{"id":1176,"date":"2011-05-12T06:54:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T13:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/?p=1176"},"modified":"2011-05-12T07:04:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T14:04:44","slug":"do-you-really-feel-comfortable-in-this-type-of-world-you-are-creating-mr-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/?p=1176","title":{"rendered":"Do you really feel comfortable in this type of world you are creating Mr.Obama?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I would love the chance to give advice to Obama:)
\nIt’s not going to happen of course because I am only a simple artist. But ……. I do wish I could voice my concerns about the world I live in.
\nI have read mountains of information over the past fifteen years about world conflict.
\nThe most important thing I have learned is that international law is the most important basis for what we might call “civilized societies”. Without it, we have chaos and anarchy and either one makes for a frightening world.
\nIf we are not going to adhere to existing laws then there certainly is no point in creating new ones.
\nSupporting international laws in good faith should be the basis for everything.
\nYou have to support these laws fully and not just say you believe in them with a “wink wink”.There should be no wiggle room.
\nFor example: During the many years of sanctions on Iraq, I watched Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Mr. Lloyd Axworthy enforce sanctions that were causing the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of children because of the way sanctions were crippling Iraq in every way possible. All the leaders knew that this was happening but chose to ignore the reports coming in from people on the ground such as UNICEF and the Red Cross Red Crescent societies among many others.
\nThose children had rights to basic things and the acts of our government leaders were denying them those rights. (According to a 2002 Unicef report, several hundred thousand people died as a direct result of those sanctions.)I was briefed on that report in Baghdad in 2002 and yet Mr. Axworthy’s office refused to meet with me to learn what I had learned. (At the same time, CISIS sent someone to my home to confront me and demanded to know why I had been in Iraq).
\nMy point is that we shouldn’t ignore international law when it suits us. (By the way, the whole reason that the sanctions were placed on Iraq was because Iraq would not “prove” that it didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Funnily enough…. our governments never asked… how do you prove you don’t have something.)
\nAnd now we have the killing of Osama Bin Laden…. without a trial. The assassination and the decision to kill him by entering another countries sovereign space without permission. And all this carried out by one country, without a world court.
\nAnd we also have a similar case in Libya. A small handful of countries deciding that it is somehow lawful to assassinate the leader of a country where war has not been declared on the basis of a “wink wink” policy.
\nIs this international law?
\nDo you really feel comfortable in this type of world you are creating Mr.Obama?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

I would love the chance to give advice to Obama:) It’s not going to happen of course because I am only a simple artist. But ……. I do wish I could voice my concerns about the world I live in. I have read mountains of information over the past fifteen years about world conflict. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1201,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions\/1201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derykhouston.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}