U.S. LECTURES FRIENDS, FOES ON HOW TO BEHAVE

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - It is the lecture season in Washington, when
the sole superpower wags its finger at friends and foes around the world
over human rights, terrorism and drugs, this year adding a class on bribery
for good measure.

The series of State Department reports, called for by Congress, annually
prompts irritation, resentment and charges of hypocrisy from those targeted.

Many in Washington, wrestling with the United States' need to define its
leadership in the post-Cold War world, find them needlessly provocative.
Human rights and other advocates believe the advantages outweigh the
negatives.

Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor and specialist in strategic studies,
in a caustic commentary in the journal Foreign Affairs, wrote that American
officials "quite naturally tend to act as if the world were unipolar.

"They lecture other countries on the universal validity of American
principles, practices and institutions," he said and recalled how President
Bill Clinton annoyed his guests at the 1997 Denver summit by telling them
how to run their economies.

There has been an intellectual game to define America's role. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright speaks of the "indispensable nation." Deputy
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers talks of the "first non-imperial
superpower."

While American culture and ideas still have immense popular appeal from
Tehran to Paris, Shanghai to Sydney, foreign governments have a less benign,
less cooperative response to what French President Chirac referred to as the
"hyperpower".

The annual State Department reports enhance for many the view of American
hegemonistic tendencies.

The series begins with Friday's human rights report, a state-by-state
analysis which lambastes China, Iran, Iraq and many other states with
authoritarian systems but also criticises violations in other more
democratic states.

That is followed by the drugs report, in which states are certified as
cooperating with or obstructing U.S. attempts to halt the flow of drugs into
the United States, then later reports on religious persecution and on
exponents of state terrorism.

This week Washington is hosting a conference on corruption, with U.S.
leaders offering advice to less developed countries on how to stamp out
bribery.

Many participants, including Latin American leaders, will be looking for
good ideas but also be ready to point to Washington's not-so-distant past
involvement in their continent for signs that the kettle is sometimes as
black as the pot.

Introducing the conference, Vice President Al Gore conceded the point. "No
nation has a monopoly on corruption ... No nation has the right to lecture
any others," he said.

But James Lilley, who coped with the annual effect of human rights report's
lambasting of China when he served as ambassador to Beijing, told Reuters
the U.S. annual scorecards have a downside.

"The human rights report gets people so angry sometimes it jeopardises some
of the positive programmes, so in that sense it's a negative," he said.

But he came down marginally in favour of continuing the practice, which has
been going on since the 1970s.

He said the human rights reports were essentially accurate and fair, and
acted as a way to tear away "all the hypocrisy and all the lies and all the
deception that goes into the human rights issue by countries that are
protecting themselves."

Mike Jendrejczyk of the Human Rights Watch pressure group defended the
reports. But he said the United States was open to charges of hypocrisy
because of its own widespread use of the death penalty, frequent cases of
police brutality and pockets of grinding poverty in an otherwise affluent
state.

U.N. agencies would predictably rather see Washington operate through
international bodies and not unilaterally.

Pino Arlacchi, head of the U.N. office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention, told reporters he hoped Congress would end the certification
process by which Washington judges countries on their record of helping or
hindering U.S. drug efforts.

"There should be evaluation, but at a multilateral level. I think this idea
is shared by many," he said.

There is no doubt that countries sit up and take notice, however defensively
they react, to a bad note in the U.S. drugs or human rights accounting,
whether it is out of fear of economic reprisals or a genuine sense of
concern.

Last year, after China received its expected criticism over the jailing of
dissidents and squashing of independent ideas, the Communist authorities put
out a 30,000-word rebuttal.

"At present when proposing dialogue and opposing confrontation have become
the irresistible historical trend, the United States has already received
strong opposition and resistance from nations across the globe for clinging
to a relic of the Cold War - the Human Rights Report," it said.