Can Chelsea Be Beaten?

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Tony

stevie
Well in, Stevie!

Yes, of course they can. We (Liverpool FC) proved that in one of the most important games of the season for both teams — forgive the crass associations, but it looked rather a lot like New Labor comes a cropper on the rock solid defense of Old Labor… And they way they struggled at Wigan in their opening fixture added to the evidence — Chelsea are going to suffer from both from the arrogance of assuming they’re going to win, and from their reputation turning every away match into a cup final for the opponents. Still, there’s a formidable look to the squad built on the billions Roman Abramovich extorted from the Russian national patrimony — like all the other oligarchs, he made most of his money when the craven buffoon Yeltsin tapped them all up for a bit of campaign cash because he was about to lose the election in 1996, and they obliged in exchange for being sold some of the state’s prized assets at Salvation Army prices.

Chelsea won the title fair and square, and if I was to name the key players in that triumph I’d say Lampard, Makelele, Terry and Cech, rather than some of his more extravagant buys (uh, how about 23 million pounds for Carvalho, or even 13 million for Ferreira?). Since then, of course, he’s been throwing mad money around trying to tempt the likes of Adriano and Shevchenko, and it’s been pretty funny to see that not everyone has a price… And when they have spent, they’ve lavished money on bringing in players like Sean Wright-Phillips, probably the second best right wing in the premiership, to compete for that position with Arjen Robben, probably the best. That’s silly — how are you going to keep either one happy on the bench when both are fit? And when you hear their chairman Peter Kenyon talking like Paul Wolfowitz about starting a dynasty that will have no competition for years to come — well, let’s just say you badly, badly want to seem them beaten. Particularly by the likes of Portsmouth and Bolton.

Chelsea have to start the season as front runners, even if their football is pretty basic when compared with Arsenal’s delightful pass-and-move game. Chelsea will break out of defense and get it wide to Robben or Duff to take it down to the byline or cut in and provide service for Drogba, whose speed and strength are awesome to behold (and I think he’ll help Cote d’Ivoire cause some surprises at next year’s world cup). Or they’ll simply hoof it up to him directly, letting him convert the chances or hold the ball up for Fat Frank to make it up from the midfield. But as Liverpool proved, Chelsea’s game can be contained, despite the resources at their disposal.

Still, what Chelsea has more than anyone else in the top tier is that ability to “win ugly” so critical to be able to win the title — that gritty game when you’re lucky to hold the opposition at bay, and sneak one well taken goal on the break while soaking up everything they throw at you. (Hell, Liverpool in the opener at ‘Boro couldn’t even win pretty — played some glorious stuff but couldn ‘t score.) For everyone else, of course, beating Chelsea will be the ultimate prize — until a few have. Their next home game against Arsenal will probably be drawn or edged by Chelsea, and much as I’d love them to, I don’t think West Brom have it in them. But I’d put a little wager that their first slip will come away at Spurs on August 27. And when they come to Anfield on Oct 2. they’ll feel the wrath of Steven Gerrard for all that messing with his mind.

They’re the team to be beat, but will they be beaten? Maybe not enough to knock them off the top, but it’ll be a lot closer.

Arsenal, I’m afraid, are going to struggle to maintain their second spot, sad as that is because they play the most attractive and poetic game in England (although having seen them in that ugly 1913 claret color strip they’re wearing as a promotional device this year, I’m tempted to withdraw the accolades!). The loss of Vieira and possibly still of Sol Campbell too, the fact that Cole is so obviously unsettled, the aging of Pires and Bergkamp. Their youngsters are a joy to watch, and I have no doubt that in the fall of 2006, they’ll be the team to beat. But this season, I think their inability to “win ugly” and defensive vulnerability will count against them. I expect a lot of high scoring games, but they may not manage better than third or fourth.

Man United are in an even worse state of transition than Arsenal, because their troubles are off the pitch as well as on it now that those American tycoons have taken over. They’re a formidable outfit, of course, but I can’t quite buy the idea of Alan Smith as replacement for Roy Keane — Smith may be a nutter, but there’s a lot more to Keane than steel. Van Nistelrooy will score goals, but he’s getting older, and he doesn’t add much else to their game. Scholes aging too, even Giggs (my favorite among their attackers). Ronaldo is a menace, and Heinze was my personal favorite defender in the premiership last season, and Dough Boy Rooney is phenomenal. Don’t think they have a title challenge in them, although their opener over Everton away was easily the most impressive start (given the venue and quality of the opposition) of any of the contenders.

Rafael Benitez’s Liverpool is a place of miracles, which is a good thing because we still need a few. I’m imagining we’re going into this campaign with a lot more grit and steel, and aren’t going to roll over away any more. Saturday was illustrative, with Mohammed Sissoko’s debut bossing the midfield underlining Rafa’s claim that he’s the next Vieira. We’re still far too reliant on Stevie for goals, although the fact is that we used to be relying on Stevie to score 30-yard screamers, but on Saturday most of his chances were close range headers and shots after smart passing by Xabi, Djibril — even Baros, who passed the ball more in his 20 minutes on the field at Teeside than in the whole of last season — had opened up defenses. So no cause for alarm there, he’s getting into scoring positions because he has Momo and Xabi behind him. And, of course, Crouchinho is still injured and suspended, and now there’s talk that we may yet buy Owen.

But if you take Saturday’s Liverpool premiership debutants — Reina in goal, Zenden on the left, and Momo in the middle — I’d say we have a more solid look about us this year. And Rafa’s tactical discipline and grasp of the English game will stand us in good stead in his second season. I’ll go out on a wishful-thinking limb and say we’ll be second!

The team I’m backing to surprise everyone this season by contending for a Champion’s League spot, though, is Spurs. Martin Jol looks like a cool head, they have loads of striking talent in Defoe and Mido, their midfield options include an extremely talented youthful trio in Reid, Carrick and Routledge, Paul Robinson is one of the better keepers in the premiership and Ledley King is a central defender Liverpool can only envy.

Unfancied for decades, I think Spurs are about to return to the top four and regular European competition.

Posted in Glancing Headers | 9 Comments

Getting Used to a Nuclear Iran

Posted on August 15, 2005 by Tony

iran

President Bush may reassure himself that “the world is coalescing around the notion that the Iranians should not have the means and the wherewithal to be able to develop a nuclear weapon,” but the more pertinent question is whether the world, or even any significant part of it agrees that military action might be a necessary to prevent Iran going nuclear should diplomacy fail. And frankly, the answer is probably not.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s sharp rebuke of Bush’s suggestion that military action remains an option should economic incentives fail is a reminder that while most of the world might agree that Iran shouldn’t build nuclear weapons, most — including, in all probability, even those European countries that joined the U.S. in Iraq — would also agree that it’s not worth going to war in order to stop them.

Schroeder, of course, is electioneering — his Social Democrats are in trouble, so he’s doing what worked last time around: Running against Bush, rather than against Christian Democrat candidate Angela Merkel. But while most of them would lambast him for uttering it in public and emboldening Iran, the position he’s articulating is almost certainly the consensus among the three European nations negotiating with Tehran on the nuclear issue: Iran going nuclear is a terrible idea, but the consequences of attacking Iran in order to prevent it doing so may be worse. The French intellectuals with whom Condoleezza Rice met during her Paris visit in February made clear, much to her alarm, that European public opinion, and much of its political leadership, believes a nuclear-armed Iran is inevitable. And Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has repeatedly made clear that Britain will not support military action against Iran.

Everyone agrees that the current talks are the last, best hope for resolving the matter diplomatically. And they are very likely doomed to fail because the starting point of the Europeans — that Iran refrain from exercising its rights under the NPT to enrich uranium — is unacceptable to Iran, and has become a national rallying point that crosses political boundaries in that country. But they clearly don’t agree on what happens if that process fails.

Bush pointedly chose Israeli TV as the platform from which he reminded the Iranians that military action remains an option. Dick Cheney has previously hinted that Israel might decide to take action, you know, nudge-nudge wink-wink. (Despite the Reagan administration condemning Israel’s 1981 airstrikes on Iraq’s reactor at Osirak to prevent that going online, Cheney two years ago pointedly praised Israel for taking that action and ignoring U.S. calls for restraint, saying if it hadn’t, Saddam would have had nuclear weapons. Perhaps, although what’s interesting is that the air strike didn’t stop Iraq’s nuclear program, it simply drove it underground, so that the IAEA reported after the Gulf War that Iraq had come closer than anyone imagined to building a nuclear weapons program in secret.) Bush making that point in an Israeli interview may have simply been an attempt for Bush to play the good cop routine: “If you don’t make a deal with me, you’ll have to face Sharon.”

But having pursued this program for the most part in the 24 years since Osirak (although it was, curiously enough, started by the Shah in 1975), Iran has built its nuclear program in anticipation of just such a response from Israel or the U.S., concealing much of it in hardened facilities and, intelligence analysts believe, building in considerable redundancy (creating more than one facility to undertake the same task, as a hedge against the possibility that one is destroyed). And while the neocons may have hoped the Iraq invasion would set the mullahs trembling, it has had the opposite result, emboldening the leadership in Tehran as they see the U.S. bogged down, overstretched in Iraq and unable to manage its political process to prevent allies of Iran from dominating. Iran doesn’t fear an invasion nor does it have any reason to — the U.S. simply lacks the troops to occupy a country three times the size of Iraq, and any neocon/exile protestations that no occupying force will be needed because Iranians would be so happy to see U.S. forces ring hollow in the wake of Iraq.

Despite the warnings of the Europeans about economic penalties, the political climate remains favorable to Iran pursuing the full extent of its civilian nuclear program — and thereby creating the infrastructure for rapid conversion to a bomb program at some point in the future. At the IAEA, Iran is appealing to third world countries on the argument of double-standards — that they’re being asked to renounce rights they actually enjoy under the NPT under pressure from the West. That argument — based on Western concern that Iranian concealment of elements of its program, together with the fact that Tehran is developing aspects of the fuel cycle that don’t make economic sense — will nonetheless resonate with other developing nations with nuclear energy programs or aspirations.

But like the civilian nuclear infrastructure, the “double standards” argument is also easily converted to support a nuclear weapons program. The purpose of the NPT was never to protect the monopoly of the existing nuclear powers; it was intended as a freeze on nuclearization in order to facilitate disarmament by the existing powers. That’s never going to happen, of course, and so the Iranians and others will insist that they can’t be asked to desist from developing nuclear weapons while Israel has plenty; and while the U.S., Russia, China etc. maintain their arsenals; and while newly nuclear nations are simply welcomed into the club when they do managed to test a bomb. Double standards and all that.

That’s a tougher argument to counter, as the Iranians well know: That’s why their ambassador to the IAEA made extensive reference to the events of 1945 in defending Iran’s position: “It is the most absurd manifestation of irony that the single state who caused this single nuclear catastrophe in a twin attack on our Earth now has assumed the role of the prime preacher in the nuclear field while ever expanding its nuclear weapons capability,” he said.

It’s hard to avoid concluding that the NPT is essentially doomed — the current nuclear powers (U.S., Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel) have no intention of relinquishing their own nuclear weapons — Bush has long ago abandoned the conceptual principles of the NPT, and is turning instead to armed “counterproliferation” by developing bunker-busting tactical nukes to be used to destroy an enemy’s own arsenal. And the persistence of the current nuclear order creates the overwhelming incentive for all enemies and rivals of the currently nuclear-armed states to pursue the same. Why would Iran accept the nuclear status quo, for example? Everytime the issue comes up, it mentions Israel’s nuclear capability.

While nobody will be comfortable with the prospect of Iran or North Korea or anyone else developing a nuclear deterrent, much of the international community will recognize its inevitability. And if the U.S. draws a red line and declares going nuclear grounds for military action against a country such as Iran, it will find itself mostly isolated. It may remain an unspoken position for some time to come, but much of the international community may have come to the conclusion that as regrettable as that may be, the current eight nuclear powers will be no more able to maintain their strategic monopoly than were the British, French, Germans, Americans and Italians of World War I able to maintain a monopoly over air power.

An educated guess would say Iran will probably go nuclear, and it will hardly be the last. Indeed, if Iran declares, I’d bet on its arch-rival Saudi Arabia being next across the nuclear threshold.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 4 Comments

What McDonalds Can Learn from Ford and the Vatican

Posted on August 12, 2005 by Tony

ronald

Why burn the stars and stripes these days when the more transcendent – and ubiquitous – symbols of all things American these days are the Nike swoosh or the golden arches of McDonalds? A dwindling coterie of Iranian firebrands may gather each year outside the old U.S. embassy in Tehran to dutifully torch Old Glory, but their ideological fellow travelers in most other places have long since graduated to trashing fast-food outlets.

When Hindu nationalist peasant farmers want to protest the entry of U.S. corporations into India’s food market in 1996, they torched a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. French farmers followed suit this year by trashing a McDonalds in order to protest U.S. exports of hormone-laced beef. Serbs protesting NATO’s bombing of Belgrade did the same last spring, as did Mexico City residents protesting California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994 and Danish anarchists who’d simply had enough of capitalism and money in 1996. Throwing trash cans through the windows wasn’t enough for Italian anti-NATO activists during the Kosovo war – they actually bombed three McDonalds outlets in Rome. And when South African Islamic fundamentalists wanted to express solidarity with international super-terrorist Osama Bin Laden last year, they bombed Cape Town’s Planet Hollywood.

America’s chain outlets are no longer safe even in their own backyard, as the Battle of Seattle proved – the enduring image of the anti-WTO ruckus was that of America’s own malcontents vandalizing a Starbucks.

In the minds of protestors, at least, chain restaurants have supplanted embassies and consulates as the primary symbol of America abroad. One obvious reason for venting outrage on Mickey D and KFC is their very ubiquity – as they lick their wounds, Ronald McDonald and the Colonel may take solace from the fact that they’re victims of their own success. In three short decades they’ve gone from being a novelty bit of Americana abroad to supplanting local cuisine as the fast food of choice in many of the world’s leading cities. And while embassies are heavily guarded and located far out of range of projectiles hurled by demonstrators, the wide windows of the U.S. fast food franchises that proliferate throughout the world’s cities are a tempting forest of windmills for Quixotes of every stripe – wearing Nike’s and composing their screeds on Microsoft software – who want to tilt pointlessly at symbols of American power.

The very fact that it’s now possible to get a Big Mac anywhere from Biloxi to Beijing symbolizes the fact that America’s most enduring and successful export since World War II has been its culture. Guardians of cultural purity abroad may howl – and even break windows – but at the end of the day McDonalds, Coke, Nike and ‘Baywatch’ are not symbols of occupation. They go only where they’re wanted, by people who’re prepared to pay for them. They’re out there because of a desire among people from Belgrade to Bombay to – as a perceptive Winston cigarette ad in my native South Africa put it – “taste America.”

Urban legend had it in my home country that during the insurrection of the mid-1980s, black kids who were rampaging through their impoverished townships burning down all symbols of apartheid authority were warned by their parents and peers that one township institution was off-limits: Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was not uncommon to see Colonel Sanders’ affably grinning unmolested through the thick smoke of burning stores all around him owned by suspected collaborators.

But don’t let such tales fuel the wishful thinking that countries with McDonalds won’t go to war with each other. The Kosovo conflict offers a cautionary tale against such sunny optimism. Indeed, Serbs munched on Big Macs throughout the ‘ethnic cleansing’ ’90s, and even though they targeted it for protests during the bombing, they were right back online when it reopened as soon as the bombing ended, sanctions notwithstanding. And Moscow may be awash in U.S. burger and pizza outlets, but that hasn’t stopped the emergence of an anti-American sentiment more pronounced – and more widespread – than at the height of the Cold War.

The chain restaurants are rarely an unambigous representation of American culture – in alien contexts they are able to mutate into phenomena not always immediately recognizable to their parent culture. Like the colonial administrators of yore “going native,” in some instances fast-food chains are inexorably reshaped by their host cultures. Indeed, there’s an interesting parallel between the spread of U.S. chain restaurants around the world and the Catholic Church’s evangelizing of the New World. Catholicism throughout the Americas today is riddled with elements of non-Christian indigenous and African religious traditions that survived the clash of cultures. Indigenous Mayan traditions, for example, are a vital element of Mexican Catholicism, as exemplified in the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A substantial proportion of the faithful in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rica and the Dominican Republic syncretized their Catholicism with Yoruba and Bakongo beliefs brought over by African slaves to create Candomble, Voudou and Santeria. In other words, the form taken by Catholicism in the New World wasn’t simply an extension of the Vatican’s cosmology and rituals to new pastures. Instead it represented an accommodation “negotiated” with remarkably resilient indigenous cultures.

In the same way, the rituals and menu of a McDonalds or a KFC in many foreign countries may not be entirely familiar to a U.S. patron – witness John Travolta and Samuel Jackson’s conversation about how Burger King’s ‘Whopper’ becomes a ‘Grande Royale’ in France in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example, in Latin American countries (and even in some Latino neighborhoods in the U.S.) serves rice and beans, while the colonel also offers his Asian clientele fried rice. In deference to Hinduism, McDonalds in India has left beef off the menu, offering only “lamburgers.” And so on.

For a generation that grows up with the fast food chains ever-present, they’re no longer an American novelty – and the longer they’re part of the local landscape, the less “American” they become. Muscovites may have queued for hours to taste the forbidden Mcfruit when the Golden Arches first marched into post-Soviet Russia, but the next generation will know it simply as a local burger joint in which the staff smile more than is the norm. And so, in the same way that Japanese kids often express surprise that their American counterparts “also” have Mickey Mouse, new generations of kids around the world will claim those American fast food chains as their own – and even invest them with their own cultural meaning.

Already, a French example is showing how the fast-food chains can even be made to bite the hand that reared them. The latest generation of McDonalds France ads rely on “Ugly American” caricatures to align the Golden Arches firmly with Europe in its nationalist food fight with the U.S. “What I don’ t like about McDonalds France,” says an overweight U.S. cowboy in one, “is that it doesn’t buy American beef.” It specifies that French McDonalds only uses French beef, to “guarantee maximum hygienic conditions.” Another ad has a cowboy proclaiming incredulously, “McDonald’s France products come from the farm? And they eat them?” The locally made ads reflect European concern over hormone-treated American beef, which the EU has tried to ban.

The idea of an American chain restaurant trying position itself as the official sandwich of an anti-U.S. trade crusade may seem somewhat treasonable, but the logic of globalization suggests that within a generation, corporations and products may lose their ‘national’ identity. Nobody in Europe thinks of Fords as American cars, quite simply because they’ve been part of the local landscape – with their own designs and plants – for decades. In ten or twenty years time, it may be harder to persuade an anti-American mob to trash a McDonalds than it is today. Because like the Ford logo for the protestors of today, the next generation may not know the origins of the Golden Arches.

Posted in Annals of Globalization | 13 Comments

Laxman Flays the Aussies

Posted on August 12, 2005 by Tony

laxman

As the entire cricket-playing world watches with glee as the Australian juggernaut is humbled by, of all nations, England, I was reminded of a piece I wrote a few years ago for TIME.com on India’s famous come-from-behind victory over the same arrogant Aussies in Calcutta. I was stirred to goosebumps by the heroics of V.V.S. Laxman who had kept his head while all around him were losing theirs and shown the sort of indomitable spirit that had CLR James remind us, so often, of cricket’s ability to stir great emotions of whole towns, cities and nations. And moved to explain these things to an audience who knows naught of cricket.

Extracts:

“What do they of cricket know who only cricket know?”

In that simple rhetorical question the legendary Trinidadian patriot and historian C.L.R. James summed up the significance of a game somewhat incomprehensible to outsiders, and yet of immeasurable collective psychic significance to the nations where it is played. A significance that was on display in India this week, when one man appeared to singlehandedly (to the extent that this is possible in a game that is the very model of team effort) lift the nation’s flagging spirits…

Elsewhere, in Calcutta, India’s cricket XI (as cricket protocol describes the 11 members of a team) were faring no better in their attempt to stop the Australian juggernaut. The arrogant, swaggering Aussies had won 16 straight test matches (a remarkable achievement in a sport whose test matches, which pitch country against country, are played over five days and as often end in a draw as produce a result), and struggling India was expected to put up only modest resistance. Indeed, Indian cricket has been as subject to the bribery malaise as its politics, with the former captain of the national team and one of its star batsmen having been forced to quit last year after being found guilty of fixing games for bookmakers.

The game was going according to form as the Australians batting first had amassed 445 runs off the demoralized Indian bowling attack. Worse was to come. India lost its first wicket after only six minutes, with no runs on the board. And the rot never stopped, as the pride of India’s batsmen were skittled for only 171. Only one man showed any resistance: Vangipurappu Laxman (like many of his countrymen better known by his initials, V.V.S.), whose 59 included 12 fours (balls smashed all the way to the boundary fence).

Its disastrous showing left India having to bat a second time — if the team that bats second can’t come within 150 runs of its opponent’s first innings, it can be asked to bat again. Being forced to “follow on” is usually a prelude to a humiliating defeat. And that’s how the Indian press were calling it at the end of Day 2 in Calcutta. At best, they hoped, India could avoid the ultimate humiliation of an innings defeat (when the team that bats second fails over two innings to pass the score its rival registered in a single innings, which suggests it was an unworthy opponent).

Laxman had other ideas.

He’d shown a Kiplingesque ability “keep his head when all around him were losing theirs” during the first innings, demonstrating that Australia’s bowlers could be seen off, and even punished. Sensing the fire in Laxman’s belly, his captain promoted him to Number 3 in the batting order, and as he strode to the wicket with the total on 52, he set out to lead his countrymen and inspire them by his example to believe in their ability not only to stand up to the juggernaut, but to vanquish it.

Laxman remained at the wicket for almost two days, besting nine Australian bowlers and smashing 44 boundaries. By the time he got out, on the morning of Day 5, he had amassed 289 runs, a record for an Indian test batsman. More important, he and Rahul Dravid (180) had led India to the awe-inspiring total of 657 for the loss of only seven wickets. Some 50,000 people had crowded into the ground as word spread around Calcutta that Laxman and Dravid were flaying the Australian bowling.

By nightfall on Day 4, their achievement had seized the imagination not only of the whole nation, but also of the wider cricketing world that has long suffered the domination of the obnoxious Aussies. And more was to come. Putting Australia in to chase a target of 373 on the final day, India bowled out Australia for 212, becoming only the third test team in history to win a match after having been forced to follow on. Where Laxman had put steel into the spine of the Indian batting, a lanky young Sikh off-spinner, Harbajan Singh, claimed the honors with the ball — having dispatched seven Australians in the first innings, he added another six scalps in the second.

With bat and ball, skill, timing, determination and courage, Laxman, Harbajan and Dravid had changed the mood of a nation.

To Americans, cricket may look like a quaint memento of the British empire’s heyday, an exasperatingly slow, overly complex game of bat and ball played by gentlemen in white flannels who continue to maintain the time-honored tradition of interrupting the afternoon session for 20 minutes at 4 p.m., to allow the players to enjoy a nice cup of tea. And yet to the British and those they colonized, it remains an almost mystical canonization of their culture’s finest achievements.

For those interest in the full piece, it’s here.

Now, if I can only persuade the Man from Madras (you know who you are!) to weigh in with regularity, we can start a cricket thread on Rootless Cosmopolitan!

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 9 Comments

They Never Give Up, Do They?

Posted on August 5, 2005 by Tony

There’s more than a whiff of rodent coming off the story carried in various U.S. outlets this week claiming that Iran is supposedly supplying sophisticated explosives to Iraq’s insurgency.

The regime in Iran may hate the U.S., but not necessarily as much as they hate those waging the Sunni insurgency against the Americans in Iraq: the Baathists and neo-Baathists who make up the bulk of the insurgent leadership, and the foreign jihadis led by Zarqawi and recently aligned with al Qaeda. The Baathists, who launched the war against Iran that effectively crippled the Islamic Revolution in its infancy, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — and later butchering fellow Shiites in Iraq — are a sworn enemy; the Zarqawi crew have far outdone any of their Qaeda kin in articulating, and acting on a virulent anti-Shiite bloodlust that would make cooperation with it by Iran the equivalent of Israel supplying weapons to Islamic Jihad.

Then there’s the fact that the new government in Iraq is dominated by two parties — the Dawa, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — that are historically and currently very close to Tehran. Iran has signed agreements with the new Iraqi government on everything from refining oil and supplying electricity to training the new military (swallow that one, Rummy!)

And Fareed Zakaria points out that in putting out feelers for talks with the Americans, the Baathist leadership of the insurgency are making clear that they consider Iran their more immediate strategic enemy, which has gained considerable ground in Baghdad as a result of Saddam’s ouster.

It’s arguable, even, whether Iran really wants the U.S. forced out right now. Not only does the quagmire in which U.S. forces are trapped in Iraq function as a kind of insurance policy for Tehran (they can’t be invaded while the U.S. is so overstretched), the reality is that if the U.S. pulled out now the resulting showdown between the Shiite militias and the insurgents would probably draw Iran increasingly into the same quagmire the U.S. had just vacated.

For the story about alleged arms supplies to be true, the regime in Tehran would have to be capable of the same degree of cynicism as the Reagan administration was back in the ’80s when it was supplying weapons to both Iraq and Iran. But on top of that, they’d have to be remarkably stupid, because doing so runs counter to their most basic interests. I doubt that. Instead, I’m inclined to agree with Juan Cole that this story sounds more than a little dubious.

P.S. While some critics may see this as part of an ongoing effort to tee up Iran for regime change, I’m inclined to see a more modest motivation (not even the neocons could seriously propagate the U.S. getting involved in a new war of occupation in the region). Instead, the purpose may be to drive a wedge between the new government in Baghdad and its close friends in Tehran (and play up Arab-Persian hostilities rather than Shiite affinities). After all, it can’t be much fun for the neocons to behold the fruit of democracy in Iraq being a pro-Iran government.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 2 Comments

Hiroshima, Mon Amerique

Posted on August 5, 2005 by Tony

hiroshima
Four Thoughts on the Hiroshima Anniversary

1. Don’t Look Back

I’ll admit, I was genuinely taken aback — gobsmacked, as they say — when after having been here for two years, the furor erupted over the Smithsonian Institute’s plans to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima with a museum exhibit that included an extensive section detailing the impact of the Atom bomb on the city, as well as thought provoking background information on the context in which the fateful decision was taken. That plan was successfully squelched by congressional Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, who proclaimed it “anti-American propaganda.” Having succeeded in stopping the show (or reducing it to little more than a display of the B-29 bomber that dropped the bomb), Gingrich crowed, ”the Enola Gay fight was a fight, in effect, over the reassertion by most Americans that they are sick and tired of being told by some cultural elite that they ought to be ashamed of their country.”

Wow. Where to begin?

It’s not as if there is any dispute over the facts of what happened on August 6, 1945. But the keepers of the national mythology appeared to have decided that America was not ready to confront the reality of what had transpired when its leaders decided to unleash a weapon of mass destruction on a civilian population. Or to even have a sober discussion over how such a monumental decision was made.

But then, while the brutal war crimes of Nazi Germany and and Tojo’s Japan are well documented and exhaustively discussed, there has really been very little discussion, not only in the U.S. but also more widely in the West, of the legitimacy of the massive aerial bombardment of those countries’ civilian populations by U.S. and British bomber fleets. The morality and legality of consciously setting out to destroy a whole civilian population center in Hiroshima was not even seriously debated at the time, it was simply enacted as the inevitable next step once the bomb was ready. And the climate that made that possible had been created in Dresden, and Hamburg, and Tokyo — and before that in the aerial bombing by British war planes of rebellious villages in Iraq in the 1920s and the Italians of the restive natives of their Libyan possession as early as 1911.

We correctly decry terrorism precisely because it targets civilians rather than combatants, making it an illegitimate and immoral form of warfare. But there appears to be a blindspot in Western discourse when it comes to discussing the context of targeting civilians in the course of formal warfare.

That, in turn, has created the moral climate in which the U.S. and its allies deem it unecessary to keep count of, let alone to be held to account for, the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians that have been killed in the course of allied military actions there.

Western discourse recuses itself from even discussing these questions by falling back on its moral certitude: Eggs are broken in the course of making omelettes, after all, and all of these Western interventions are for the greater good; therefore the collateral damage is simply a tragic by-product of the march of progress and liberty — but not one that should detain or distract us from repeating the exericse when next the cause of liberty and progress demands it. This ends-justifying-means logic unfortunately has an ironic echo in the rationalizations used by terrorists for their own violence against civilians.

2. Defining terrorism

The UN General Assembly will — very sensibly in a world in which one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter — next month be asked by Secretary General Kofi Annan to adopt a resolution (with U.S. support) that, among other things, for the first time offers a single, universal definition of terrorism in order to achieve moral and political clarity and eliminate political preference as the basis of determining what is and isn’t terrorism. The definition reads as follows:

“We affirm that the targeting and deliberate killing of civilians and non-combatants cannot be justified or legitimised by any cause or grievance, and we declare that any action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a government or an international organisation to carry out or to abstain from any act cannot be justified on any grounds and constitutes an act of terrorism. ”

No arguments there. Now read the decision to attack the civilian population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with weapons of mass destruction designed to to wipe out tens of thousands of people in a single moment — in order to compel the Japanese government to surrender to U.S. forces — against that definition. The official rationalization for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that to proceed with a land invasion would cost the lives of up to 250,000 U.S. troops, and bring horrific suffering on millions of Japanese civilians. There’s considerable debate about the troop figure, but for me that misses the point: The terrorism definition outlined above specifically precludes the targeting of civilians to force a government to change course, and my own very limited understanding of the laws of war tells me that there is no provision for putting civilians in harm’s way in order to protect the lives of combatants — that’s why people make such a fuss when troops use “human shields.”

Wherever you come down on these issues, we have here an issue worthy of a lot more discussion than it has prompted so far. Osama bin Laden, for one, has seized on that silence for his own propaganda purposes: In this first video statement after 9/11, Bin Laden referred explicitly to Hiroshima and said that the fact that it was not considered a war crime disqualified the U.S. from denouncing terrorism. And as Pervez Hoodbhoy has pointed out in a thoughtful commentary on the debate in Pakistan over nuclear weapons, the Hiroshima decision remains central to the thinking of those among America’s rivals and enemies who advocate building nuclear weapons.

So, unpacking and reexamining the Hiroshima decision may be long overdue. But if what I saw in 1995 was any indication, don’t hold your breath. For Gingrich and his ilk, even opening these questions to debate is verboten.

3. Weapons Create Their Own Logic

We’ve already noted that the primary factor that prompted the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply the weapon’s completion. America was at war, and once this super-weapon was a reality, there was not a moment’s questioning whether it could be used.

Of more concern, however, is the fact that 15 years after the Cold War, nuclear weapons are spreading faster and further than ever. Forget about horror scenarios of terror groups acquiring these weapons on the black market — plausible, but not really likely at this point, I think. The reality is that the major powers have allowed a reality to emerge where the number of nation states rushing headlong to acquire strategic nuclear capability is growing all the time. Indeed, the U.S. appears to have accepted that reality, increasingly abandoning the Cold War era arms control regime in favor of missile-defense technology and a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons designed to destroy the weapons of the other side (whoever that may be) in their bunkers.

Of course they fight rearguard actions in the name of the Non-Proliferatin Treaty, Iran being the current focus. But the premise of the NPT was that other states would refrain from going nuclear while the established nuclear powers would disarm. It was never designed to protect the strategic monopoly of the Nuclear Five (now Eight, or Nine if you count North Korea). And it is simply absurd to expect states whose enemies are nuclear armed to simply refrain from attaining that exalted status, particularly when globalization has put that capability within reach. Why would Iran refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons when the U.S. and Israel, and also a regional rival Pakistan, have them? And the example of Israel, Pakistan and India shows that if you do manage to build a bomb, nobody can reverse your nuclear status, you simply get membership of the club. And if Iran did, then Saudi Arabia almost certainly would (via its longtime client state Pakistan, probably). Similarly, North Korea looks likely to learn from the fate of Iraq, and play out the current negotiation process until it tests a weapon and changes the terms of the talks. And that will prompt Japan to do the same, which will prompt China to expand its own arsenal, and so on.

This is bad, of course, very bad. But there’s no stopping it, really, under current geopolitical conditions.

4. It will happen again

No, not because some terrorist will buy some suitcase device from the Russian mob. Those scenarios are plausible, of course, but they strike me as pretty unlikely. The real nuclear danger comes from nuclear armed states, who maintain their arsenals in good working order, and continually hone the delivery systems to get them to their intended targets within an hour of taking a decision to use them. The number of those states has expanded over the past decade, and it looks to expand again over the next one. And once the capacity is there — particularly if states believe they can avoid a ruinous counterstrike, either through technological advantages or through applying a first-strike so devastating that it eliminates an enemy’s capacity to respond — the rest will take care of itself. That, after all, is what happened in 1945.

Posted in Situation Report | 8 Comments

A Jew’s Place

Posted on August 3, 2005 by Tony

This piece appeared in South Africa’s Sunday Times in December of 2003

Israel’s leaders don’t fear Palestinian suicide bombers nearly as much as they fear the Palestinian population explosion.

Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now warning that holding on to the West Bank and Gaza will soon make Jews a demographic minority in this “Greater Israel”. And that’s anathema to Zionists – believers in the principle of a Jewish nation-state – because the Palestinians could simply demand citizenship in the state that rules them.


Occupation creates an apartheid scenario

That would leave Zionists unpalatable choices: maintain the current apartheid scenario in the West Bank and Gaza and accept an endless intifada; drive the Palestinians out of those territories and book a date with a war crimes tribunal; or surrender the idea of an ethnically defined state and live alongside the Palestinians in a single polity – the “South Africa” option.

To South Africans, the idea of common citizenship hardly sounds calamitous; but for Zionists, the demographics of ethnic advantage are everything.

During my days in the Habonim youth movement in South Africa, I briefly considered settling on a kibbutz in the northern Galilee. Kibbutz Tuval, we were told, was of critical importance to the Zionist project because the local Arab birth rate threatened the area’s Jewish majority.

I subsequently learned from reading Israeli historians that the Galilee had, in fact, been overwhelmingly Palestinian before a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Israeli military units in 1948.

Even before I knew that, however, the idea of living out Habonim’s utopian socialist ideals in a hilltop garrison designed to keep a check on the local Arab population seemed a little grotesque – particularly when measured against the competing claims on my activist energies of the ANC’s non-racialism.

The Zionist language of demographics can be more than a little unfortunate in light of Jewish history: Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week described Israel’s Arab citizens as a “demographic problem”.

Having once, ourselves, suffered the consequences of being someone else’s “demographic problem”, you’d think a Jew would know better. But the logic of Zionism is frequently in conflict with the cherished ethics of the Jewish tradition.

Although Zionists like to imagine Israel as the prophetic culmination of 5 000 years of Jewish history, it is more a product of the Nazi Holocaust than anything else.

Before the death camps, Zionism had been a minority tendency among the world’s Jews: the genocide and the refusal by the US and Britain to take in most survivors turned the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine into a matter of physical survival for hundreds of thousands of Jews.

Growing up with the benign anti-Semitism prevailing in much of white South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s – cricket clubs from which we were barred, a teacher complaining that there were too many of us in his class, “Jewish” as a synonym for “stingy” in playground parlance – and then encountering the story of the Holocaust in my teens made me susceptible to Zionism’s basic premise: the world was a dangerous place to be Jewish; our safety required a state of our own.

If anything, however, the inverse has proved true: Israel is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a Jew; its survival is dependent on the fact that Jews in the US are not only safe, but enjoy sufficient influence to have made favouring Israel an article of faith for American politicians of all stripes.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s Jews live outside of Israel, and that number may grow: the destination of choice for Jews leaving Russia today is no longer Israel, but Germany, while the number of Israelis now living abroad has grown by almost 50% in the last two years, to 750 000 – some 15% of Israel’s Jewish population finds the Diaspora sufficiently safe and hospitable to make their homes elsewhere.

The idea of a state that reserves citizenship for the Jews who live in Milwaukee or Milnerton at the expense of Palestinians continuously expropriated since 1948 is now as dysfunctional as it is morally untenable. Israelis increasingly recognise that they can have peace only by reconciling with the Palestinians.

Conventional wisdom sees such reconciliation achieved by splitting “Greater Israel” into two states, but a small but growing number of Israelis have begun to argue that the two peoples have no option but to live with one another, as South Africans have done, in a single state.

Resolving the conflict, however, involves reconciling the competing claims of the Palestinians and the 4.8- million Jews who live in Israel. They have a legitimate right to live there in peace and safety.

But the 8.2-million of us who have chosen to live elsewhere have no legitimate claim on that land. Zionism has outlived its purpose: a Jew’s place is in the world.

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 9 Comments

Why Iraq Is Not Vietnam

Posted on August 3, 2005 by Tony

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Bruce Willis visits the troops

As it becomes more and more obvious by the day that the U.S. simply cannot win in Iraq, the Vietnam comparison is inevitably going to be getting a lot more play in the media. Hey, even Jane Fonda has taken her campaigning self out of mothballs to take an antiwar crusade on the road. The temptation of that comparison is obvious, not least because of the increasingly manic spin in which the whole sorry mess is being packaged for American audiences: The latest placebo we’re asked to digest is the notion that if Iraq’s draft constitution is delivered on its August 15 deadline, the insurgency will begin to wilt on the vine. Yeah, right, just like it did after the U.S. transferred “sovereignty” to the Allawi’s interim government, and after the January election — both of which were promised as the antidote to the insurgency. The element of Iraqi society represented by the insurgency is, quite simply, not represented in the constitution-making process. So, unless the drafters and the U.S. are secretly taking up the offer of the Baathist insurgent commanders for talks over a political settlement, it’s extremely unlikely that the August 15 document will make any difference. And the fact that they’re rushing to meet a deadline under pressure from the U.S. suggests that, as ever, the contentious issues will be kicked down the road.

But wait, let’s back up to the Vietnam analogy, which has been a trope of liberal opponents of the war since the invasion was first mooted. By once again projecting its power into a far-off land in a war of choice, supposedly to liberate a people who hadn’t exactly asked the U.S. to be there, the argument went, America was bound to repeat its most traumatic foreign misadventure. And the liberals’ Vietnam obsession was echoed in the behavior of some of the American troops in Iraq, who took to broadcasting Wagner while on raids and other such Hollywood Vietnam stunts. I think Iraq is very different from Vietnam, however, even if they share the basic feature that the U.S. will be unable to achieve its goals there.

Before we get into the most important difference between Iraq and Vietnam — okay, for those of you with no patience, it’s that in Vietnam the U.S. couldn’t win, but the communist-nationalist movement led by Ho Chi Minh could, and did; in Iraq the U.S. can’t win but nor can anyone else — it’s worth dwelling on the conservative flip-side of the Vietnam comparison: For the Bush administration and its backers, the analogy in Iraq is not the trauma of Vietnam, but the triumph of post-war Germany and Japan.

As preposterous as that may sound to anyone vaguely familiar with events in the Middle East, it’s a folly that appears nonetheless to have shaped the thinking at the very top of the Bush administration on how to manage Iraq. Condoleezza Rice repeatedly told audiences that the resistance in Iraq was not dissimilar to that mounted by “werewolves” in Germany — an improbably quaint fiction.

More recently, it was hard not to giggle when Dick Cheney — who over the past three years has disseminated enough manure on Iraq to put the whole country under tomato plants — rewound the tape on Condi and said the current phase in Iraq is more comparable to the Battle of the Bulge in Europe or Okinawa in the Pacific, and that a glorious victory awaited. (If the rest of the world took seriously anything Cheney said on Iraq, they might have taken that as a declaration of intent to nuke Baghdad!)

Far more important than mocking the plain silliness of the Japan-Germany spin, however, is to recognize the central role it may have played in shaping policy: Last year, I heard a radio interview with Noah Feldman, the NYU Middle East legal scholar who worked as a consultant on constitutional matters for the Coalition Provisional Authority, in which he described flying into Baghdad along with all the other “experts” who would run the occupation. He looked up from the tome on Iraqi history he was reading and looked around the plane; to his alarm he realized that everyone else who would be directing policy for the CPA was immersed in works of history on either Japan or Germany after WWII. And CPA chief J Paul Bremer kept a chart on his wall documenting “Milestones: Iraq and Germany.” Journalists discovered the CPA working from policy documents lifted directly from the administration of postwar Germany, from which they had neglected to change the term “reichsmark” to dinar.

Small wonder, that they were never able to grasp Iraqi reality. More compelling, perhaps, is the fact that both the conservatives and the liberals seem to share the same epistemological flaw: They insist on understanding Iraq through the prism of American experiences — traumatic, in the case of the liberals; triumphant in the case of the conservatives — rather than engaging with Iraq’s own history and context.

While it may also be destined to be remembered as another American failure, I do believe Iraq is quite different from Vietnam. The key ifference may have been underscored recently by the visit to Washington of Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai. After all, this is the same regime installed by Ho Chi Minh after the regime created by the U.S. in Vietnam was finally overthrown in 1975. The U.S. couldn’t win, but the nationalist-communist movement led by Ho Chi Minh could and did. And while no movement is ever really fully representative of a people, it appears to have been sufficiently representative of enough of them to ensure that its 30-year rule over all of Vietnam has been basically stable, despite the strictures it placed on many Vietnamese. Despite its “fall” into the Soviet orbit, the outcome in Vietnam did not significantly challenge U.S. interests in the wider Pacific rim. The Vietnamese even arguably cleaned up their neighborhood by ousting the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, and then whupped the Chinese when Beijing sought to punish Hanoi for destroying its client by launching military actions along the border. (Ironically, the same Khmer Rouge later received covert U.S. backing when it fought the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh.)

But as the presence of the Prime Minister in Washington signaled, Vietnam is stable and has come around to seek the advantage of a market economy and doing business with the U.S.

In Iraq, to put it bluntly, while the U.S. can’t win, nor can anyone else. There’s no reason to believe the insurgency will be quelled on the current political terms, and it has actually grown steadily in strength, depth, breadth and sophistication over the past two years. It has crippled reconstruction efforts, leaving Iraq pumping less oil and producing less electricity two years after its “liberation” than it was doing before Saddam’s ouster. And it has sustained a level of violence that has seen thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, both in terror strikes and in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in the years since Saddam’s fall. The insurgency is based in a minority community — the Sunni Arabs — from which most of Iraq’s political, social and economic elites have been drawn since the creation of Iraq by the British. It is a community thoroughly alienated by the political transition, but not simply because insufficient effort has been made to coax them to join the table, but because the very idea of democracy imperils their traditional privileges: The very idea of being offered scraps by a government led by the Shiites with the Kurds playing second fiddle is anathema enough people in a community that traditionally ruled Iraq — and while this is largely unspoken, there is considerable hostility even among U.S. allies in the Arab world to the idea of a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, particularly because the current government have made clear that they are far closer to Iran than to the U.S. (Recently, they concluded extensive pacts with Tehran on everything from refining oil to training the new Iraqi military, much to Washington’s chagrin.)

So the transition to a Shiite dominated democracy (the two being inextricably linked, given the Shiites demographic dominance) may in itself be driving the insurgency — and remember, while the Zarqawi phenomenon grabs the headlines and the spin, most of the insurgents captured and killed have been Iraqis, and the dominant element in the insurgency remains mid-level former Baathists. And on the basis of the current political process, the insurgents may well find a social base among the Sunnis, and financial support in the wider Sunni Arab world, for years to come.

Even then, they lack the ability to prevail. Some suggest if the U.S. pulled out, the former Baathists would make short shrift of the new security forces, and reinstall themselves via a putsch. But the Kurds would simply break away, and the Shiites — increasingly armed and dominant in the new security forces would fight, probably with direct backing from Iran. The Sunni insurgency is strong enough to withstand whatever force the Shiites government can muster, but not strong enough — or representative enough — to reassert control over the whole country. The Sunnis have the organization and training; the Shiites have the numbers and the backing of Iran to cancel that out.

To some, the answer is simple: Break Iraq up into three ethnic mini-states. The Kurds want to go their own way, anyway. So do some of the Shiite politicians of the south. Let them take their oil and leave the recalcitrant Sunnis with the vast empty deserts of Anbar province as reward for the insurgency. Bad idea, and it won’t work: The country doesn’t divide that neatly. Baghdad, for example, is home to 3 million Shiites and close to 2 million Sunnis. Even Kirkuk, which the Kurds are claiming, has a large enough Arab and Turkmen population to put up a fight. (Even among the Shiites, the residents of Baghdad may not be that enthusiastic about their southern cousins talk of keeping the oil revenues away from the capital.) More importantly, there’s insufficient support for a breakup of Iraq outside the Kurds. It’s not only the Sunnis that will resist; Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader who remains the most powerful person in Iraq won’t hear of it. And, of course, creating new borders between ethnic communities along a frontline that has traditionally been the battlefront between Arabs and Persians will inevitably draw in Iran and the Arab League on opposite sides, while Kurdish independence will be swiftly smothered by Turkish intervention. Today’s guerrilla and terror war would swiftly be replaced by a far more damaging regional conflagration.

No, Iraq is more like a split atom: The fallout will have to be contained for a long time to come. The only hope for the U.S. being able to recuse itself from that role would be if it started down the long and complex road of negotiating a compact between Iran, Turkey and the Arab League countries on managing Iraq. But listening to Rumsfeld’s high-pitched whining to the new Iraqi government about stopping Iran’s “meddling” (uh, Don, they were invited by the new, democratically-elected governmetn to “meddle”) there’s no sign of Washington embracing this reality any time soon. Besides, managing Iraq on the basis of consensus with Tehran, Ankara, Damascus, Cairo, Amman and Riyadh would mean accepting that a war designed to dramatically overturn the status quo throughout the Middle East will have, in fact, ended up reinforcing it.

Still, as America tires of a foreign entanglement draining blood and treasure with no end in sight, Iran may start looking a lot more attractive to Washington. As Juan Cole so elegantly explained, whichever way you slice it, the biggest winner in the Iraq war has been Iran. And, of course, al-Qaeda, whose once-marginal ideas have become sufficiently mainstream among sections of the Arab and Muslim youth — in no small part because of the U.S. behaving in ways that fit the propaganda stereotype promoted by Bin Laden and his PR people — so as to guarantee that the problem of terrorism will be with us for another generation. So, not really like Vietnam. Something quite different, and possibly worse.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 12 Comments

Bin Laden’s Fiendish Chemical Warfare

Posted on July 26, 2005 by Tony

So is this what all those politicians mean when they tell you Al Qaeda is out to destroy America’s way of life? Or is it just a sign of just how gormless some news organizations can be? The New York Post on Tuesday devoted its front page to a story suggesting Osama bin Laden had sought to poison America’s cocaine supply. The rest of the News Corporation empire duly followed suit. It was a perfect moment of synergy for the paper’s headline writers who like to use such Dickensian pejoratives as “fiend” to describe Bin Laden at the best of times — “Bin Laden Coke Fiend!” they screamed in towering letters.

The story suggests US drug enforcement authorities report a plot to kill “thousands of Americans” by poisoning cocaine supplies to be sold on the streets, which was foiled only because bin Laden’s ostensible Colombian kingpin suppliers baled out when they realized they would be killing their own clientele.

Of course believing this hogwash requires that we simply forget about how terrorism works — if it’s not on TV, it’s not particularly effective. And the idea of a poisoned cocaine epidemic slowly eliminating various Wall Street bankers, club kids, uh, Washington politicians and ghetto bad-boys isn’t exactly going to create that sort of iconic image that 9/11 did. But you can understand the concern. After all, anyone who could take at face value their source’s claim that Bin Laden met, in person, with Colombian drug kingpins at an undisclosed location in 2002, has got to be smoking something pretty nasty.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 2 Comments

Lost in Translation

Posted on July 25, 2005 by Tony

When a U.S. spyplane collided with a Chinese fighter and was forced down in Hainan on April Fool’s Day in 2001, I wrote a commentary on TIME.com inviting American readers to imagine the incident through Chinese eyes, in order to appreciate the depth of anger the incident caused in Beijing.

“Imagine a Chinese plane flying a surveillance mission off the Florida coast colliding with an Air Force F-16 sent on an aggressive monitoring mission,” I wrote. “The U.S. fighter goes down and the pilot is lost; the Chinese plane is forced to land on U.S. soil. The incident occurs at a moment when China is about to supply a package of sophisticated weapons to Cuba (possibly including the very same model spy plane now in U.S. hands); is planning to deploy a missile shield that would neutralize the U.S. nuclear arsenal; and has signaled that curbing U.S. regional ambitions is to become the organizing principle of its military doctrine. Imagine further that the incident comes two years after Chinese bombs had destroyed (albeit inadvertently) a U.S. embassy in Europe… It’s unlikely Americans would feel in a particularly forgiving mood, either.”

Apparently, the editors at China’s official Xinhua agency were sufficiently impressed with the column that they created their own version of it, writing three days later that : “Time Magazine columnist Tony Karon wrote an article on the same web site pointing out that the US approach in demanding that China return the reconnaissance aircraft and its crew doesn’t make sense. He said that the US government should put itself in China’s position and imagine that, if it had been a Chinese reconnaissance aircraft engaging in spying and reconnaissance off the coast of Florida, and a US pilot had been lost after a US aircraft had taken to the air to intercept it, and furthermore that China was also in the process of selling a series of advanced weapons to Cuba, a US adversary, and was preparing to set up a missile defence system targeted at the United States, how would the Americans handle it? He says that ‘I don’t believe the Americans would feel that it is forgivable either.’ ”

Which doesn’t mean quite the same thing as saying “wouldn’t be in such a forgiving mood.” But hey, at least they read the piece.

The incident, you may remember, had a happy ending, as neither Beijing nor Washington had any interest in escalating the standoff.

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 7 Comments