A rchive Date
[ 11-09-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[Clinton, oh so pleased, plays final U.N. gig
By GRAGG HINES
Sept. 9, 2000, 8:05PM
NEW YORK - President Clinton brought his extended farewell tour to the periphery of Broadway last week and indulged in a variety of his favorite roles - Daddy Warbucks, Peter Pan, Tiny Tim.
His star turn was a brief, largely anodyne speech at the beginning of the United Nations Millennium Summit in which even the few zingers, including a couple of welcome ones (a dart for Burma, for instance), took no particular courage for the leader of the last remaining superpower.
His performance was a typical Clinton attempt to make more of the moment than was merited, to challenge the assembled worthies not to kill each other, and, most importantly as his days dwindle down, to polish the memory of his own eight years on the world stage. Clinton continues to attach more importance to the Kosovo conflict than is warranted and to slide over the fact that on his watch the weapons inspection program in Iraq collapsed.
In classic Clinton fashion, he used decorative but pointless rhetoric to address what is perhaps the central question facing the world body - whether or when to intervene in civil, ethnic or religious dust-ups - but offered nothing definitive.
"These conflicts present us with a stark challenge," the president said, observing the obvious. "Are they part of the scourge the U.N. was established to prevent?" he asked, without really answering. But lest there be some question whether he has a handle on the issue, Clinton offered self-evident vacuity: "If so, we must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity but still find a way to protect people as well as borders."
The laundry list of international platitudes contained one of Clinton's periodic, irritating attempts to equate what Israel and the Palestinian
Authority (a growing contradiction in terms) have done to advance the Middle East peace process. Clinton knows better, but he's not missing many chances these days to jolly up Yasser Arafat.
Again, Clinton demonstrated that he sees the Middle East conflict through the prism of his own, quickly vanishing term in the White House. He referred to the "fleeting" chance for peace that is "about to pass" and cautioned: "There is not a moment to lose." He wanted to appear to be talking about Arafat's seemingly fungible deadline for unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state. But Clinton's real frame of reference wasn't lost on many.
(And remember, there's already a Palestinian state in the Middle East. It's called Jordan. It just happens to be run by a family from the Hashemite minority.)
In a sideline forum Clinton advanced his dubious idea of expanding the U.N.'s security mandate to cover unfortunate but nonmilitary disasters, specifically HIV-AIDS.
Regretfully, he was speaking to African leaders, many of whom have shamefully failed to deal with the continent's leading health menace and at least one of whom, South African President Thabo Mbeki, has willfully engaged in massive, persistent dis-information about the plague. Clinton, of course, called neither to book.
Instead of his usual quick hit to address the annual opening of the General Assembly, Clinton encamped Tuesday-Friday at the Waldorf-Astoria to revel in the entire U.N. fandango, which he seemed to take as a premature going-away party. On hand was a record 160 or so world leaders (using the term very loosely). Given their incessant to-ing and fro-ing, in motorcades that clogged the East Side, they had come to New York primarily to see, be seen, socialize and complain to each other about U.S. hegemony.
The mocking perfidy of some of this crowd was illustrated as the conference began by the savage beating deaths of three unarmed U.N. workers in East Timor, almost certainly at the hands of a mob egged on (or at least certainly not restrained) by the Indonesian government. Perhaps the delegation from Jakarta wasn't smirking as Clinton remarked on the tragedy, but it might as well have been.
Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. (cragg.hines@chron.com)
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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