Human rights “interfere” with President Obama’s campaign against climate change.
by Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal
October 19, 2009
Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama’s decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month’s 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany’s reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?
To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the march of human freedom. It’s a march to which candidate Obama paid rich (if solipsistic) tribute in last year’s big Berlin speech. “At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West,” waxed Mr. Obama to the assembled thousands. “This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom.”
Those were the words. What’s been the record?
China: In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Beijing with a conciliating message about the country’s human-rights record. “Our pressing on those [human-rights] issues can’t interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis,” she said.
In fact, there has been no pressing whatsoever on human rights. President Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama last month, presumably so as not to ruffle feathers with the people who will now be financing his debts. In June, Liu Xiaobo, a leading signatory of the pro-democracy Charter 08 movement, was charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” But as a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing admitted to the Journal, “neither the White House nor Secretary Clinton have made any public comments on Liu Xiaobo.”
Sudan: In 2008, candidate Obama issued a statement insisting that “there must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing. . . . The U.N. Security Council should impose tough sanctions on the Khartoum government immediately.”
Exactly right. So what should Mr. Obama do as president? Yesterday, the State Department rolled out its new policy toward Sudan, based on “a menu of incentives and disincentives” for the genocidal Sudanese government of Omar Bashir. It’s the kind of menu Mr. Bashir will languidly pick his way through till he dies comfortably in his bed.
Read the complete article at WSJ.
