national movements, in which millions of peoplehave lost their precious lives and many more people been plunged into misery and despair.
In March 2003, without authorization by the United Nations, the United States unilaterally waged a large-scale war on Iraq based on its claim that the Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In its wanton and indiscriminate bombing of Iraq, many bombsof the US army were dropped on residential areas, shopping malls and civilian vehicles.
According to an article carried by Britain's Independent newspaper in January 2004 titled "George W. Bush and the real state of the Union," in the war on Iraq by then, more than 16,000 Iraqis had been killed, of which 10,000 were civilians (see the edition of Britain's Independent on Jan. 20, 2004). On April 2, 2003, the US armed forces attacked a Baghdad maternity hospital installed by the Red Crescent, a local market and other adjacent buildings for civilian use, claiming a lot of human lives and injured at least 25 people. Five cars were bombed and drivers were burned to death inside their cars (see the edition of San Diego Union-Tribune, U.S. on Aug. 5, 2003).
Based on a report by Britain's Independent newspaper on Feb. 8,2004, more than 13,000 civilians, many of them women and children,have been killed so far by the US army and its allied forces in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the wake of Sept. 11 incident in 2001, "making the continuing conflicts the most deadly wars for non-combatants waged by the West since the Vietnam War more than 30 years ago." Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to former US President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, said "it is a serious matter when the world's Number One superpower undertakes awar claiming a causus belli that turns out to have been false." (Washington Post on Feb. 2, 2004).