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Rumsfeld: Ungrateful world kicks U.S. off rights panel

Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld  

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday blamed a recent U.S. diplomatic setback on a world ungrateful for American aid in the Cold War.

The Bush administration has upset U.S. allies opposed to its plans to develop a missile defense system and its rejection of the Kyoto agreement on limiting industrial emissions linked to climate change.

Diplomats said a Thursday vote to drop the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Commission -- a body it helped found and has participated in since 1947 -- was a sign of deepening resentment.

Asked whether recent unilateral U.S. moves have aggravated relations with the rest of the world, Rumsfeld said the world's thanks for helping contain the Soviet Union has dissipated since the communist state dissolved in 1991.

"With the Soviet Union gone, that gratitude is gone, that appreciation is gone," Rumsfeld told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"People who never believed the United States had a monopoly on all political wisdom or all economic wisdom or all cultural wisdom now don't feel grateful for the role the United States was playing to the same extent, and so they're perfectly willing to express their views."

Rumsfeld added: "That's fine. We don't have a monopoly on all wisdom in the world, and we can live in that world very successfully."

Rumsfeld said Thursday's U.N. vote in Geneva "tells more about the people who cast the votes and the judgment that was used than about the United States." Authoritarian countries like Cuba, Sudan and China, which have been the targets of U.S. criticism in the world body, kept their seats on the human rights panel.

"Obviously, the United States has been too strong on the human rights agenda," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview on Fox News. "I suspect that this was a backlash of those who don't like being judged."

But the human rights commission "was a place where we could hold China accountable, and now we've lost it," Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, told NBC. Kerry blamed the Bush administration's alienation of U.S. allies for the lack of support.

"We see Taiwan suddenly heated up. We see China heated up. We've moved away from the Kyoto treaty," Kerry said. "We find ourselves at odds with our allies in the United Nations. We find ourselves with many friends suspicious of our current diplomacy, or lack thereof."

A third of the membership in the 53-member commission is up for renewal each year. The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the loss of the U.S. presence was disappointing, but "Washington should have seen it coming."

U.S. opposition to a treaty banning anti-personnel mines and an international criminal court to prosecute war crimes also fueled international criticism. But Joanna Weschler, the group's U.N. representative, said the commission was turning into an "abuser solidarity" group without the U.S. presence.



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RELATED SITES:
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
United Nations
 • Human Rights

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