Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity
around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more
popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the
United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done
better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo
Bay deserves a thumbs-down.
But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I
also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline
silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.
Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of
too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would
they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended
military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be
heading.
Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.
I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something
truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security
Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in
Zimbabwe.
The U.S. put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an
arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and
financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government
officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire
country in broad daylight.
In the first round of Zimbabwe’s elections, on March 29, the opposition
leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42
percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of
killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced
the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.
Even before the runoff, Mugabe declared that he would disregard the results
if his ZANU-PF party lost. Or as he put it: “We are not going to give up our
country because of a mere X” on some paper ballot.
And so, of course, Mugabe “won” in one of the most blatantly stolen elections
ever — in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and
inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s people have now taken refuge in
neighboring states. (I have close friends from Zimbabwe, and one of my daughters
worked there in an H.I.V.-AIDS community center in January.) The Associated
Press reported in May from Zimbabwe “that annual inflation rose this month to
1,063,572 percent, based on prices of a basket of basic foodstuffs.” Zimbabwe’s
currency has become so devalued, the A.P. explained, that “a loaf of bread now
costs what 12 new cars did a decade ago.”
No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted
sanctions that the U.S. and others wanted to impose on Mugabe’s clique exceeded
the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate
and dangerous,” he said, describing the resolution as one more obvious “attempt
to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.” Veto!
Mugabe’s campaign of murder and intimidation didn’t strike Churkin as
“illegitimate and dangerous” — only the U.N. resolution to bring a halt to it
was “illegitimate and dangerous.” Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the
Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe’s right to
crush his own people’s spirit.
But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South
Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo.
They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on
the Mugabe dictatorship.
As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused
South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this
particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic
sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long
oppressed that country’s blacks.
So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of
U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N.
sanctions is too much.
Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has
some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on
Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries —
called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man
who is pulverizing his own people.
So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would
prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of
Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices
for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.