On February 22, the boss of the Council On Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass, cited the so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine in response to the situation in Venezuela.
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What the Maduro regime is doing to the people of Venezuela is inconsistent with the obligations that come with being a sovereign state. The time has come for the UN or OAS or Lima Group to consider how to apply the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. https://t.co/Ppum6DJaXS
— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) February 22, 2019
R2P was engineered by the United Nations to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Of course, this policy is selectively enforced.
For instance, while the UN has pointed to Israel as a serial violator of R2P, no action has been taken to curb its ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, certainly not sanctions or an invasion of Israel.
“If ever there was a group in need of protection from war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing it is the Palestinians,” writes Stephen Gowans for Global Research. “And yet the Palestinians receive little outside help, relying on themselves, for the most part, for whatever little protection they can provide. Realpolitick prevents them from falling within the ambit of the responsibility to protect doctrine, the idea that ‘the international community,’ that is, Western governments led by the United States, should intervene in other countries to prevent genocide, mass killings and massive human rights abuses. Responsibility to protect (R2P) has given rise to campaigns for humanitarian intervention in Darfur, Myanmar and Zimbabwe, but not Gaza or the West Bank.”
Moreover, this highly selective double standard does not apply to the United States and its so-called war on terror against manufactured enemies.
“The most extreme expressions of this cognitive dissonance occurred during the Obama administration, when the notion of U.S. exceptionalism was used to justify continuing the barbarism of the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror,” explains Ajamu Baraka, the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace. “With this justification and the outrageous assertion that it was defending democracy, the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination committed crimes against humanity and war crimes that resulted in the deaths of millions, while millions more were displaced and ancient cities, nations and peoples were destroyed.”
A WIN/Gallup International survey of people in 65 countries conducted in 2014 found most of those surveyed consider the US the greatest threat to world peace, followed by Pakistan (now apparently at war with India), and China.
Richard Haass is naturally a hypocrite and his tweet reveals what the ruling elite want for Venezuela—a return to the status quo before Hugo Chávez: all the nation’s wealth owned by a small oligarchic elite and parceling out of its vast oil reserve to transnational corporations.
In 1995, before Chávez’s ascension, the poverty rate in Venezuela stood at 55%. As the chart below shows, in 1999 extreme poverty was at 23.4%.
When the geopolitical ignoramus Donald Trump and his foreign policy handlers—Pence, Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams—talk about “democracy,” they are talking about returning Venezuela to its vassal state with accompanying mass poverty and disenfranchisement.
The people of Venezuela know this and are ready to fight against the neoliberal diktat of poverty and international bankster imposed debt.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.
Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Tehran Times
