Charles Lane: Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson
[Charles Lane in an opinion writer for The Washington Post]
On Wednesday, President Obama will drape the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of former Irish president Mary Robinson. The White House says Robinson deserves it because she was the first female president of Ireland and is a “prominent crusader for women’s rights.” I think honoring Robinson will dilute an already somewhat overextended award.
I agree with those who say Robinson showed a prosecutorial attitude toward Israel when she was United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights between 1997 and 2002 -- and since then. That record includes her supervision of the U.N.’s Durban anti-racism conference in 2001, which was badly marred by “Zionism-is-racism” agitation.
But the White House is right that eligibility for the Medal of Freedom need not be defined by a recipient’s politics, even if those clash with American policy. Pablo Casals’ brilliant cello playing trumped his long condemnation of U.S. recognition of Francisco Franco. And if Israel-bashing disqualifies Robinson, then what about such past recipients as Jesse Jackson, Zbigniew Brzezinski and, yes, Jimmy Carter?
My objection to Robinson is a bit different. By law, the medal is supposed to go to those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” I just don’t think Robinson, though an accomplished civil rights lawyer in her youth, a skilled self-promoter and a fixture at global confabs, has done anything especially meritorious in those areas, much less meritorious enough to outweigh the troubling part of her record.
Of the 588 Presidential Medals of Freedom given out since 1963, only 28 have gone to non-U.S. citizens -- less than 5 percent of the total. The bar is, and should be, a little higher for foreigners. Minor figures have slipped through (former NATO secretary-general Manlio Giovanni Brosio, for example). But for the most part, foreign recipients have been substantial people: Mother Teresa, Jacques Cousteau, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The number of current or former heads of state or government who’ve gotten the medal is even smaller -- 12. Only a few have inspired sufficient good feeling across the American spectrum. This ultra-select group includes two popes, John XXIII and John Paul II, Anwar Sadat, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Nelson Mandela.
President George W. Bush pushed the limits of consensus a bit by including Tony Blair and Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, both disliked on the left. But neither was as polarizing as Robinson will be. Like the other foreign leaders on the list, they stood by the United States in perilous times.
Robinson, by contrast, got elected to Ireland’s ceremonial presidency in 1990. This breakthrough came long after Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher had already proved that women can wield real political power. And she has consistently criticized U.S. foreign policy, often when U.S. troops were in the field.
She condemned Bush’s war on terror and recently implied that an independent war crimes inquiry might be appropriate for him. This is perhaps predictable, but in 1999 she also spoke up about potential illegality in President Bill Clinton’s air campaign to rescue the mostly Muslim population of Kosovo from Serbian-led genocide. She condemned atrocities against the Kosovars, but she also thought the U.N. Security Council -- on which Serbia’s ally Russia exercised a veto -- should “have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations.”
After the Irish presidency, she took the U.N. human rights post. One of her functions in that job -- other than wringing her hands about NATO’s defense of the Kosovars’ human rights -- was to supervise the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a body so badly discredited by its inclusion of countries such as China and Cuba that it has since been disbanded. The Bush administration helped push her out, but even a former Clintonite, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (now in the Obama administration), said she had “overly politicized the job.”
Plenty has been said already about Robinson’s supervision of the notorious U.N. World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The atmosphere was so tinged with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric, especially that emanating from a simultaneous conference of non-governmental organizations, that Colin Powell, then secretary of state, led a walkout by the U.S. and European countries.
Robinson’s detractors, including the late Tom Lantos, a U.S. Congressman and Holocaust survivor, blamed her for this flop. Robinson argues that she helped purge the worst anti-Israel rhetoric from the conference’s final document -- which she later pronounced “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.”
What I’m struck by is Robinson’s zeal for this gabfest in the first place. Even on the most benign view, the conference was an exercise in outrage-by-committee whose real-world impact on racism was bound to be minimal...
Read entire article at The Washington Post
On Wednesday, President Obama will drape the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of former Irish president Mary Robinson. The White House says Robinson deserves it because she was the first female president of Ireland and is a “prominent crusader for women’s rights.” I think honoring Robinson will dilute an already somewhat overextended award.
I agree with those who say Robinson showed a prosecutorial attitude toward Israel when she was United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights between 1997 and 2002 -- and since then. That record includes her supervision of the U.N.’s Durban anti-racism conference in 2001, which was badly marred by “Zionism-is-racism” agitation.
But the White House is right that eligibility for the Medal of Freedom need not be defined by a recipient’s politics, even if those clash with American policy. Pablo Casals’ brilliant cello playing trumped his long condemnation of U.S. recognition of Francisco Franco. And if Israel-bashing disqualifies Robinson, then what about such past recipients as Jesse Jackson, Zbigniew Brzezinski and, yes, Jimmy Carter?
My objection to Robinson is a bit different. By law, the medal is supposed to go to those who have made “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” I just don’t think Robinson, though an accomplished civil rights lawyer in her youth, a skilled self-promoter and a fixture at global confabs, has done anything especially meritorious in those areas, much less meritorious enough to outweigh the troubling part of her record.
Of the 588 Presidential Medals of Freedom given out since 1963, only 28 have gone to non-U.S. citizens -- less than 5 percent of the total. The bar is, and should be, a little higher for foreigners. Minor figures have slipped through (former NATO secretary-general Manlio Giovanni Brosio, for example). But for the most part, foreign recipients have been substantial people: Mother Teresa, Jacques Cousteau, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The number of current or former heads of state or government who’ve gotten the medal is even smaller -- 12. Only a few have inspired sufficient good feeling across the American spectrum. This ultra-select group includes two popes, John XXIII and John Paul II, Anwar Sadat, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Nelson Mandela.
President George W. Bush pushed the limits of consensus a bit by including Tony Blair and Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, both disliked on the left. But neither was as polarizing as Robinson will be. Like the other foreign leaders on the list, they stood by the United States in perilous times.
Robinson, by contrast, got elected to Ireland’s ceremonial presidency in 1990. This breakthrough came long after Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher had already proved that women can wield real political power. And she has consistently criticized U.S. foreign policy, often when U.S. troops were in the field.
She condemned Bush’s war on terror and recently implied that an independent war crimes inquiry might be appropriate for him. This is perhaps predictable, but in 1999 she also spoke up about potential illegality in President Bill Clinton’s air campaign to rescue the mostly Muslim population of Kosovo from Serbian-led genocide. She condemned atrocities against the Kosovars, but she also thought the U.N. Security Council -- on which Serbia’s ally Russia exercised a veto -- should “have a say in whether a prolonged bombing campaign in which the bombers choose their target at will is consistent with the principle of legality under the Charter of the United Nations.”
After the Irish presidency, she took the U.N. human rights post. One of her functions in that job -- other than wringing her hands about NATO’s defense of the Kosovars’ human rights -- was to supervise the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a body so badly discredited by its inclusion of countries such as China and Cuba that it has since been disbanded. The Bush administration helped push her out, but even a former Clintonite, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (now in the Obama administration), said she had “overly politicized the job.”
Plenty has been said already about Robinson’s supervision of the notorious U.N. World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The atmosphere was so tinged with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric, especially that emanating from a simultaneous conference of non-governmental organizations, that Colin Powell, then secretary of state, led a walkout by the U.S. and European countries.
Robinson’s detractors, including the late Tom Lantos, a U.S. Congressman and Holocaust survivor, blamed her for this flop. Robinson argues that she helped purge the worst anti-Israel rhetoric from the conference’s final document -- which she later pronounced “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.”
What I’m struck by is Robinson’s zeal for this gabfest in the first place. Even on the most benign view, the conference was an exercise in outrage-by-committee whose real-world impact on racism was bound to be minimal...