Are we really always the good guys, or merely the strong guys?

Opinion
William Raspberry

What aspect of America's international policy causes you the most
distress or the greatest disappointment? It was, of course, the sort
of fat-pitch question reporters don't like to ask. I asked it because
I thought U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan would use it to provide a
much-needed glimpse of how America is seen - not by its enemies but by
its thoughtful admirers. He didn't disappoint. Americans, he told a
couple dozen African-American journalists recently, are full of talk
about a "global village" as an acknowledgement of the shrinking size
and growing interdependence of the nations of the world.

"But a global village implies international cooperation in the
collective interest," he said at a luncheon in the United Nations
staff dining room. And when it comes to international cooperation,
America falls short. He offered three specifics: Rejection by the
United States, alone among Western nations, of the Kyoto protocol
designed to slow global warming (President Bush said the treaty's
mandatory pollution reductions were harmful to the American economy);
the anti-torture convention passed over U.S. objections; and the
International Criminal Court, of which the Bush administration is
particularly suspicious.

"Respect for the rule of law is so high on the American agenda," he
said. "Why this contradiction?" The reasons vary in their details.
Fear that American businesses might be hurt by mandated reductions of
greenhouse gases is different from fear that international do-
gooders might stick their noses into the camps at Guantanamo Bay, and
both are different from the fear that an International Criminal Court
would endanger America's very sovereignty.

But as Annan sees it, all signatories to international accords agree
to assume similar risks. The common thread, he said, is an American
attitude that says "one law for us, another for everybody else." The
Nobel Peace laureate acknowledged that the United States, as
the world's lone superpower, has some special concerns that must be
dealt with. There are, for instance, those who would use
international agreements as a pretext for intruding into American
politics, or as a way of embarrassing the country internationally
through bogus prosecutions.

But he believes sufficient safeguards are in place or, at any
rate, achievable. The greater difficulty, he believes, is America's
tendency to reach out internationally when it suits its purposes to do
so (as in the fight against terrorism), but to assume a go-it-alone
posture when international co-operation seems inconvenient. For
instance: Why should we reject the idea of international
inspections of conditions at Guantanamo, or assurance the prisoners
are afforded due process, humane treatment or a chance to plead their
cases?

At least two things seem to be involved. First, America's almost
automatic presumption that we are the good guys. The second is a bit
less attractive: the assumption we are the strong guys who don't have
to play by any rules that inconvenience us. It's a little like the
way certain personages feel when the airport security people become
overly intrusive. Can't they see I'm not a terrorist? And don't they
know I can make trouble for them? Or maybe the better analogy is to
parents who haven't learned the folly of trying to exempt themselves
from the rules (like buckling up seatbelts) that they would enforce on
their children. As Kofi Annan put it, "Leadership comes with some
obligations."

It doesn't follow that, on every point, the secretary-general is
right and the American president wrong (though Bush does seem too much
the isolationist for my philosophical comfort). But it does strike me
that we ought to be paying more attention than some of us are inclined
to pay to the thoughtful criticisms of a man who has earned the right
to make them.

How much sense can it make to smash Kofi Annan's gentle mirror
while asking, with great consternation, why so much of the rest of the
world hates us?

The Guardian Weekly 15-8-2002