Let U.S. Send Forth a Winning Message

Everyone should understand that nothing ended in Durban, South Africa. Instead, a new phase began in the international struggle for moral and financial power. It’s a struggle that the U.S. can win on behalf of democratic values worldwide, but first Americans must recognize the nature of the fight and how it has been lost--and won--in the past.

Casual observers may be excused for thinking that the big news out of Durban was the compromise language finally achieved on the Zionism-as-racism controversy.

But Jesse Jackson and other Africans and African Americans insisted that the real issue at Durban was reparations for the slave trade. And those activists were pleased; Wade Henderson, director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., called the final resolution “a genuine breakthrough.” He added, “By recognizing slavery as a crime against humanity, the document sets the stage for legislative and legal action to address historic inequities.”

Meanwhile, civil rights and class-action lawyers, including Johnnie Cochran Jr., are readying a reparations lawsuit; “damages” are being calculated in the trillions.

Such a suit is unlikely to succeed any time soon, but Durbanites have managed to put “racism” and “racial justice” back atop the global agenda. And since, as a rule, the more leaders talk about a issue, the more they spend on that issue, it’s likely that even without a legal verdict a significant shift in resources is about to sluice forth. Now, for instance, the entire Bush administration will scramble to find more funding for black children caught in poverty and dragged down by poor schools, to preempt the reparationeers.

Meanwhile, international conferences, mostly staged, it seems, for the purpose of guilt-tripping Western white people, keep coming. Next up: a special session on children at the U.N. General Assembly, starting Sept. 19.

Some, of course, will cheer at every repetition of the racism-and-reparations mantra. But to the extent that the Bush administration has its own priorities, it needs to get off the defensive. Instead of walking out of conferences as the U.S. did in Durban, it should be standing and fighting for principle--as Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a quarter of a century ago.

By the mid-1970s, the General Assembly, expanded by decolonialization to 138 members, was dominated by its Third World majority. America’s ambassadors to the U.N., including George H.W. Bush, the future 41st president, were ineffective at stopping or even arguing against a string of anti-American votes.

Into this void stepped Moynihan, then a Harvard professor.

In an article in the March 1975 Commentary titled “The United States in Opposition,” he lamented the “blindness” of American diplomats toward the radical-chic momentum of Third Worlders at the U.N. He spoke forthrightly about the power of truth: “It is time that the American spokesman came to be feared in international forums for the truths he might tell.”

Moynihan was soon named the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and from that perch he eagerly argued the case for capitalism and freedom.

He may not have won every fight, but he demonstrated that in the long run the United States had nothing to fear from the truth--the whole truth--coming out.

Moynihan is mostly retired now. But why shouldn’t the U.S. and its friends convene, for example, a world conference on free speech? Why not a conference on freedom of the press, including free access to the Internet? How many Durban participants would show up for that?

History proves that the U.S. has a winning message, but it loses when it shrinks from making its case in every forum, at every opportunity.