U.S. is real peacemaker, not Kofi Annan
By Thomas Bray / The Detroit News
Detroit News. Dec. 12, 2001
In Afghanistan, the war to liberate a people from the jackboot of theocracy is over. In Oslo, meanwhile, Kofi Annan accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and chided the Bush administration for infringing on civil liberties. What's wrong with this picture?
What's wrong is the inability of nattering nabobs of negativism like Annan to accept that it is America, not the United Nations, that advances the cause of freedom. To do so would require the international bureaucracy to acknowledge its own irrelevance -- at best. Even as Annan was receiving his prize, worth $947,000 to himself and his organization, a NATO radar plane was patrolling a no-flight zone over Norway's capital city, backed up by four American-built F-16s piloted by Norwegians -- all to make the UN general secretary safe while he declaimed the need to get beyond old-fashioned ideas of sovereignty.
Never mind that it is precisely U.S. sovereignty that did so much to cast off the yoke of human slavery in Afghanistan, at least for now. When America was attacked on Sept. 11, it wasn't the United Nations, which had long been whining ineffectually about human rights, that responded. And it was George Bush's blunt warning that "you are either with us or you are against us" that rallied much of the world to America's side.
None of that, of course, stopped the 63-year-old Ghanaian aristocrat from delivering himself of the usual pieties in Oslo. "If today, we see better and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible," quoth Annan. "New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status."
To reduce this insecurity, we must work harder to solve "old problems," intoned Annan: "the elimination of poverty, the fight against HIV and AIDS, the question of the environment. We need to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children."
You might think a good starting point for such a noble mission might be Ghana, a wretched place that has gone downhill since the bad old days of colonialism. But Annan, who bestrides New York's comfortable liberal salons like a colossus, has bigger, much bigger, fish to fry. "The sovereignty of states must no longer be used as a shield for gross violations of human rights," he concluded.
It was right in line with a renewed effort in fashionable intellectual circles to paint the nation-state as an illegitimate roadblock on the way to a better one-world. Whenever the enlightened folks at the United Nations decide that there are good works to be done, mere sovereignty must not be allowed to stand in the way. But lest you think Annan has only places like Afghanistan in mind, consider what he had to say to CNN later in the day.
He started patronizingly by saying Sept. 11 had resulted in "almost a loss of innocence for the American people" -- as if the loss of 4,000 or so lives weren't loss enough. But he went on to warn Americans not to forfeit their civil liberties in the haste to root out the culprits. "If one is going to err, one should err on the side of liberty and freedom," he tongue-wagged.
Thank you very much, Mr. secretary-general. We are happy that an organization made up of representatives from such garden spots as China, Syria and Uganda is looking out for our civil liberties. If Americans fall short, we're sure we can count on an international police force being sent to arrest the fiend John Ashcroft and turn him over to the international tribunal in the Hague. Slobodan Milosevic could probably use a roommate.
Until that day arrives, however, most ordinary citizens of the planet are probably just as happy to have the bad old United States serving as the principal cop on the beat. Even the Islamic terrorists tended to see our problem as not too little freedom, but too much. And if Kofi Annan thinks Osama bin Laden deserves something better than a U.S. military tribunal, let him send in the Ghanaian air force to get him. Maybe his fellow peace prize recipient, Yasser Arafat, could be persuaded to help out.
Thomas Bray is a Detroit News columnist.
