A Universal Shout

This is not the most cheerful week in which to write a letter from America.

Everywhere I look - in the paper, on the screen - I hear angry statesmen, I read long bilious dispatches from American correspondents in Europe and Asia reporting what Alexander Pope called "an universal shout" of anti-Americanism.

An epidemic of head shaking from Beijing to Paris over American policy as announced or sanctioned by President Bush, with the French, as usual, the chief European deplorer of American policy, if not of American civilisation in general.

Many of the headlines in European papers are more pugnacious than almost any I can remember.

Some typically bellicose ones however reflect more than the underlying stories themselves how little attention the writers - the European papers in particular - have been paying through the past decade to American policy and continuing concerns in two parts of the world.

Here's one headline: "Bush throws his weight around in the Pacific". This has to do with the sale of weapons to Taiwan.

A writer of such an ignorant headline might well be reminded that for many years, after the triumph of Communism, Taiwan was the representative of China in the United Nations. And President Truman and his secretary of state told the Soviet Union over and over that there was no way mainland China could ever displace Taiwan as the UN's official China.

"No nation," declared Secretary Acheson, "can shoot its way into the United Nations."

Well it did and so did others. And I remember a day when an old United Nations watcher, marvelling at Mr Yasser Arafat's addressing the General Assembly in New York, said: "The best way to become president of the General Assembly is to have been a guerrilla leader somewhere bombing the buildings of the colonial power in residence and in a few years your likeness will have gone from a photograph in police stations over a reward for your capture, to a photograph of the newest ambassador of his country to the United Nations."

I can think of six countries to which this has happened.

Nobody ever reported President Kennedy or Johnson or Carter or Bush or Clinton throwing his weight around in the Pacific on the evidence, simply, of mainline American policy - which was to keep China warned that the United States would not stand by if Communist China attempted to invade and conquer Taiwan.

President Bush, asked a month ago: What would it take to counter a Chinese invasion? replied: "Everything it takes."

He pronounced quietly what all previous presidents since 1947 have said more strongly. Taiwan may be news to European editorial writers but 10 presidents have taken special pride in Taiwan as a shining Asian example of how one small country could stay independent of the enswirling Communist tide and become a prosperous democracy.

Here's another headline with which the French especially sorrowfully concur: "Iraq: Bombing Instead of Diplomacy".

Could that have been written by a veteran reporter of the Gulf War? I believe another short history lesson is in order.

In August 1990 Saddam Hussein (remember him?) on his first step towards the Persian Gulf and the ownership of the oil business, overran Kuwait and annexed it as a province of Iraq.

The UN imposed a ban on all trade with Iraq. The UN Security Council commanded Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait. This order fell, I'm sorry to say, on the list of scores of other United Nations demands - it was ignored.

And in January 1991 the United States led a United Nations coalition army. After a month of exchanging missiles - some fell from Iraq on Israel - the coalition launched a ground attack which defeated the Iraqi forces in four days.

Under the cease fire treaty Saddam agreed to scrap all poison gas and germ weapons and allow full UN inspection of silos and all possible sites of nuclear weapons production.

That's not the end but the beginning of the story. For 10 years the UN was denied inspection of most suspect sites and material. It kept ordering Saddam to stop, to reveal.

The grapefruit of diplomacy was wrung dry over and over. The beggings, the urgings, the compromises were endlessly practised.

One man - the Australian Ambassador Butler - gave about three years of his life to practising diplomacy in Iraq and it still goes on but now reinforced by bombing patrols of American and British planes.

The rest of the United Nations, including France, long ago gave up taking any interest in Iraq. But now the present French ambassador to the UN regrets that the Americans don't follow the example of France with belligerent nations - "French foreign policy," sighs Monsieur Jean David Levitee, "is not conducted with bombs but with dialogue and respect."

In a marvellously Orwellian echo of Monsieur Levitee the Chinese representative in the UN sighed his agreement. Yes, alas, the behaviour of the United States "has undermined the atmosphere for dialogue".

The Chinese were sermonising on the reason why the United States, the creator of the UN's human rights commission, had been ousted from it in the latest election of members - a secret vote, by the way. Why? No explanation.

The Commission was conceived by Mrs Franklin Roosevelt who in late middle age and early old age wore herself out in identifying and publicising and protesting around the world such abuses as the oppression of women in the Third World, the unequal rights in our world, international prostitution, child slavery, sweated labour everywhere, always to the embarrassment of her countrymen admitting the existence of sweat shops in some American cities.

Perhaps Mrs Roosevelt's crusade was too Utopian, too all-embracing of the gross, the slight and the accidental. And her belittlers in Europe loved to point out the automatic American condemnation of rights abuses in Communist dictatorships but its frequent tolerance of the same sins in dictatorships of the right. The French have tolerated everybody.

Still the United States has made more noise, more steadily, than any other Western country about the suppression of dissent - the labour camps, the torture practices of famous countries which Europeans don't care to recognise as tyrannous.

The United States will go on as before monitoring the nations it has found delinquent in the practice of human rights.

It's impossible to see how the United Nations commission on human rights has any positive future since it has achieved a triumph even George Orwell could not in his most cynical moments have predicted. The nations that elected the commission to smell out tyranny and oppression are themselves the most notable tyrants and oppressors.

They include Communist China, Cuba, Algeria, Libya, Sudan - and there was solid representation of the 22 countries of the Middle East, none of which is a democracy.

This tragedy could conceivably mark the end of the United Nations. As Western Europe's refusal to do anything about the rape of Ethiopia except indulge in "dialogue with Mussolini" marked the end of the League of Nations.

Well talking as we've been doing of the moral reputation of nations I've come across the result of a fascinating experiment - an experiment in the honesty of the average citizen in your country and mine and a score of others.

This clinical trial, if you like, was organised by the magazine Readers Digest. Over five years it scattered more than a thousand wallets, personal wallets, in 117 cities in the USA, Europe, Australasia, to see and count how many were returned.

Each wallet had $50 worth of local currency and the name and a phone number of the owner.

Since in moral behaviour the United States is currently the miscreant, the offender, and continental Europe the chief judge, perhaps they will furnish for us the results most eagerly awaited.

Very well: In the United States 7 out of 10 wallets were returned. In middle and southern Europe less than half the wallets went back to their owners.

In two countries, and in two only of all the continents, every single wallet was returned. An astonishing result.

And which two countries could they possibly be? England and Scotland? No. They came under the 50% honest group - one in two returned.

No. Norway and Denmark. They alone, I should think, having no beam in their own eyes can, without hypocrisy, condemn the mote in the eye of their brother - the poor bald eagle, the pathetic emblem of the United States, a slow-moving, half-blind creature, not even, in spite of the universal rumour, a bird of prey.

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