In New York at the United Nations last week, the United States shot itself in the foot. How? The Bush administration sacrificed profound American interests and values in order to appease its ideological base when it announced that it will not seek a seat in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Just a few years ago, when the United States failed to win an elected seat on the now-obsolete U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Bush White House expressed alarm and the Republican-controlled Congress threatened to withhold funding from U.N. human rights programs. A few weeks ago, by a vote of 170 to 4, the United Nations General Assembly established the U.N. Human Rights Council, a body with even more potential to advance the cause of human rights than the Human Rights Commission it replaced. Now the Bush administration won't even make an effort to get a seat on it.
What a disgrace, particularly because this new organization is an integral part of our country's legacy. Under the visionary leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, the United States spearheaded the effort to promote observance of human rights. With this recent decision, we have broadcast to the world that the United States has turned its back on more than half a century of consistent and conscientious efforts to use the United Nations to promote and to protect human rights.
The new U.N. Human Rights Council, though flawed in many ways, is a clear improvement over the old Human Rights Commission. When it was approved overwhelmingly last month, apart from the three countries that the United States cajoled into joining it in a "no" vote, the only other states that declined to support the council were three notorious human rights abusers who abstained: Iran, Belarus and Venezuela.
The new body's membership and voting requirements offer tools that American diplomats could leverage to dismantle the myth of moral equivalency among states that has long polluted the U.N. human rights efforts. It replaces a bad joke of a commission that, with time, diverged wildly from its original role, and could never be taken seriously as long as it welcomed to its membership the pathological despots of Sudan, authors of the Darfur genocide, as if they occupied the same moral ground on human rights as Denmark and Sweden.
The Bush administration's announcement of its disinterest in membership on the new council also projects a disturbing image of weakness in U.S. diplomacy. It should not have required heavy lifting for our diplomats in New York and in foreign capitals to recruit the necessary 96 "yes" votes to seat the United States on the new council. By the same token, our capable diplomats should have been able to ensure that 96 countries do not support the likes of Zimbabwe, Syria and North Korea for U.N. Human Rights Council membership. I can only conclude that this decision, which makes absolutely no sense, is simply a sop to forces within the Bush administration who instinctively oppose any cooperation with international institutions. It is way past time to rein in these forces. The stakes are high for the United States at the United Nations; reducing nuclear proliferation and winning the global war on terrorism require us to work with -- rather than in opposition to -- our allies there. We cannot continue to show such contempt, and to court further isolation.
Ambassador John Bolton, our representative to the United Nations, proclaimed last week that the spurning of a seat on the new Human Rights Council in its early days should not be taken to mean that the United States will sit it out as other countries begin reconstructing the world's human rights architecture.
Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., in a proposal that seems more attuned to presidential politics than international realities, suggests that the United States create a new human rights organization that operates outside the United Nations.
How can we expect to work with the United Nations on issues such as reining in Iran's nuclear ambitions, if we are not working with the United Nations on human rights and other issues. Though the Bush administration's credibility vis à vis its overall U.N. reform effort is severely strained at this point, I hope we can take our ambassador at his word. The United States certainly can still wield enormous influence behind the scenes in seeing that the right candidates are elected to the new council, and in ensuring that its agenda does not become polluted in the way the old commission's did. Such efforts are absolutely critical to long-term U.S. interests. I call on President Bush to stop his administration's dangerous drift into self-defeating, ideologically based U.N. policy. We suffer from a self-inflicted wound at the United Nations; it is time to staunch the bleeding.