The debates that preceded the annual opening session of the United Nations General Assembly last Saturday were dubbed “Dialogue Among Civilizations.” It’s comforting to know that the interaction of civilizations in our time is characterized not by a clash, as people like Samuel S. Huntington in his turgid book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” would have us believe, but by dialogue. Or is it?
In their speeches, speaker after speaker denounced the Sept. 11 attacks and expressed sympathy for the US. Iranian President Muhammad Khatami, for example, called the perpetrators “a cult of fanatics.” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, however, expressed his country’s long-held gripe against America by accusing it of “bombing defenseless people” in Afghanistan and seeking to “impose its own ideology and cultural values” on the rest of the world.
Similar criticism was voiced by several of the “eminent persons” invited to address the assembly, including Kamat Aboumajd, an Egyptian World Bank official, who warned that people are beginning to wonder if America’s “focus on reprisals” might not be counterproductive.
When President Bush addressed the Assembly’s 189 member states on Saturday, he said he “expected each nation to play its full part” in the war against terrorism. Then he allegedly caused a stir when he said, “we are working toward the day when two states — Israel and Palestine — live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by Security Council resolutions.”
Though there is nothing new here — Security Council resolutions refer to a settlement based on land-for-peace, and the current administration is on record as going along with the idea of a Palestinian state — and though Secretary of State Colin Powell has “reassured Israel” that the US is not formulating a major new initiative, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, expressed “the deepest appreciation” of the American president’s statement, choosing to make no mention of the fact that Bush had declined to meet him.
In his own address, Arafat in effect, said: Call in the UN.
He dismissed “interim solutions” (who blames him!) and suggested that “what the peace process requires now in order to achieve just and lasting peace is a genuine effort sponsored by the US, Russia, the European Union and Arab and Muslim countries, along with other friendly nations in the Non-Aligned Movement to introduce immediately a comprehensive framework for a permanent solution.”
Ah, after all these years, back to the good, old UN.
To be sure, despite being handicapped by US indifference, even hostility (how many reasonable resolutions has Washington quashed by its veto over the years!), the UN is not a bad venue to go for a settlement of the Palestine question.
This world body, after all, has made major contributions to conflict resolution in the world, including places like East Timor and Cambodia. The UN thus should be allowed a more important and active role to play. The US, which has in the past used the UN to advance its own foreign policy interests, or dumped it when the member states did not see things its way, has a responsibility to shoulder as a big power, and should let the UN be a moral as well as a practical guide to international relations. (That’ s where representatives of the peoples of the entire planet sit together in one room, isn’t it?)
Thus walking out on conferences like the one recently held in Durban shows how out of touch America is with people’s sentiment around the world. Especially after Sept. 11, when the battle against terrorism is seen also as a battle for the hearts and minds of nations everywhere, the need for Washington to work with and through the UN, that is, the international community, is more compelling.
When you alienate people, especially Muslims and Arabs, people who are heir to a great civilization, then, yes — and here Rudolf Giuliani can go jump in a lake — some of them will take that alienation to lunatic extremes.
Look at it this way: While the United States spent two months calling on Arabs to cooperate with its war on terrorism, behind the scenes it introduced a law, so far largely eluding public attention, that authorized the State Department, beginning Nov. 9, to slow, and in some cases even block, the process of granting visas to young men from Arab and Muslim nations in an effort to “prevent terrorist attacks.”
The restrictions apply to virtually every country in the Arab world, from, in alphabetical order, Algeria to Yemen.
So much for Arab immigrants, students, businessmen, and tourists wishing to come to America’s shores.
Out of touch indeed.
It is time for the old Kissingerian notion of a world defined exclusively by “national interests,” where people do not matter, to be discarded. This earth is inhabited by human beings and they matter. (The former secretary of state, who is back on TV as a pundit, told John McLaughlin last week that the murder of thousands of innocent people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had “strengthened the Western alliance.” Ask the survivors of that tragedy if they care two-pence about the Western alliance.)
Henry Kissinger’s new book, incidentally, is called “Does America Need a Foreign Policy?” The tome, as expected, is bombastic, but I take my hat off to the title.
