Bush’s softer side: U.N speech nice but too late

Newsday: President George W. Bush’s address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, an impassioned appeal to members of the world body to live up to the United Nations’ own Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was a welcome speech, a refreshing change in tone and substance from his previous combative addresses.

But it would have been more welcome — and far more credible — had he delivered it at least five years ago, well before the abysmal conduct of the Iraq war and the spate of civil rights abuses in the fight against terrorism besmirched his administration and dropped the reputation of the United States ever lower in the eyes of much of the world.

Right notes

As far as it went, Bush’s speech hit all the right notes, urging the United Nations to “work for great purposes: To free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and diseases, illiteracy and ignorance and poverty and despair.”

Pledging the United States would do its part, Bush announced — in the only unexpected and newsworthy part of his speech — new U.S. sanctions against Myanmar, the Southeast Asian country also known as Burma, where monks led 100,000 people in a protest Monday against the brutal military dictatorship that’s ruled the nation for 19 years. But even in that, Bush seemed a bit disingenuous, saying that “Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma.” Some peace activists are outraged, but most Americans would be hard put to find the country on a map.

Still, it was refreshing to see Bush try to use the “soft power” of reasoned suasion instead of falling back on bellicose, if veiled, threats of military force as a way to redress the world’s wrongs.