The Debacle in Durban: U.S. Was Right to Leave, But Really Shouldn’t Have Gone in the First Place

(Washington, D.C.): As the latest, appalling exercise in mob rule that passes for UN- sponsored multinational deliberations grinds towards its scheduled end-point in Durban, South Africa, it is well to reflect on where this meeting on racism (and other grievances) went wrong. Happily, two recent analyses — the first an editorial that appeared last week in the current New Republic, the second a column by Michael Kelly that appeared in Tuesday’s Washington Post — do much to help understand the serious flaws that all-but-guaranteed that no good would come of this meeting.

The first of these essays offers with respect to this conference a welcome and fully justified — if rather rare — endorsement of President Bush’s “unilateralism.” by a publication like the New Republic with left-of-center leanings on domestic policy. Its essence is summed up in the following passage:

Durban reminds us that the “international community” liberals love so much still amounts to little more than the sum of its parts, many of them brutal regimes that rule without the consent of those they govern. When it furthers the cause of peace, freedom, or justice, the United States has an obligation to stand with the international community. But standing apart from that community when its conclaves pollute public discourse–as the conference in South Africa is doing this week–should not be cause for self-flagellation. It should be a point of pride.

Mr. Kelly goes so far as to predict that the President’s unilateral action with respect the Durban goat-rope will prove to have sustained beneficial repercussions:

In the long term, walking out is likewise to the good. It is not healthy for the forces of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism to be allowed to persist in the idea that it is their proper role to whack the West, and that the West’s proper role is to sit there and take the whacking. It is healthy for the United States, as the leader of the West, to occasionally remind everyone that taking a hike is an option too. An occasional reminder of reality helps against the delusions of power that cause most wars. As George Bush might put it, guns don’t kill people, delusions do.

It is to be earnestly hoped that the Durban debacle will end whatever lingering “delusions” the American people may yet have harbored that their interests and equities can be safely entrusted to the hostile and sovereignty-sapping mercies of the mob that controls the UN.

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism, being held this week in Durban, South Africa, is an illuminating spectacle. Not for what it will accomplish–which is absolutely nothing–but for what it has already clarified, both at home and abroad. A few years ago, optimists thought the United Nations, and the gaggle of nongovernmental organizations that cluster around it, was finally realizing that democracy in Israel did not constitute a threat to human dignity and that rampant dictatorship in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East did.

The optimists were wrong; the United Nations and its acolytes are as morally obtuse today as they were the day the Berlin Wall fell. And in their denunciations of the Bush administration’s admirable decision not to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to this charade, more than a few American liberals have shown that they, too, remain frozen in amber.

Truth be told, the world does not need an anti-racism conference. Aids, corruption, debt, and illiteracy all constitute greater burdens on the world’s poor. But if anti-racism is to have any value at all, it must at least be viewed as a subset of the larger issue of human rights. In Durban, however, anti-racism is actually a bludgeon against human rights. At a planning session in Geneva last month, representatives from the non- governmental organizations attending the conference approved a declaration resolving that Israel–the only country in the Middle East where citizens freely choose their leaders–is “an apartheid, racist, and fascist state.” And–despite the presence in Durban of such freedom-loving countries as Sudan, Iran, China, and Zimbabwe–Israel is the only one singled out for abuse by the conference’s organizers. Not only will the human rights records of these execrable regimes be exempt from examination; many of them intend to use the conference to claim “reparations” from the United States. Third World dictatorships have long used America’s real and imagined deeds as an excuse to lock up, loot, and even murder their citizens. Now they’re using them as an excuse to shake down the United States. No one who knows anything about Africa’s postcolonial history can imagine that sending guilt checks to its thuggish and corrupt regimes will help the continent’s suffering masses one bit.

In fact, the agenda of the Durban conference is barely distinguishable from that of the first heady Third World rally, the 1955 Bandung Conference. All the recent talk about a “New Middle East” and an “African renaissance”–about the new post-cold-war respect for democracy and human rights–turns out to be just that: talk. Left to their own devices, the despotisms that litter Asia, Africa, and the Middle East quickly revert to the old pathologies, blaming others for predicaments of their own devising. Tellingly, the exceptions to this pattern–the regimes that offer their people more than just historical resentment–are also the ones that want little to do with the forthcoming show of farce in Durban. The president of democratic Senegal, for instance, calls reparations “absurd” and “insulting,” while democratic India has opposed the resolution castigating the Jewish state.

Alas, many liberals seem to think that the United States must attend international conferences as a matter of principle–no matter what principles those conferences actually propound. Democratic Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia speculates that the Bush administration is snubbing the conference because the White House is “just full of latent racists.” Jesse Jackson complains that Powell’s decision not to attend represents “a huge step backward toward isolationism.” Michael McClintock of Human Rights Watch gleans in the abstention evidence of “a larger trend toward unilateralism and not being bound by international fora and treaties.”
But there are greater sins than unilateralism, and cooperating with other nations in the name of hatred happens to be one of them–a point strangely lost on much of the American human rights industry. If anything, Durban reminds us that the “international community” liberals love so much still amounts to little more than the sum of its parts, many of them brutal regimes that rule without the consent of those they govern. When it furthers the cause of peace, freedom, or justice, the United States has an obligation to stand with the international community. But standing apart from that community when its conclaves pollute public discourse–as the conference in South Africa is doing this week–should not be cause for self-flagellation. It should be a point of pride.

Delegations from around the world have been meeting in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations for something called the World Conference Against Racism. From such a grand title, one might expect the conference to address all racism in all nations. One might think this, that is, if one was ignorant of the track record of these U.N. conferences, which have a long new-left history of serving as forums for the ritual whacking of the United States and its allies — above all for whacking one ally in particular: Israel.

Going into this year’s conference it was clear that Israel once again would enjoy most favored nation whacking status. President Bush warned against this, and his administration underscored this warning by declining to send Secretary of State Colin Powell, opting instead for a delegation of second-tier diplomats. The conference lived down to expectations, producing a draft resolution filled with what Powell properly called “hateful language” that singled out “only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse.” Specifically, the resolution expressed the conference’s “deep concern” over the “racist practices of Zionism . . . as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority.”

So Israel walked out, and so did the United States. And then, of course, came the usual chorus of carping, tut-tutting and deep regretting. Pakistan’s foreign minister said he was disappointed in the U.S. action. Sweden’s deputy industry minister said the United States “left the conference far too early, before the negotiations were concluded.” Italy’s La Stampa newspaper warned that the U.S. walkout “marks the beginning of a new Cold War.” A spokesman for the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party called the Bush decision “a gross mistake.” Canada’s chief delegate said the pullout “undoubtedly makes the work being undertaken in Durban that much more difficult.” U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the U.S. decision was “unfortunate.” Jesse Jackson, the chief delegate of the delegation from Jesse Jackson, said that the United States “should negotiate a change, not withdraw and run.”

This could go on forever. Actually, it has gone on forever, and it will go on forever. Which is precisely why walking out was such a good and necessary idea. This may sound like mere jingoism — if Jesse Jackson and the Canadians disapprove, it’s the right thing to do. But the case for walking is actually one on the merits. It works.

It works, first of all, in the short term. In Durban, all efforts by the polite European friends of Yasser Arafat failed dismally. Arafat himself delivered a speech — after Jackson had boasted of his influence in moderating Arafat’s views — accusing Israel of “a supremacist mentality.” The draft resolution that prompted the American and Israeli walkout represented a complete rejection of all efforts to persuade the Israel-haters to tone down the rhetoric.

Then George Bush, the impolite president (you know, my dear, he is a unilateralist) yanked the U.S. delegation home. What has been the result? For starters, the European Union nations, seeing a splendid opportunity to score off Bush and the United States, have led a drive to “salvage” the conference by forcing a return to the negotiating table and a rewriting of the resolution. If this succeeds, the Europeans will get the satisfaction of reprising the Kyoto morality play (“Noble Europeans Rescue Grateful World from Mud- Stupid U.S. President”) and the conference will pass a resolution that is acceptable in basic terms of fairness and honesty.

That’s an okay outcome. If the new effort fails, the conference will fall apart, the Europeans will get the satisfaction of once more denouncing the mud-stupidity of Bush, and no resolution will be passed. That’s an okay outcome too.

Either way, thanks to Bush’s rude resolve, the immensely counterproductive resolution that had been on the table will have been killed and its supporters will have suffered a major poke in the eye.

In the long term, walking out is likewise to the good. It is not healthy for the forces of anti- Westernism and anti-Americanism to be allowed to persist in the idea that it is their proper role to whack the West, and that the West’s proper role is to sit there and take the whacking. It is healthy for the United States, as the leader of the West, to occasionally remind everyone that taking a hike is an option too. An occasional reminder of reality helps against the delusions of power that cause most wars. As George Bush might put it, guns don’t kill people, delusions do.

One particularly dangerous delusion held by a surprising number of people in the Middle East is that Israel will one day be forced to its knees — and that America will let that happen. This week, in Durban, that delusion confronted reality.