By Walking Out Of Racism Talks, U.S. Takes The Moral High Ground.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(PERSPECTIVE)

Byline: Tom Gray

The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance -- with a name like that, you can see why it never could get focused -- has actually achieved a couple of things.

It has shown one and all that multilateralism doesn't always work. And it has made the U.S. go-it-alone approach look, by comparison, not so bad.

The conference in Durban, South Africa, was supposed to chart a course toward purging the world of racism and (very broadly) related evils.

Well before it started last week, though, it was clearly being hijacked in the service of other agendas, especially the Arab world's perennial drive to delegitimize Israel.

The U.S. response was to make its point with empty chairs.

First, Secretary of State Colin Powell stayed home, refusing to lend his office's prestige and his own symbolic value, as the black secretary of state of the world's most powerful nation, to the conference. After failed attempts to purge draft resolutions of anti-Israel language, the lower-level American delegation pulled out.