Carter and Kofi

March 6, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114161078956690054.html

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is in a hurry to abolish the U.N. Commission on Human Rights before it begins its annual six-week session in Geneva next week. We suppose that's progress. Mr. Annan realizes that the Commission -- whose current members include such paragons as Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe -- has become an international embarrassment.
So he's pushing for a vote this week on his proposed Human Rights Council, which would replace the Commission. There's just one problem with this strategy: The proposed new body is barely an improvement over the existing one in that it would still more or less guarantee that some of the world's worst dictators can become members. The strict membership rules that Mr. Annan originally proposed for the Council have been watered down in the usual U.N. attempt to appease the lowest-common-denominator objections.
American Ambassador John Bolton has warned that the U.S. won't go along with it. And while other nations have raised private misgivings, only the U.S. has been willing to object publicly -- to the great frustration of Mr. Annan.
Enter Jimmy Carter, who has apparently decided he'd prefer to behave like a current Third World head of state than an ex-American President and is taking every opportunity to bash the Bush administration over its rejection of the Council. My hope is that when a vote is taken, the other members will outvote the United States, he told the Council on Foreign Relations the other day. He added that he had personally called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to lobby her in favor of the proposal, as if Mr. Bolton wasn't following her orders in the first place.
Mr. Carter long ago broke with the unwritten tradition among former Presidents to refrain from public criticism of the current occupant of the White House. But it's a sign that he's losing even a residual sense of political dignity that he is repudiating his own legacy as a human-rights advocate.
The general view among historians is that Mr. Carter failed as a President but that his placement of human rights at the center of his agenda during the Cold War at least made life more difficult for Communist leaders. Now, however, his anti-Bush animus has become so overwhelming that Mr. Carter is willing to diminish the importance of human rights as part of the war on terror. The next time he calls, we hope Ms. Rice doesn't answer.