There are some news stories that the international online media embrace while U.S. opinion makers shy away. Civilian casualties in Iraq is a prime example.
And there are other stories that international pundits tend to overlook while their U.S. counterparts comment aggressively. Case in point: The U.N. oil-for-food program scandal.
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World Opinion Archive
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It was only last week, after U.S. conservatives, led by Sen. Norman Coleman (R-Minn.), called for the resignation of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that international leaders and pundits started to focus on the story. Most commentators rallied to Annan's defense. When Nobel laureate Annan arrives in Washington this week to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell and his designated successor, Condoleezza Rice, he will have virtually the entire international community behind him.
The damning details of how Saddam Hussein corrupted the U.N.'s program to aid Iraqi civilians between 1997 and 2003 are not much in dispute. Hussein personally oversaw a system of rewards for persons and companies willing to do business with his regime. Curiously, amid all the polemics, U.S. and foreign pundits alike seem uninterested in the small but significant role of U.S. companies and individuals in the scandal.
The reaction of the world community to Coleman's much-publicized Dec. 1 column in the Wall Street Journal was swift.
Last Monday, the Bush administration's most loyal ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, rushed to the secretary general's defense, saying Annan was doing "a fine job... often in very difficult circumstances," according to the Independent of London.
Another American ally, Australia, expressed support for the U.N. chief whose term expires in 2006, reported Channel News Asia. So did U.N. Security Council member China in its state-run People's Daily.
The Paris daily Liberation (in French) saw an American "witchhunt" launched in retaliation for Annan's criticism of the war in Iraq and the U.S.-led attack on Fallujah last month.
It wasn't until last Thursday that President Bush offered lukewarm support for Annan. The administration remained silent until U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John C. Danforth told reporters that the president did not support the call by some members of Congress for Annan to resign.
In Annan's home of Africa, there is anger.
"A U.S. Senator by the name of Coleman, desperate for attention, is leading a call for our brother's resignation but we would say 'not so fast,'" says Ghana Web in Annan's native country. "It would be a travesty of justice if that happens."
Annan, says a columnist for Nigeria's Vanguard, is being tried in "the court of racists and hypocrites."
Iafrica.com, a South African news site, reports that a high profile group, including former president Nelson Mandela and Nobel Prize laureate Nadine Gordimer, issued an open letter condemning the U.S. attacks on Annan as "reprehensible and unjust."
In the Toronto Star, Paul Heinbecker, Canada's former U.N. Ambassador calls the clamor for Annan's resignation an exercise in "frontier justice."
