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America Still Has Moral Backbone

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By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 18, 2008

Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantanamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.

But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday's vote at the United Nations on Zimbabwe reminded me why.

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don't like a world of too much American power - "Mr. Big" got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America's overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia's and China's vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe's ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

The United States put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire country in broad daylight.

In the first round of Zimbabwe's elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.

And so, of course, Mugabe "won" in one of the most blatantly stolen elections ever - in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe's people have now taken refuge in neighboring states.

No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia's U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted sanctions that the United States and others wanted to impose on Mugabe's clique exceeded the Security Council's mandate. "We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous," he said.

Mugabe's campaign of murder and intimidation didn't strike Churkin as "illegitimate and dangerous." Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe's right to crush his own people's spirit.

But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.

As The New York Times reported, America's U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, "accused South Africa of protecting the 'horrible regime in Zimbabwe,'" calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa's apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country's blacks.

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these "popular" countries - called Russia or China or South Africa - who have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

Thomas Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times.

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