What are Hillary Clinton's foreign policy credentials? One of the stock answers her campaign gives she "stood up for women's rights in China". This was back in 1995 when she attended the Fourth World Conference on Women, where she said:
It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.
All Right. There is more:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken..
when women and girls are sold into slavery or prostitution for human greed.
Most people would tend to agree with that.
So what was this conference?
The World Conferences on Women are a series of meetings organized by the United Nations. The Third one was in 1985 in Nairobi, the second in Copenhagen(1980) and the first in Mexico City (1975). As with many United Nations conferences, the main end result is a voluminous report (prepared in the various official languages) that you can buy if you are in need of a good sleeping aid. There has not been a fifth in the series although the General Assembly meeting in 2000 resolved to
assess regularly further implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action with a view to bringing together all parties involved in 2005 to assess progress and consider new initiatives, as appropriate,ten years after the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action.
There was such a meeting in 2005 to review the Beijing Platform for Action and it produced, you guessed it, another report (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish). This is what the UN calls action.
Don't get me wrong. The UN is a valuable body, and in its serpentine way does occasionally address important issues. One wishes someone (say, a US Senator) had paid attention to the UN Inspectors who looked for WMD in Iraq.
But to claim a speech given in one of its conferences as a major foreign policy accomplishment is just silly. It simply highlights how thin is the resume in question. Usually it is some sub-cabinet level official that represents the US at these meetings.
One wonders what Bill Clinton's motive was in sending his wife abroad to attend that meeting. What was he up to in 1995? Wasn't that the year when there were many interns working at the Whitehouse,including one Monica Lewinsky?
So, what did the Chinese do after listening to this stunning indictment? Nothing. They just ignored Hillary Clinton and went about their business. To them it was more important that trade relations not suffer. The lot of women in China has improved, but that is because the booming economy employs many of them; as wage-earners they get a respect in society that no UN resolution can grant them. The draconic one-child policy of the Chinese Government continues; so does the selective abortion of female fetuses.
Surely, Senator Clinton has other Foreign Policy accomplishments? Did she not do anything in the Senate for eight years, other than vote for the Iraq war?