<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>The ugly Americans
<BR>Don't blame it all on Bush -- the world's grievances against the U.S. have
<BR>been stewing for a long time.
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<BR>
<BR>By Ian Williams
<BR>
<BR>May 8, 2001 | NEW YORK -- Last week's ouster of the United States from the
<BR>United Nations Human Rights Commission has turned into a political Rorschach
<BR>test for politicians and editorialists from left to right, who have read
<BR>their own domestic prejudices into this inky blot on American diplomacy. In
<BR>fact, the U.S. deserved to lose the seat, even if countries like Sudan
<BR>certainly did not deserve to win.
<BR>
<BR>Some Democrats have seen the vote as a particular rebuff to the Bush
<BR>administration and its attitude. But defeat should really be seen as the
<BR>result of a long-standing American neglect of diplomacy. Certainly, the Bush
<BR>administration has made some embarrassing mistakes: Picking a major campaign
<BR>contributor who does not speak French to serve as U.S. ambassador to France
<BR>was unfortunate. So was the failure to push the appointment of the U.S.
<BR>ambassador-designate to the United Nations, John Negroponte, through the
<BR>Senate. Many of the diplomats at the United Nations complained of being taken
<BR>for granted by a low-level, low-energy U.S. campaign for the
<BR>rights-commission seat.
<BR>
<BR>And there are indeed key multilateral issues on which the White House
<BR>attitude has annoyed other countries: treaties on child soldiers, land
<BR>mines, the Kyoto emissions agreements, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
<BR>and the threat that the nuclear missile defense (NMD) poses to nuclear
<BR>disarmament treaties. But most differences between the Clinton and Bush
<BR>administrations have been in the spin of their rhetoric rather than in
<BR>pragmatic reality. Clinton fudged on NMD, for instance, keeping the program
<BR>alive. And he signed the ICC explicitly to keep open the possibility of
<BR>subverting it, not so the U.S. would implement it. Indeed, while
<BR>editorialists harrumphed in horror at countries like Sudan, China and Libya
<BR>being on the Human Rights
<BR>Commission without the United States, they ought to have remembered that the
<BR>U.S., alone among democratic states, joined this small select band of
<BR>recidivist human rights violators in voting against the Rome Treaty on the
<BR>ICC. And it was not, as some of the headlines implied, these "rogue"
<BR>countries that defeated the United States for the Human Rights Commission,
<BR>but France, Austria and Sweden, which were the successful contestants for the
<BR>West European and other seats.
<BR>Both the Bush and Clinton administrations' double standards on the ICC
<BR>epitomized why the U.S. lost the support of enough allies to lose the seat.
<BR>The bipartisan American position is that the ICC should only apply to
<BR>non-Americans, because we don't do things like that, and if we do, we deal
<BR>with it ourselves. Of course, the families of those killed by former Sen. Bob
<BR>Kerrey and his Navy SEALs at Thanh Phong might disagree with that. On the
<BR>issue of U.S. arrears in paying U.N. dues, Clinton was little better. Despite
<BR>eight years of rhetorical support for the United Nations, neither he nor his
<BR>secretaries of state secured payment of arrears, though last year they cut a
<BR>deal that has yet to be implemented. Even on the appointment of an ambassador
<BR>to the U.N., the Clinton administration left Richard Holbrooke dangling in
<BR>the wind for almost a year before sitting him in the U.S. seat in the
<BR>Security Council. And while the vote has been widely depicted as a U.N.
<BR>rebuke to the Bush administration, in fact, Kofi Annan and his team seem very
<BR>happy with the relationship with this White House, and even more so with
<BR>Colin Powell and the State Department. It must be a relief not to be hectored
<BR>by Madeleine Albright. Both administrations needed to contend with die-hard
<BR>isolationists on Capitol Hill, but if anything, Bush and Powell have been
<BR>doing a better job of controlling the dinosaurs than their predecessors.
<BR>
<BR>Predictably, the Republican right saw the U.S. failure to win back its
<BR>rights-commission seat as yet another reason to renege on America's debt to
<BR>the United Nations, thus reinforcing the very attitude that helped lose even
<BR>allies' votes for the American rights-commission candidacy. Almost as
<BR>parochially, the United Nations Association sees the vote as a setback to its
<BR>efforts to win support for the organization in Washington, and is calling
<BR>upon one of the Europeans who won a seat to stand down in favor of the United
<BR>States. This is unlikely to happen. There are good reasons why the U.S. lost,
<BR>quite apart from Chinese or Cuban malice. Three years ago, under precisely
<BR>similar circumstances, tiny New Zealand was bullied into standing down from
<BR>the U.N.'s budget committee to make way for a defeated U.S. candidate. In
<BR>return, Washington promised that the arrears of some $1.5 billion would be
<BR>paid. They have not been.
<BR>
<BR>At the end of last year, that money still unpaid, U.S. Ambassador Holbrooke
<BR>secured a reduction in U.S. assessments in return for payment of some, and
<BR>eventually all of the arrears. Almost half a year later, with no check in
<BR>sight, last week a House Committee vote to remove the Bush-imposed
<BR>restriction on abortion counseling by international agencies that get U.S.
<BR>family planning aid led to yet another predictable call by some congressmen
<BR>to hold up the long, long overdue payment. Defenders of human rights who
<BR>think the U.S. is being punished for its firm principles will have to explain
<BR>to the rest of the world why Cuba can do no right, but Israel can do no
<BR>wrong, as far as U.S. delegations are concerned. European envoys are quite
<BR>prepared to support investigations of human rights violations in Cuba, but
<BR>not as part of a feud ultimately engineered by unsavory Cuban exile groups in
<BR>Florida. They are often prepared to temper the excesses of the Arab rhetoric
<BR>against Israel, but they cannot, unlike the United States, bring themselves
<BR>to give a blanket veto in support of Ariel Sharon, the man who, until he won
<BR>the last Israeli election, was
<BR>remembered best as the architect of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and as
<BR>the facilitator of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. Of course, the U.S.
<BR>has no monopoly on hypocrisy, as a quick glance over France's record on Iraq
<BR>or Morocco and Western Sahara, would establish. However, Washington does have
<BR>a near-monopoly on arrogance and insouciance to what other countries think.
<BR>To blame the American defeat on maneuvers by totalitarian countries overlooks
<BR>the much more impressive and consistent human rights voting record of Sweden,
<BR>which won more votes than the U.S. So what can be done? A little more
<BR>self-criticism and a lot less self-righteousness would go a long way. The
<BR>incident reveals the weaknesses not just in the American position, but also
<BR>in the very mechanisms of American diplomacy. Our envoys are seen as one-way
<BR>emissaries, bearing ultimatums from Congress to the rest of the world.
<BR>Somehow the mechanism needs refining so that the positions of other
<BR>countries, especially allies, are taken into account, and given at least as
<BR>much weight as those of
<BR>domestic lobbies in the formulation of foreign policy. Until that happens,
<BR>the United States will continue to delude itself that it alone is right, and
<BR>the rest of the world wrong, on issue after issue. We can only hope that
<BR>occasional reality checks, like this defeat, make some people look again at
<BR>our foreign policy, and realize that alliances are reciprocal relationships.
<BR>
<BR>About the writer
<BR>Ian Williams is the United Nations correspondent for the Nation.
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
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