Ma’s struggle for leadership

Critics of president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have long derided (if not vilified) him for his alleged "spinelessness" and inability to create a distinct path for himself within the party. While it is true that Ma does not have the authority of, say, Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) or Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) — which will undoubtedly create problems for him — we can nevertheless see him, in the weeks following his election in March, striving for a modicum of autonomy. As I have argued before, this effort has expressed itself in Ma’s move to the center of the political spectrum, a slide that already is beginning to alienate more hardcore members of the KMT.

The most salient example of Ma’s shift may be his surprise appointment of former Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislator Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) as Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) chairwoman. The decision came as a surprise — and shocked KMT purists — because Lai has long been known for her critical stance on China and pro-independence views on Taiwan, which seems a bit of a contradiction given the KMT’s “pro-China” position and the role of the MAC in fostering rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing. Nevertheless, the appointment appears to reflect Ma’s promise to assemble a Cabinet that includes people from both the pan-green and pan-blue parties, and for this, Ma should be given credit.

No sooner had the announcement of Lai’s appointment been made, however, than KMT members were decrying the decision and calling on Ma to instead tap into the pool of dedicated, hard-working KMT candidates as he puts together his Cabinet. In other words, Ma appeared to be breaking a party rule that would limit the candidates to blue-card-carrying candidates. Put differently, under that unwritten rule, rather than seek to appoint the best candidates from across the political spectrum, Ma should be limiting himself to picking individuals from within the KMT and thereby engineer a true one-party state, or a state for the party.

If, as I read it, Ma’s intentions are (at least partly) to create a Cabinet that would indeed be representative of Taiwan (as opposed to being representative of the KMT or, more cynically, Beijing), the future president may be in for the fight of his life, and his opponents will be party members themselves rather than the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opposition.

The real danger lies in Ma losing that battle — which is a very real possibility, given, as we have seen, his lack of authority and non-old-KMT-guard allies. Should this come about, Ma would become but a figurehead president, while the real political decision-making would rest with behind-the-scene figures such as former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and the ever-conspicuous (and likely National Security Council chairman) Su Chi (蘇起), whose allegiance seems to rest with Beijing rather than Taipei. Furthermore, a sidelined Ma would mean that his Cabinet appointments that do not meet prevailing party standards would also be cast aside, meaning that Lai, for example, would be incapacitated as MAC chairwoman and the real negotiations with Beijing would happen at the non-official level — which may already be the case, what with (as Michael Turton rightly points out today on his blog The View from Taiwan) Lien’s meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) this week.

There is no doubt that Ma has been changed by the presidential election; the transforming power of carrying the weight of a people on one’s shoulders should not be underestimated. Ma may not go as far as his predecessor Lee did in becoming an advocate of Taiwanese independence, but there are undeniable signs that a shift in his perspective has occurred. And it is more than political smokescreen to appease the DPP. What remains to be seen, however, is whether he is capable of retaining his independence and fight the battle that is brewing within the KMT.

Sounding the alarm

I began the draft of my book on Canadian security intelligence two days after I resigned from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in September 2005. Following graduation from the War Studies Master’s Degree program at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) on Nov. 4 that year, I relocated to Taiwan, where I began working as a copy editor. For months I sporadically worked on my manuscript, but there was still too much anger in me — anger at what I had experienced at CSIS — to be able to write with enough emotional distance to make my work more useful than mere tirade. So months passed and I focused instead on events in Taiwan.

But Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in July-August 2006 reawakened in me a sense of urgency and the need to get the message out, to show how destructive the misguided, bigoted intelligence and military apparatuses that claim to protect democracy can be (buildings need not be pulverized for lives to be damaged by intelligence services, as I saw first-hand at CSIS). Following that illegal war, I re-embarked on my writing and, months later, came up with the semblance of a finished manuscript, which I then submitted to a literary agent in Toronto, Canada. The manuscript was read and the agent sent me a list of items that needed to be changed. I was told my work was to autobiographical, which (he was right) might not have appealed to general readers. So I rewrote the entire thing, cutting entire sections that were of little interest to people who did not know me.

Three versions and 18 months later, my book Smokescreen: Canadian Security Intelligence after September 11, 2001, is finally out. It is much slicker and I believe has enough emotional distance — yet still enough — to make it engaging and useful for general readers as well as academics and intelligence officers.

I would be lying if I said that writing this book was a walk in the park. It wasn't. Aside from the hundreds (dare I count?) of hours writing the manuscript, doing research, seeking permissions from publishers whose work I quote, finding my own publisher, making the proofs, designing the cover (yes, I did that, too) and everything else, the endeavor reopened wounds I had consciously decided I would leave behind when I resigned from CSIS. For a while, the sleeplessness that had haunted my last year at the Service threatened to revisit me, and I could once again feel the very real, suffocating ball of pain creeping inside me. But in the end, this work, however painful it was, served as an exorcism. Even the more personal parts that ultimately did not make it into the final product were cathartic and allowed me to deal with the demons and, once I was done with them (or they with me), to banish them.

My work has taken so many shapes and forms that after a while I lost sight of whether it would appeal to general readers. I believe it does. Sadly, very few people in Canada have been asking the questions that I raise — and try to answer — in Smokescreen. Even fewer are those who have been part of the intelligence community, people who have a better sense of what’s going on and everything that is wrong with that state-within-the-state, largely because, like me, they were told never to write about the things they have seen or done. It was precisely because I had been part of that system that I so urgently needed to get the message out — not to reveal secrets (which I don't) — but rather to show how utterly corrupted and corrupting that system is.

Democratic systems in the West are indeed threatened, but the threat comes not from al-Qaeda, or Hezbollah, or Hamas or Iran, but from within, from the unaccountable, authoritarian (and oftentimes incompetent) sub-state actors like CSIS, the CIA, MI5, ISIS (Mossad) and all the others that purportedly protect us. This is what my book is about, how the system transforms the individuals who are part of it and crushes their sense of morality to defend a cause that has little to do with reality or protecting civilians (in my case Canadians).

So it’s out, not in my hands anymore. I don't know whether I should be excited or terrified. I think I'm both. Let’s see what happens…

NOTICE: Please note that Smokescreen is now available for order at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk, as well as in e-book format at www.iuniverse.com. It will go on sale through other distribution channels (Chapters, Indigo and Coles bookstores) in a few weeks.

New stock phrase

On several occasions in recent months, this site and others — Michael Turton’s The View From Taiwan spearheading the effort — have pointed out the biased use of language by wire agencies and news organizations to describe Taiwan or the situation in the Taiwan Strait. In most instances, it would be fair to say that the misrepresentations were unintentional and stemmed from the fact that the copy writers were ill informed. Given the reflex, as in any big organization that deals with information, to recycle material (a phenomenon only made worse with the advent of the copy-and-paste function), information gets congealed in time and the path of least resistance means that errors will not get corrected. What may also explain the poor track record of reporting on Taiwan is the fact that many of the reporters are not on the ground — or their work is edited by people in far-away offices who do not have a clue what they are doing.

Let us hope, therefore, that Associated Press reporting by Taiwan’s own Debby Wu over the weekend was the result of an editor in the main office, because the new stock phrase that was used in the piece bespeaks an ignorance of Taiwan’s history that defies the imagination.

In a piece titled “US may post Marines at office in Taiwan,” Wu uses terms such as “island” and “self-ruled island” that we have all become accustomed to, as well as the “Taiwan and China split amid a civil war in 1949,” which though wrong has been so overused as to have become a fact on the ground. But then follows a phraseology that, to my knowledge, had not been used to date. China “threatens to attack Taiwan if it seeks to make the break permanent” (my italics).

How can a break be made permanent if it doesn’t exist in the first place? Furthermore, by sloppily paraphrasing Beijing’s propaganda — or failing to directly quote what Chinese officials have said — AP gives the impression that the comment is its own, as if this were a historical fact rather than flagrant distortion of reality. Sadly, as always, this stock phrase will be used and reused, adopted and slightly permutated by other agencies until it, too, becomes customary, regardless of the fact this it contains not one particle of truth.

Book Review: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq
Michael Scheuer
Free Press, 364pp

Former CIA officer Michael Scheuer’s first two books, Through our Enemies’ Eyes and Imperial Hubris, provided timely and necessary correctives to Western governments’ contention that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Islamists in general had declared and were waging war against the West because of some fundamental hatred for the democracy, rights, mores, consumerism and social habits that it epitomizes. Rather than a madman, Scheuer rightfully portrayed bin Laden as an adept student of Islam and a not unreasonable voice for the millions of Muslims who have clearly defined political grievances against the US for its encroachment in the Arabian Peninsula, unqualified support for Israel, tolerance of authoritarian regimes (Russia, China) that repress Muslim minorities, open support for and arming of police states (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Uzbekistan) that can only be characterized as an affront to Islam, and now the open-ended occupation of two Muslim countries.

Based on his experience as an intelligence officer and as the head of the unit in charge of hunting bin Laden, Scheuer’s main argument that the US and the West would be locked in a war without end unless they changed the policies that were generating so much anger in the Muslim world — policies that, as he argued, bin Laden has clearly decried in his declarations of war against the US — had much traction, so much so that it was imperative that I quote him in Smokescreen, my upcoming book on the subject and Canada’s disastrous participation in the US-led “war” on terrorism.

Sadly, aside from reiterating those very helpful points, Scheuer’s latest book, Marching Toward Hell offers little else, aside from a contradiction in strategy that can only be described as apocalyptic. Building his argument toward a prescription for success, Scheuer savages every US president (except Ronald Regan), non-governmental organizations, Amnesty International, leftists, peace activists, "antinationalists," neoconservatives, academics, Europe, expatriates and the Clinton and Bush administrations, and bemoans the lack of courage that, in his view, is necessary to win the war militarily, through means that would put to shame the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the carpet bombing of Vietnam. Through vengeance disguised as Machiavellian wisdom, Scheuer writes that only the muscular, no-holes-barred use of military force that punishes both non-uniformed terrorists, their supporters and those who tolerate their presence in their midst (that is, civilian populations) — the incineration of Kabul and Kandahar soon after Sept. 11, 2001, for example — would bring back global awe of the US’ power to deter its enemies, the kind of deterrence that existed at the height of the Cold War, which Scheuer seems to miss dearly.

The contradiction in Scheuer’s argument could not be starker: While, at one level, he correctly and wisely identifies the 30-year-old grievances that gave rise to the jihad against the US, and furthermore argues for a change of course in such areas as support for Israel and Saudi Arabia and over-dependence on oil, he then mortally undercuts his argument by saying that overwhelming force — using an arsenal that includes landmines, depleted uranium ammunition and total disregard for collateral damage — should be used to exterminate the enemy. Given that he has named the political grievances in all of his three books, it defies the imagination that he would then propose military action on such a scale as would not only fail to address those grievances but surely fuel even greater hatred for US policies and potentially spark a cycle of violence from which no one could possibly benefit. If the US' problem in the Islamic world can be fixed by correcting its policies — which Scheuer points out on numerous occasions — why the use of overwhelming force? For some quaint reason, Scheuer fails to understand that the two are not subsets of the same strategy.

To his credit, Scheuer gets many things right that even other intelligence officers fail to grasp, including the West’s self-defeating policies on Hamas and Hezbollah, or the fact that Iran should be left alone and that the invasion of Iraq was not only a fiasco but prevented efforts in Afghanistan, where he rightly sees defeat, both on military terms and in the “hearts and minds” campaign, on the horizon, if not already upon us. On those points and in his assessment of the nature of the al-Qaeda threat, Scheuer offers quality advice that one wishes our leaders would follow. But unfortunately, his anger, thirst for vengeance and ostensible need to demonstrate his support for the military and intelligence officers is such that it overwhelms the reader and, as David Rieff wrote in his review in the New York Times, makes it difficult for the reader to take him seriously, just as it is difficult to take seriously another proponent of overwhelming force, Ralph Peters, for whom Mr. Scheuer seems to have boundless admiration.

When he sticks to assessing the nature of the threat, Scheuer has few equals and remains a helpful guide. But the strategic prescriptions he provides in his latest book will — and wisely should — be ignored.

Kosovo blowback in Quebec?

In my March 24 entry titled “Canada and the recognition of Kosovo,” I argued that Ottawa’s decision to accord full diplomatic recognition to the former Serbian province could encourage separatist elements to turn to violence to promote their agenda, as the Kosovo case may have helped convince individuals that only through violence can the status quo be altered. In Canada's case, my fear mostly concerned separatists in the Province of Quebec.

Less than a month has passed, and today the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was reporting that the Regional Association of West Quebecers — a group that defends the rights of English speakers in Outaouais — received on Tuesday a second e-mail message, a “final warning” to cease and desist or else “they would put a little lead in their heads.” The e-mails came from a previously unknown organization calling itself the Ligue de défense nationale (“National Defense League”) and the “new” Front de la libération du Québec (FLQ), which conducted bombings in Montreal in the 1960s and sparked the October crisis in 1970 after it kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and later killed Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte.

While it is probably too soon to ascertain the veracity and seriousness of the threat — a task that police and security intelligence should soon undertake — it nevertheless supports the contention that groups or individuals, in earnest or deranged, may have reached the conclusion, as I stipulated, that only violence, or the threat of violence, will allow them to achieve their political objectives.

UPDATE: On April 11 the CBC received the following message from the group: “We believe that the peaceful action of the Quebec independence movement is not enough to defend the French language, the protection of Quebec territory in dealing with the threats of English people.”

How it changes us

The scenes from the Olympic torch event in San Francisco provide the perfect microcosm, if you will, for everything that is wrong with the world’s intensifying engagement of Beijing in spite of — or rather thanks to the conscious ignorance of — its abysmal track record on human rights. In July last year, I published an article, “Olympic Games for the hollow men,” in which I warned against the danger of international cooperation with China on intelligence matters, how doing so could make the world’s intelligence agencies complicit in the targeting of various legal dissident organizations and repression of individual liberties. Sadly, there is no reason to believe that such cooperation did not occur, or does not continue to occur.

While it is understandable, following the — how shall I put it? — rambunctious torch relay events in London and Paris earlier this week, that the City of San Francisco would increase security to ensure an orderly event, the measures yesterday teetered dangerously close to becoming a reflection of how Beijing acts at home, which turned the run into an uncharacteristically muscular display of force, what with the runners being protected by a large “amphibious” vehicle and hundreds of baton-wielding police. Slant the eyes a little and you’d think we were back in Beijing.

But the change also occurred at a different, perhaps even more fundamental, level: Fearing protests, the event organizers used the tool of secrecy — changing routes and venues — that is diametrically opposed to the very spirit of the event, which should be one of oneness and openness. Decisions were made undemocratically in a city long known for its vociferous support for civil liberties. This was strikingly reminiscent of the policy in China of focusing on an end goal without heeding for a second the impact this might have on people or the environment — and arresting those who point a finger at all the ugliness. rather than stop an act altogether, the state marches on, like a feral machine (or an "amphibious" vehicle), making its way in the throng, pushing aside, crushing all in its way.

When Beijing’s authoritarian system begins spreading like a disease, when in order to accommodate it we change who we are at home, how we act, there is real reason for concern. Let us hope for further disruptions down the road, and less restrictive measures by the organizers in the cities to come.

Salesmen

The footage was amateurish, the colors so faded it could have been black and white. The video compression gave the movements an accelerated, frame-skipping pace, while the areas where there was no movement were swaths of shifting translucent squares. There was no sound. Whoever had shot this must have been hiding and filmed the whole thing with a hand-held digital camera.

Next to me at the table, fellow analysts looked at the projector screen with expressions of mixed disgust and incredulity. And overemphasized seriousness, I though, as my eyes scanned one cleanly shaven face after another, the ties immaculate, all in business attire, conforming to the extent of having become indistinguishable from one another.

I returned my attention to the screen just as a bright flash appeared on the right-hand side, where the blurry, darkened shape of a human being was standing. As it faded and the eye of the camera reopened, we saw that the flash had emanated from something that was resting on his shoulder.

“This is what we have to deal with now,” said Stern, a giant of a man with a booming voice, who would look more at ease, surely, in a wrestling ring than in an ill-fitting suit in an air-conditioned government building.

Something dark was arcing the sky, fading into its uneven grayness as it approached what looked like a small camp at the top of a hill. An observation post, Stern informed us, in southern L.

Nothing. Everybody at the table held their breath, knowing what would follow next yet refusing to believe it.

And it came. In the blink of an eye, the light gray building, listening antennas on its rooftop, burst into a giant fireball that dwarfed the initial flash, radiating pure whiteness and making us recoil from the digital cataclysm.

When it regained its senses, the camera revealed a burning mass of concrete. In the foreground, where the dark figure had stood, two others had joined it. All three seemed to be dancing and congratulating themselves, one waving a tattered flag of the readily recognizable fist holding an assault rifle.

The screen went blank and we all stood there, transfixed, in silence.

Stern’s deep voice brought us back to the present. “Iranian. In recent years, Tehran has been selling them these weapons. Some are US made.” His English, though immaculate, had an European accent I could not place, the same type of elocution that characterized the other agents who had come with him to brief us. “These videos,” he said, “ have begun being sold at bazaars and markets all over the Middle East. In fact, the one you’re watching and the copy we’re giving you [a CD] were purchased at a grocery store in Gaza.”

“Terrible,” my supervisor, a giant baby doll, blond hair and all, said.

“Shocking,” her favorite, a banker-looking type who in fact had once worked in that sector, said.

Stern’s eyes went round the table, seeking confirmation of the unacceptable as we had just witnessed on screen. I looked up. All eyes were on me as I realized I was the only one who hadn’t said anything. But words wouldn’t come; something was wrong with me, as if a mechanism inside me had malfunctioned, blocking a reaction. I stared at the screen, onto which were projected — visible to my eyes only — scene after scene of buildings, cars, neighborhoods incinerated from above, murder of far greater magnitude that what we had just been shown. At least those three men had risked their lives, had had to be close enough to their target to fire at it, and the target had been military. In the other scenarios, the ones only I could see, the great majority of the victims had been civilian, including women and children — the great majority of them, in fact, women and children, babies, the unborn. And whoever had rained terror down upon them had done so from twenty-five thousand feet, safe from harm and far enough to be spared a glimpse of the consequences. So what if the organization had acquired shoulder-launched missiles from Iran, some made in the US? What difference did it make, really, when their opponents had technology and means orders of magnitude beyond that, Falcons and Apaches and drones with million-dollar sensors attached to their million-dollar gifts of death, capable of annihilating dozens of lives from a distance calculated not in meters, as we had just seen, but rather in kilometers, at the click of a button? Disgusted? Horrified? Scared witless? How risible that was, theater in which we all knew we were actors, the script preventing any independent thought — bar that, not theater. A puppet show, rather. At least in theater, the actors, though following a script, nevertheless retain the capacity to emote, to personalize the expressions. We were puppets, all of us, also following a script but the expressions on our faces fixed, immutable. And the strings animating us had grown so long that one couldn’t even begin to imagine who the puppeteers might be.

“Very…”

These men, Stern and the others, were salesmen, prophets bringing a product to the faithful, the converted. But who needed them when the customers were already sold to the product. Why all the charade, three pilgrims sent thousands of kilometers to preach the gospel to those in no need of convincing, knowing fully well — and expecting nothing less — that all, with no exception, would play the part as per the script written long ago. Did they believe in the utility of their presence? Did we?

Eyes boring into me, a terrible emptiness opening beneath me, threatening to swallow me. Sweat was beading on my forehead, lakes forming in my armpits. Yet I felt cold, so cold. My supervisor, most of all, cast me this look, the same trace of annoyed disgust that reshaped her face whenever she and I didn’t see eye to eye on something, which happened frequently. What a disappointment you are, I could hear her think. We had high hopes for you, but you just don’t seem to get it. The accusations, the condescension, I’d heard it all, the volleys of missiles fired at me time and again. “Moral relativism,” she said, they said, using the self-righteous accusation of the mindless against leftists, intellectuals, artists, those who had different opinions, who chose to question the paradigm. “That’s why you don’t get it.” But I did get it, much better than all of them. They were right, of course: moral relativism is, in fact, fundamentally flawed. But what they failed to understand is that while there was no room for moral relativism in what Camp A was doing to Camp B, we’d chosen the wrong side and like sheep were cheering for the camp that was slaughtering the other, or when it wasn’t doing that, it was busy destroying the other’s livelihood on a massive scale. To hell with moral relativism indeed!

“Excuse me,” I said, getting up and leaving the room in a hurry, as if one of those missiles were chasing me, threatening to disassemble me, to incinerate the very molecules of me, of my soul, my being. I swiped my card, typed the four-digit code on the holographic panel and ran outside, feeling like spilling my guts right at the foot of the national flag.

Incompetence or China’s very own “Mighty Wurlitzer”?

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) victory in the presidential election has provided a number of case studies in how some international wire agencies continue to misrepresent events in Taiwan and, in the same breath, to depict President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) as a “troublemaker” who should always be doubted.

The latest instance involves the so-called “1992 consensus,” which, in its odd rhetorical gymnastics, has it that while Taipei and Beijing agree to there being “one China,” they disagree in their interpretation of what it means. As the KMT’s Su Chi (蘇起), a former Mainland Affairs Chairman with a well-earned reputation for making things up, has admitted that the term, which first emerged weeks before Chen’s inauguration in 2000, was (his) fabrication, the case should be closed. Instead, in step with the KMT’s attempt to resuscitate the concept, some wire agencies have either failed to mention that the term is a political contrivance or, more conspicuously, will write something like Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian claims that the “1992 consensus” was invented by Su Chi.

What such writing does — especially after years of castigating Chen — is put doubt into the reader’s mind by making him wonder if Chen’s “claim” isn’t just another one of his “dirty tricks” to “cause trouble,” when instead it should be clear that there exists no such thing as a “1992 consensus.” Why put words into Chen’s mouth when the actual culprit has himself confessed? Why the second-hand reference, if only to divert the reader’s attention? A similar tactic has also been used repeatedly on the matter of the 1,400 or so short-range missiles Beijing aims at Taiwan. “Chen claims that China is targeting …” No! Imagery intelligence, the US and Taiwanese defense establishment state that so on and so forth. Beijing itself doesn’t deny that fact.

Again, the above disinformation is either the result gross incompetence on the part of some wire agencies, or the outcome of Beijing’s very own “Mighty Wurlitzer” propaganda machine. Either way, readers are being duped.

Why the economy won’t get better

As a foreigner living in Taiwan, I have often wondered how people could believe the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) propaganda that the Taiwanese economy was in the doldrums and that somehow this should be blamed on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “mismanaging” the economy.

While I am not even remotely an economist, I know enough that 6.07 percent GDP growth in 2004 and above-4 percent GDP growth average since 2001 (at a time when most mature economies struggled to surpass the 2 percent mark) was not indicative of a struggling economy. Furthermore, as I have written before, the supposedly “high” unemployment rate in Taiwan would make people in most Western economies dance in the street.

Yet another indicator — call this one a “layman’s view” was how busy the redundant high-end shopping malls in downtown Taipei were. If the economy were in such a terrible state, people would not be buying Armani suits and expensive jewelry at Swarovski. And yet, on any given day, the malls were filled with shoppers.

This led me to investigate the matter a little more. Were the KMT claims founded? If not — and aside from electoral rhetoric — what was it that they had missed? It soon emerged that context was everything. Taiwan’s economy has matured tremendously since the booming 1980s, when its GDP growth reached 16 percent, and all the elements that allowed for that “miraculous” growth had, since the 1990s, shifted to China, which is now enjoying the benefits. The global financial situation, one that is very much anchored in the US economy, is also a principal factor that has often been overlooked by the KMT and the critics of the DPP. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and sings that the US is headed for recession, have had and will have an impact on the state of Taiwan’s economy, but somehow we rarely hear about that, as if Taiwan could somehow operate outside the global economy (nothing could be falser) or that further integration into the “greater China” economy would solve everything (also false, but espoused by the KMT, as if China were not dependent on the global system).

Readers can access the full article, titled “Some economic truths for the KMT,” by clicking here.

The Tiananmen Square torch fizzle*

Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) yesterday berated the Beijing Olympic organizing committee following the failure, during the much-awaited torch lighting ceremony in Tiananmen Square, to start the flame. Thousands of onlookers, including hundreds of foreign reporters, collectively gasped as Lu Xiaobing (碌小餅), a 12-year-old Chinese triathlon hopeful, tried in vain to light the Olympic torch before it embarks on its journey tomorrow, with the first stop scheduled in Almaty, Kazakhstan. After a second, equally unsuccessful attempt by Lu to light the torch, a clearly discomfited Hu promptly left the stage and was seen departing the scene in a black limousine, followed by a retinue of state security officials, police and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Xinhua news agency reported that preliminary investigations had shown that traces of diethylene glycol, commonly known as antifreeze, were found in the petrol used to light the torch. Chinese authorities refused to reveal the source of the petrol, but unofficial sources who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals said it had been provided by Sino Petrol Co, of Fujian Province, a principal sponsor of the Beijing Olympics in August.

Later yesterday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (劉建超) said Beijing had intelligence indicating that an umbrella underground organization consisting of Tibetan dissidents, Taiwanese intelligence officers, Muslim Uyghur terrorists and possibly American human rights activists funded by the Japanese government may have been involved in the plot to humiliate the 1.3 billion Chinese by attacking the flame. It added that the entire thing also smacked of a plan by Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) to “create tensions across the Taiwan Straits [sic].” As a precautionary measure, Chinese security officials late last night “preventively” rounded up Tibetans, human rights and environmental activists and imposed a curfew on certain Beijing neighborhoods. Taiwanese businesspeople operating in China, as well as individuals who looked or sounded Japanese, were also under close observation, officials said.

“This [the antifreeze attack] is totally unacceptable,” the foreign ministry said in a press release late last night. “President Hu has been personally hurt and refuses to leave his room. He has stopped eating and, according to his wife, he will not let go of his Mao Zedong [毛澤東] doll.” Chinese children were reportedly holding a candle vigil outside the Hu residence late last night.

Meanwhile, the Taipei Times learned last night that an executive at Sino Petrol surnamed Huang had sent signals to Taiwan that he and his family were seeking to defect for fear of persecution following the torch incident. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) would not comment on the matter while president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he would consult honorary Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Lien Chan (連戰), who was on a hunting trip with co-conspirator and US Vice President Dick Cheney, on the matter.

* Happy April Fools day! Disclaimer: Every person, identified or otherwise, news organization credible or not as well as events mentioned in this entry is either fictional or, if real, did not act in ways as portrayed in this entry. No animals, torchbearers, demonstrators, workers in the oil (and antifreeze) industry, spokespersons, government officials, spouses, reporters, candle-holding children, police officers, PLA staff, Taiwanese, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Japanese and Americans were injured in the process.

Book review: Bates Gill’s Rising Star

Despite all the alarmist rhetoric coming from the Pentagon and a handful of conservative think tanks, war with China is not inevitable, argues Bates Gill in his book Rising Star: China’s new security diplomacy. The key to avoiding conflict ( or making it less likely), he contends, lies in paying closer attention to and understanding Beijing’s interests as a regional power and encouraging it to continue down the road of multilateralism.

Despite all its virtues — and as a counterbalance to the US’ paranoid perspective on the rising giant it has many — Gill’s book barely touches on the Taiwan Strait, which among all the potential sources of war involving China and the US is by far the likeliest. That said, should Washington, Tokyo and others make some of the adjustments Gill hints at in his book, it could be possible to decouple the Taiwan problem from the encirclement issue, which as I have argued before has made conflict resolution in an increasingly militarized Strait a more onerous task than is necessary.*

There are certain areas, such as Beijing's alliances with murderous regimes like Khartoum, where Gill could rightly be accused of being soft, or at minimum too optimistic, but overall his book shows us that being too hard on it may not be any more constructive.

Readers can access my review of Gill’s book, “The twin rises of the Chinese superpower,” by clicking here.

* See “The missile blunder,” “Washington conservatives strike again,” “Washington celebrates, but other are fretful,” and “But are they really friends of Taiwan?” below.

The missile blunder

A lot has already been written about the erroneous shipment, a little more than a year-and-a-half ago, of ICBM nose cone fuses to Taiwan and the diplomatic storm that this has created. While I do not intend to belabor the details of the military faux pas, suffice it to say, for those readers overseas who have yet to hear of the news, that the items intended for shipment to Taiwan were four replacement battery packs for UH-1H helicopters. What the Taiwanese military received instead was a batch of precise instrumentation used to trigger nuclear warheads as intercontinental missiles approach their target.

As a former government employee and long observer of government institutions involved in military and intelligence matters, what I intend to discuss in this entry is twofold:

(a) a mistake such as this one is not altogether impossible. While one would like to think that ordering from the Pentagon involves a little more oversight than, say, ordering books from Amazon.com, we should never underestimate the incompetence of government. In many cases, reality defies fiction, and the case at hand is at least as good as anything one would encounter in Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh or John Le Carre. Believe me: Despite all the nonproliferation mechanisms and mine field of checks and screening, errors remain possible. They're quite common, in fact.

(b) in spite of the above, one should equally never underestimate the capacity of government to cover its errors, and this is where things get really interesting. Given the magnitude of the mistake and the impact it can have on nonproliferation, the military buildup in China and regional stability (not to mention that it makes the Pentagon look utterly incompetent), we could assume that all the governments involved in the matter would have seen it in their best interest that the blunder never see the light of day. In fact, things like this would get the highest classification, something like TOP SECRET, US (AND MAYBE SIX TAIWANESE AND CERTAINLY NO CHINESE) EYES ONLY. People would be surprised how often the classification of documents is relied upon to ensure that errors such as this one are not exposed. And yet, in this case, press conferences were held, the Pentagon has been surprisingly open about it, the news has spread all over the world, and China, as expected, has reacted in anger.

It would be tempting to think of a conspiracy theory here, but I’ll do my best to avoid that. Still, given the stakes, for something like this to become public knowledge can only mean one thing: Someone, somewhere, wanted this to be known, and the intended audience was Beijing. Never mind that the timing of the “discovery” — the night before the presidential election in Taiwan — or its revelation days later is also, er, suspiciously suspicious, given that said equipment had been in storage in Taiwan for more than 18 months. Why now? Why at a time when, given the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) win, chances of diminished tensions in the Taiwan Strait have at least been imagined by both sides of the Strait?

Someone in Taiwan or in the US (or possibly on both sides) wanted this public, and I suspect the intended result was to ensure that tensions continued in the Taiwan Strait so that the flow of weapons to the region could continue. Too many people, both in Taiwan and the US, stand to gain from a continued military standoff. As I argued in the previous entry (“Washington conservatives strike again”) and in my article “Washington celebrates, but others are fretful,” peace in the Taiwan Strait just isn’t lucrative enough for certain parties.

Stay tuned, this one isn’t over yet.

Washington conservatives strike again

In an article published today in the Taipei Times, I once again turn to the reflex of US conservatives to militarize the situation in the Taiwan Strait, focusing this time on comments made by a well-known Washington advocate immediately after the presidential election on March 22. As I have lamented in previous articles, there is an undeniable overrepresentation — at least in the media — of those views on Taiwan, which in the end is unhealthy and undermines efforts to resolve the conflict by peaceful means.

The more I look at the conservatives’ position on Taiwan, the more convinced I become that the issue has now become intertwined with the Pentagon’s (and its think tank subsidiaries) efforts to encircle China through a system of well-armed proxies and regional alliances. While, for reasons financial, cultural or professional, many are willing participants in this endeavor, some who lie in that spectrum of the US establishment may not even be aware of this, as oftentimes the institution, much like the devil, is a master at convincing the world that it doesn’t exist. But the end result is the same: a Beijing that feels increasingly cornered, which cannot but lead to further militarization in the Taiwan Strait, more short-range missiles aimed at Taiwan, a greater likelihood that errors on either side will be committed, and therefore less security for all.

Readers can access the full article, titled “Washington celebrates, but others are fretful,” by clicking here.

Canada and the recognition of Kosovo

Ottawa joined a number of capitals last week in officially recognizing Kosovo as a country. Unlike most states that did so, however, Canada faces its own dilemma concerning domestic constituents — in this case Quebec — that have long sought independence, and the implications of that decision could be far reaching. So why did Ottawa officially recognize Kosovo, when it knew fully well that doing so was bound to reawaken the separatism question in Quebec?

Two principal reasons come to mind.

First, as a general rule Canada abides by the principle of self-determination contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (at least when doing so coincides with its own national interests) and has a long history of support for movements that sought to defend the national identity of a people.

Second is the fact that Canada was a participant in NATO’s air campaign against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999. It would have been embarrassing for it to have fought the war only to refuse to recognize the people in whose name it took part in Operation Allied Force. Not to mention the problems it could have created within the alliance at a time when it faces serious divisions over Afghanistan.

The problem with Ottawa’s decision, however, is that it is based on double standards. Why, some would rightly ask, recognize Kosovo, but not Chechnya, or Taiwan, especially when, as the world’s 16th largest economy, the latter would make a far more viable independent state, in the legal sense of the term, than a number of countries that have received official recognition in recent years, including Macedonia, East Timor and now Kosovo. As stated above, Canada’s adherence to the principle of self-determination is the result of a cost-versus-benefit analysis: What will be gained by recognition? The items are many, including (but not limited to) moral credibility, a new ally, new business opportunities and, in the case of Kosovo, the cohesiveness of the NATO alliance. Conversely, will there be negative repercussions? In this case, this means risking the alienation of countries or groups that disagree with the decision, both abroad and within ethnic minorities domestically. Only by weighing the pros and cons will a country decide whether or not to recognize a country. The cost of recognizing Taiwan, for example, despite the boost it would do to Canada’s image, would be too high at the moment, given the impact it would have on trade relations with China. Recognizing Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and East Timor, on the other hand, while alienating Russia and Serbia in the first three instances and Indonesia in the last, was a cost Ottawa was willing to absorb and which was made all the more easier because of the quasi universal support those causes have received and the fact that those new countries were born in war, their populations repressed by the stronger party.

Which raises what is perhaps the most important question, one that very few have asked to date, which is the utility of violence. Many forget that throughout the 1990s and in early 1999, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), then a small rebel movement fighting for independence, launched pinprick attacks against Serb forces, hoping that the response would be disproportionate — and it was, with the world media soon bringing back images and dispatches of mass graves and rampant human rights violations. Many of the people who now constitute the Kosovo government are former KLA members, but had history chosen a different course, the KLA today could very well have been considered a terrorist organization. While the Serb response to the KLA taunts was inexcusable, we must nevertheless not forget that to a large extent the successful realization of statehood came from an initial recourse to violence to publicize the conflict and draw in the international community, in this instance the NATO air campaign, followed by substantial NATO and UN peacekeeping forces. Had it not been for he KLA’s well-orchestrated invitation to violence, it is hard to imagine that Kosovars would have a country of their own today.

The danger in this, now that Kosovo has been embraced by a large number of countries, is that other “liberation groups,” in Quebec and elsewhere, might reach the conclusion that the only way to achieve statehood is to turn to violence, in the hope of repeating the Kosovo experience. In the case of Canada, it is highly unlikely Ottawa would use massive force to quell a separatist movement in Quebec — at least not to the extent that was seen in Kosovo in 1999. But some lunatics or deranged individuals could nevertheless see violence as the only option. Should, at some point in future, the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait become untenable, a similar scenario might not be impossible in Taiwan either, and in this case the likelihood of disproportionate retaliation would be much higher.

While the recognition of Kosovo is not, in and of itself, a negative outcome, it nonetheless increases the possibility that separatist groups that so far have limited themselves to peaceful means may eventually decide that force is the only option. And thanks to the Kosovo precedent, they could be forgiven for believing that it is.

The BBC mucks up on Tibet, Taiwan

The following is a letter I sent to the BBC Web site in response to an article published on Thursday, March 20:

Dear BBC,

The following is in response to the article “China's quandary on Tibet's future” by Jill McGivering published on the BBC Web site on March 20, 2008. As is often the case with wire agency reporting or coverage from the outside, pieces on Tibet, Taiwan and China bespeak an unfortunate lack of understanding of the situation and misrepresent the facts. Your piece, sadly, is no exception. At a time when Taiwan seeks, despite oppression by Beijing, to make a place for itself on the international stage, reporting that distorts reality cannot but hurt its chances of getting the support that it needs globally, a support that, I must add, can only come when people are given the facts.

The “one country, two systems” alternative proposed by your author lacks the qualifications and caveats that would allow your readers to fully understand what this means. First, Taiwanese never had a say in the formulation of that system, which furthermore comes amid a buildup of short- and medium-range missiles aimed at Taiwan, now at about 1,300 and growing at a rate of about 100 annually. This model, “devised,” for Taiwan, as the author writes, is actually imposed, with the threat of force.

Secondly, that vaunted system, which your author claims worked well in Hong Kong, fails to mention that it has (a) come at the detriment of universal suffrage, which has been yet again delayed; and (b) resulted in an unprecedented attack on the rights of individuals and freedom of expression in the Special Administrative Region. Laws have been rewritten, critics of the authorities in Beijing have been threatened, silenced, and the powers of the state apparatus have gained in intrusiveness — perhaps not to the same extent as in the rest of China, but nevertheless, to such a degree as to represent an attack on the rights of people in Hong Kong. Beijing’s interference during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, its blackout on health matters and heavy-handed treatment of medical workers who defied their authorities so that they could do their job serves as a stark reminder that all is not well in that model. In other words, economic performance cannot be used as the sole indicator of success.

The model would also have ramifications for the religious freedoms of the largely Buddhist Tibet. System or not, we can expect that Beijing would continue to meddle in religious affairs by picking and vetoing Lamas, which represents a grave infraction as pertains to ethnic, religious and identity rights.

Yet again, reporting of this type portrays Tibetans and Taiwanese as the irresponsible party, which rejects the sagacious and generous offers of the Beijing authorities, and leave readers with the impression that tensions and conflict, whether it be in the Taiwan Strait or in Tibet, should be blamed on the refusal of the underdogs to play along, to be responsible. This sends the signal that Tibetans and Tibetans are irrational, while Beijing is pragmatic.

Resolving the conflict over Taiwan, in Tibet and in Xinjiang (another repressed minority, this time Muslim Uyghurs) does not mean absence of violence on TV news or on your Web site, but rather respect for the human rights and grievances of the minorities involved. And, above all, justice, which will never happen if the so-called negotiations involve a stronger party that threatens the use of military force.

Let us hope, therefore, that your author’s use of the “one country, two systems” model for Taiwan was, at worst, a false analogy.

Germany’s logic on Tibet

“A boycott of the Olympic Games, as some have demanded ... would only penalize the athletes and those who have been training for years,” a German government spokesman said yesterday in response to pressure on Berlin and other governments to pull out of the August Olympic Games in Beijing following its violent crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators. About 100 people are believed to have died since the clashes began.

The problem with that argument is that if we were to follow the logic of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, we could expect it to say with regards to the suspected military nuclear program in Iran, for example, that Germany should continue to sell dual-use equipment to Tehran because a ban, or sanctions, would be unfair to German companies that have worked hard for years to develop their industries.

The spokesman continues: “For human rights, for the people of Tibet and for the Tibetans in other Chinese provinces — a boycott would change nothing about their situation,” a view that almost simultaneously was shared by Patrick Hickey, the head of the European National Olympic Committees.

But this is wrong. As China strives to portray its “rise” as a “peaceful” one, it is at a point in its history where external pressure may be at its most effective. Consequently, to claim that a boycott of the Games — or the threat of doing so — would only hurt the athletes and fail to sway the authorities in Beijing is misguided at best. In the past decade or so, Beijing has backed down on a number of issues (natural resources in the South China Sea, to give but one example) largely as a result of its desire to maintain its image of a responsible power. While it is true that Beijing considers the Tibet issue a “domestic” problem, which means that international pressure is unlikely to be as effective in forcing China to change its policies than on external matters, the international community nevertheless cannot stand by and do nothing. And mere words of condemnation won’t suffice.

While it is true that the athletes have been preparing for years and that a boycott would obviate all that hard work, it remains that sports should not have precedence over basic human rights, including the lives of innocent people. But by publicly announcing its opposition to a boycott, Berlin (and Hickey) was telling Beijing that it has a free hand in how it deals with its people and that it will not suffer any consequences to its actions. This kind of language can only invite further abuse, perhaps even escalation, for which Tibetans (and by rebound Uyghurs and other minorities) will suffer.

As a purported leader of the European continent, Germany gets a failing grade on this one. Of course, what Berlin really has in mind isn’t the poor Olympic athletes it ostensibly wants to protect, or that so-called “Olympic spirit,” but rather, as always, the lucrative business deals that accompany smooth relations with Beijing.

AFP creates a moral equivalence in the Taiwan Strait

In a piece posted on Sunday, Agence France Presse (AFP) painted the portrait of Yeh Chun-jung, a Taiwanese entrepreneur who decided to turn to China — the “obvious” choice — to expand his high-tech power cable business. Yeh, AFP tells us, will be returning to Taiwan to vote on March 22 to ensure that the “right” leader, one who can “accept reality and set political topics aside to seek peaceful cooperation with China for the good of the island,” is elected. In other words, given the hardly concealed slant of the story, to vote for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).

What really stands out in the AFP piece, however, isn’t the reporter’s seeming preference for the KMT over its Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opponent, or his uncritical belief, held by many, that the KMT would be better for the economy. Rather, it is this little nugget of information, hidden half-way in, that makes one stop dead in his tracks.

AFP writes: “Despite the diplomatic insults and the missiles aimed toward each other’s shore, Taiwan and China are inextricably and increasingly connected by commerce” (my italics).

Diplomatic insults and missiles aimed toward each other? Since when is criticism of a repressive government, one that crushes Tibetan protesters, silences and locks away rights advocates and forcefully displaces tens of thousands of Muslim Chinese, or the desire to be left alone and develop one’s democracy in peace, “an insult”?

Let us allow for errors in judgment on the reporter’s part, or, to be charitable, let us assume that he or she misconstrued warranted criticism for an insult (in which case the annual human rights reports on China released by the US and the UN should also be called “insulting”). But “missiles aimed at each other” is pure journalistic nonsense, a blurring of the lines and the creation of a moral equivalence that borders on the irresponsible — especially when we take into account the fact that many readers of that AFP piece will be far away from Taiwan or China and therefore will have a poor understanding of the realities of the conflict.

US intelligence reports tell us that China is aiming about 1,100 DF-11 and DF-15 missiles (with 300kg warheads) at Taiwan, whose circle error probable (CEP) rate has been refined to less than 150 meters (meaning that the likelihood of making a direct hit on a target is very high). Taiwan intelligence and its military estimate the number of such missiles to be above 1,300 and growing at a rate of about 100 missiles every year (it was 650 in 2003).

Although Taiwan has in recent years intimated that it may seek to develop surface-to-surface missiles to target Chinese positions, their deployment remains uncertain and would most likely be targeted at Chinese missile launchers and only be used in retaliation, as opposed to a first strike, which is clearly what China's missiles are intended for. Furthermore, the US — Taiwan's principal source of weapons — has clearly stated its opposition to the development and deployment of offensive military technology, and most of its assistance has been conditional on Taipei respecting that arrangement. Even allowing for indigenous development of offensive missile technology against Washington’s wishes, Taiwan could not possibility hope to challenge China on missiles, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In addition, while through its “Anti Secession” Law China has made it official policy to use force against Taiwan should it ever declare independence or somehow alter the “status quo,” no such policy exists in Taiwan. In other words, the use of force is clearly on the table in Beijing; it isn’t so in Taipei.

But readers abroad don’t know that. By failing to quantify the missile threat on both sides or explaining the nature of Taiwan’s missile threat to China, AFP is giving readers the impression that there exists a moral relativism, that somehow Taiwan represents a threat to China — which no matter how you look at it isn’t the case.

In many cases, support for Taiwan abroad, for the underdog, will be predicated on its being seen as the small democracy, with limited defensive capabilities, threatened by a giant military bully bristling with missiles. If, as a result of irresponsible journalism such as the AFP piece discussed above, people are denied this reality, the precious little help that Taiwan receives from abroad will likely grow even weaker.

AFP should either prove its facts — number, type and quality of Taiwanese missiles targeting China — or drop the reference in future.

Hau Lung-bin on Israel

Attending an exhibition titled The 60th Anniversary of Israel — Birth of a State Photo Exhibitions of Paul Goldman and David Rubinger & the Art of Design: Dan Reisinger, co-organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei on Thursday, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) praised Israel’s achievements and said that other countries (ostensibly including Taiwan) should learn from its economic prosperity, democracy and technological achievements.

Such vapid comments could only have been made by someone who either has no clue how the state of Israel came into being or who has bought the false analogy of “Taiwan as the Israel of the East,” which I expose as altogether false and unhelpful in my Nov. 7, 2007, response to the “Our moral nakedness” piece by Ha’artez columnist Adar Primor. Once we look past the facile analogies, it becomes clear that Israel does not serve as a model for Taiwan. In fact, the only thing these two nations have in common is the fact that they are large recipients of US weapons.

On the democracy side, Hau seems to paper over the fact that Israel is a Jewish democracy as opposed to a universal one, meaning that the democratic rights of Jews are fuller, if you will, than those of non-Jews who live in Israel, such as Arab Israelis. This has implications for non-Jews living in Israel, from the ability to work in government to a set of social issues, such as housing. If democracy, as Hau would have us believe, were one of Israel’s achievements we should learn from, we wouldn’t be hearing the Palestinian Prime Minister on Friday saying that Israel is conducting “ethnic cleansing” in East Jerusalem. Although the term “ethnic cleansing” may be a little overdone, it is no less true that in recent years, through unequal laws and social repression, Israel has made life extremely difficult for those who remain in the Arab part of the city. Jewish extremists (how rarely we see the term used) have made no secret of their desire to see Jerusalem in its entirety as the capital of the Jewish state.

The same applies to the prosperity of Israel. Part of this success has been the carte blanche support is has received from the US as well as policies of outright theft of natural resources (mainly water) from Palestinian territories. The military assistance Israel receives from the US is so large that it can afford to develop its economy while it continues the longest occupation of another territory in modern history. Israel’s military-industrial complex, backed by the US, is also quite healthy, and that sector has sold many weapons to China, some of which could one day be used against Taiwan and possibly put at risk the life of the mayor who showered praise on Israel yesterday.

It is about time that those who ascribe to the “Israel as Taiwan,” or the “David of the Far East” analogies abandon them, for the similarities between the two nations are in fact minuscule. As I have argued before, the view that Israel and Taiwan are two small democratic islands surrounded by hordes of barbarians is not only misleading, but it fails to bring to the surface the root causes of that “hatred” and does not take into consideration the quite different power imbalances involved in those conflicts. In the Levant, Israel is very much in a position of power, and no group, state or combination of state could ever mount such a force as would threaten the survival of Israel. It is that advantage in military might, added to its indiscriminate use with full backing of the US, that has generated the resentment. One finds no equivalents in Taiwan’s situation. Whatever hatred Chinese may have for Taiwan certainly does not stem from Taipei’s military advantage against China, or use of force against it. Taiwan does not flex its muscles abroad; it does not occupy a people and its main backer, the US, never hesitates to berate its client publicly whenever the latter is perceived to be heading in the wrong direction (e.g., Washington’s overt criticism of Taiwan seeking to develop offensive weapons; of Taipei changing the “status quo” or, more recently, of its desire to hold referendums on joining the UN).

All that to say, if we really wanted to force the “Israel as Taiwan” analogy down people’s throat, a more militarized and less law-abiding Taiwan would have to invade and occupy a weaker people in, say, the southern Philippines, kill its people (mostly children and civilians) at a 1-3 ratio, convince the world it is doing so to (a) protect itself and (b) as part of the “war” on terrorism and receive the full moral blessing of Washington. Of course this little scenario is ridiculous, but so are analogies that Taiwan is like Israel, or that it can learn from its democracy and prosperity.

What Hau should have said instead is something like “Congratulations on your first 60 years; let us hope that the next sixty will not be as bloody — and the onus is on you.”

Pyongyang’s joke

With the presidential election in Taiwan approaching, the number of countries that have voiced reservations concerning the referendums on joining the UN — to be held simultaneously with the vote on March 22 — has risen. China, of course, has stated that the referendums are wrong, while other countries, foes and allies alike, have used the full spectrum provided by the English language to express their disagreement. Another country joined the fray yesterday, whose pronouncement, though it did not add an ounce to the diplomatic pressure on Taiwan, surely added humor to the otherwise sad attempt to smother a democratic voice in Asia.

That country was North Korea.

Pyongyang condemned Taiwan for attempting to join the UN, arguing yesterday that the move would escalate tension in the region. "This move by Taiwanese authorities is a grave act that aggravates the situation in the Taiwan Strait and in Northeast Asia,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said.

A grave act? Aggravating tension in Northeast Asia? If one country is not qualified to make pronouncements on what other nations should or shouldn’t do, it is North Korea, which in recent years has, to name a few transgressions, starved its people, broken every existing non- proliferation regulations, tested a nuclear weapon and fired missiles over Japan.

Oddly, Pyongyang’s statement could be helpful to Taiwan, as it adds an international basket case to the group of countries that have expressed their opposition to the UN referendums. Should the choose to continue opposing Taipei on the matter, they might now be compelled to qualify that opposition, lest it be seen to mirror Pyongyang’s. It is one thing to side with China or fear the consequences of a referendum; it is an altogether different one to hum the same tune as the Hermit Kingdom’s and its megalomaniac leader.

Language and the “terror threat”

One reason why intelligence agencies will never run out of work isn’t the bottomless source of threats, but rather the language they use to describe threats. A good example of this was provided by US Northern Command and the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday, as they made public their views on the al-Qaeda threat to the US. Let us look at the specific language used as they outline the threat — all italics are mine:

Northern Command chief US Air Force General Gene Renuart, paraphrased by Associated Press: “terrorists may be plotting more urgently to attack the United States to maintain their credibility and ability to recruit followers.”

AP continues: While [Renuart] said that US authorities have thwarted attacks on a number of occasions, he said terrorist cells may be working harder than ever to plot high-impact events. He did not point to any specific intelligence that authorities have received but said the “chatter” they are hearing “gives me no reason to believe they’re going to slow down” in their efforts to target the US.

So he has no reason to believe that an attack is not being planned, but there is nothing to back that claim. He continues: “I think there may be a certain sense of urgency among that organization to have an effect. So it would tell me that they’re trying harder.”

The sun may not rise tomorrow. It may rain tomorrow. Or again, it may not. Is this why our countries are pouring billions of dollars into security intelligence, so that generals and NORTHCOM chiefs can state the obvious? It gets better.

While Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke was saying that: “There continues to be no credible information telling us about an imminent threat to [the US] homeland at this time,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was telling us he had a “gut feeling” that the US faced a heightened risk of attack.

I have a gut feeling it may rain tomorrow. Are you going to decide whether to cancel that picnic in the park based on that, a gut feeling?

Readers should always be wary of threat assessments that use such language as may — which, if we pay close attention, is used on a frequent basis. “May” means absolutely nothing, as it is simultaneously a positive and a negative, which simply cannot exist. Either they will, or they won’t, based on the would-be terrorists’ intent and capabilities.

To the uncritical reader, however — of which there must be plenty else all those buffoons at DHS and NORTHCOM would be laughed out of town — the message maintains the level of fear that those agencies thrive on. It justifies budgets, intrusive powers, and wars, allowing those agencies and contractors that stand to gain from the perpetual war footage to make a profit.

Of course I may be wrong about all this…

Altruistic or interested?

In a short piece published in the Taipei Times on Feb. 27 I raise the question as to whether the segment of US academia that has “seized” the Taiwan Strait issue is doing this out of a fundamental belief in the value of democracy or rather for more obscure reasons, such as the belief (originating from that same sector) that no power should ever be allowed to challenge the US militarily, which in the present case would mean using Taiwan as part of a strategy to encircle and contain China.

Is the militarization of the conflict — selling Taiwan,* Australia, Japan more US-made weapons, or encouraging those states to further develop their defense trade industries — the answer to the problem, or should there be more focus, perhaps by another segment of the US diplomatic/defense/intelligence/academic sector, on diminishing Beijing’s perception that all help to Taiwan is but a cynical use of the terms democracy or freedom to contain it, especially when those very same states openly chastise Taipei for seeking to hold a referendum on joining the United Nations?

Arguably, as some have pointed out in response to my article (many thanks for that), the “hawkish” or “conservative” think tanks are no monoliths, and even among those circles there is disagreement on the road taken when Taiwan is concerned. Which is a good thing. Nevertheless, given the reputation of those think tanks in the wake of the disaster in Iraq and the fact that as with every institution dissent among the ranks will unlikely lead to organizational reorientation or policy change, governments such as Beijing that are on the receiving end of the policies promoted my American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and others may be excused for looking at their intentions with wariness, if not paranoia.

As I argue, a balance of “left” and “right” think tanks fighting for Taiwan would present Beijing with a unified front that perhaps would make it a little more hesitant to rattle the saber at Taipei for wanting to retain its democratic system. (Which raises the important question, Why hasn't the American "left," with a few exceptions, shown an equal interest in safeguarding Taiwan's interests?)

Readers can access the full article, titled “But are they really friends of Taiwan?,” by clicking here.

* By means of reference, Canada spends approximately C$13 billion, or 1.1 percent of its GDP on defense, to Taiwan's C$10.5 billion, or 2.6 percent of GDP. Canada therefore spends C$1,302 per square kilometer, while Taiwan spends C$291,800 per square km on defense and is among the top-three, with Saudi Arabia and Israel, buyers of US weapons.

A return to the past in Kosovo

While Kosovo's "declaration of independence" on Sunday may be feted by those who, like Taiwan, believe in the universal right to the self-determination, there is reason to worry that Pristina's move, accompanied by official recognition by Washington today, could lead to a resumption of violence in the Balkans.

Even though nine years have elapsed since NATO launched its largely ineffective78-day air campaign against Serbia to force it to end its campaign against the breakaway province (Moscow pressure on Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic is what broke the impasse), and despite the fact that during that period the violence there — though not entirely gone — no longer made headlines, the truth of the matter is that none of the proximate causes that led to violence in the 1990s, from social distribution to land claims to grievances to poverty, were resolved by NATO and the UN during that hiatus. Absence of violence, as any political scientist will tell you, by no means signifies absence of conflict. In fact, were it not for the presence of NATO and UN forces on the ground separating Serbs and Kosovars, thus creating an artificial peace, we most assuredly would have seen violence after 1999.

Having failed, just as the Dayton Accord of 1995 ending war in Bosnia and Croatia failed to address the Kosovo issue, to remedy the socio-political underpinnings to the conflict, the international community now finds itself with a problem on its hands: By declaring independence, Kosovo is once again giving the hardline nationalists in Belgrade, along with the many militias that were not disbanded after 1999, renewed arguments to resort to violence. This time around, the UN and NATO could very well find themselves stuck between the two warring factions — in other words, as the very boots on the ground the US and other countries sought to avoid as they limited their "humanitarian" intervention to an air campaign at 15,000 feet in 1999.

Furthermore, having failed to address the strategic foundations to the regional conflict, the declaration on Monday risks driving a wedge in the UN Security Council, with Russia and China on one side and NATO powers on the other, at a time of increasing Sino-Russian-American strain. More distantly, it risks even adding fuel to conflict in the Taiwan Strait, with Taipei recognizing Kosovo while Beijing reiterates its threat against Taiwan should it make a formal move toward independence.

Regardless of whether sovereignty for Kosovo is desirable or not, the failure to choose the appropriate time to do so can only create more problems than were necessary, with many lives in the balance. Should things escalate — as they very well might — the US, NATO and the UN will feel compelled to intervene one way or another, but doing so will further drain the already overstretched alliance, which cannot even manage to produce the force level necessary to deal with the resurgent militants in Afghanistan, which in the past two days suffered its greatest number of civilian casualties since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

Israel's twin dynamics

Syria and Iran announced yesterday that they would conduct a joint investigation into the car bombing on Wednesday that killed top Hezbollah operative Imad Mugniyeh. Given their shared interests in Hezbollah, the conclusions reached by Tehran and Damascus are not difficult to predict — Israel, without or without Washington’s blessing, did it. In other words, this will hardly be an unbiased investigation, or the kind of probe that one would like to see regarding the assassination, three years earlier, of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Myth and conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East, and all of them point to, again, Israel or the US. Although the Mugniyeh assassination bears all the hallmarks of an Israeli hit operation, there might have been some Syrian complicity in the coup, which a serious investigation could uncover but in the present case would most assuredly smother.

What this means, therefore, is that probe or not, all the arrows will point to Israel. And Jerusalem knows this.

Hezbollah has already named Mugniyeh’s successor, but its threat of responding to Israel’s “open war” in kind, anywhere in the world, has yet to materialize. If it did, however, and if Hezbollah were to strike against Israeli interests somewhere in the world, it would be playing right into Israel’s hands.

Two principal dynamics help explain why Israel was likely behind the assassination and why, if it was, it chose to strike when it did.

One is that Israel was humiliated by its incapacity to defeat Hezbollah during its war in Lebanon in July 2006. The pressure within the Israeli defense establishment to “finish the job,” or to exorcize Israel's own "Vietnam Syndrome," cannot be ignored.

The second, as I noted in the Feb. 13 entry on Mugniyeh’s assassination, is that Israel, which has long pushed for a military solution to Iran’s nuclear threat, fears that the findings of the US National Intelligence Estimate have taken the military option off the table. Seeing that intelligence has “failed” it, Israel may well have engineered an act — Mugniyeh’s assassination — that, given Hezbollah’s expected reaction (retaliation), could force the US to come to Israel’s assistance military by targeting the organization's main sponsor.

Put in simpler terms, Israel wants another go at Hezbollah and wants the military option against Tehran back on the table.

The ball is now in Hezbollah’s camp. Given its own domestic pressures, it might be very difficult for the Shiite organization to show restraint this time around.

What Mugniyeh’s assassination means

The assassination of the former head of Hezbollah’s External Security Organization (or Foreign Security Organization), Imad Mugniyeh, in a car bomb in a Damascus suburb yesterday, closes a long chapter in the West’s bloody meddling in the Levant, which began (or some would say resumed) in the early 1980s when the Lebanese Shiite organization was born.

The problem, however, is that the killing will likely open a new, and perhaps bloodier, chapter.

Despite Israel’s denial it had anything to do with the assassination, no other country, not Iran, certainly not the US, has the technical skill and geographical and social access to mount such a targeted operation against the elusive militant, who was believed to be in hiding either in Iran or Lebanon. While Mugniyeh was wanted by Interpol for, among others, his alleged involvement in embassy bombings and abductions in Lebanon in the 1980s, the 1985 hijacking of a TWA aircraft and the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, assassination by car bombs is not in the arsenal of the international police organization.

Israel, on the other hand, has long refined the technique of decapitating the leadership of the various organizations arrayed against it, including Hamas (against whose cadres it struck twice in recent years) and Hezbollah, and has made no effort to hide this policy. Interestingly, Mugniyeh’s assassination comes days after Jerusalem announced it could attempt to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza, and three years, almost to the day, after the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005.

But despite the celebrations in Jerusalem, today’s assassination was not vengeance. Rather, it was strategic positioning through an attempt to alter the status quo.

Like Hamas, Hezbollah is sponsored by Tehran, the Jewish state’s No. 1 source of fear, mostly because of the rhetoric of its firebrand leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the belief that Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons. Ever since a US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), released late last year, claimed that Iran had ceased nuclear weaponization efforts in 2003 — thus deflating (though not ending) ongoing efforts to isolate Tehran — Israel, which disagrees with the NIE findings, has shown increasing signs it is willing to go it alone against Iran, perhaps in a repeat of its preventive bombing of a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

(The presence of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Turkey, Israel’s main regional ally, the same day Mugniyeh was blown to pieces may not have been coincidental either. Despite denying it is so, Turkey would serve as the most logical launch pad for Israeli strikes against Iran.)

Mugniyeh’s assassination will also create additional pressures in Lebanon and risks undermining ongoing efforts to create a stable government there by bolstering the Shiite organization and pro-Syrian factions. Hezbollah, which announced the killing yesterday on its Al-Manar TV station, will very likely retaliate. Expecting this, Jerusalem has put its overseas missions on notice and called for a redoubling of security in preparation for a move by Hezbollah — which may just be what Israel is waiting for, as it would provide it with the justification it needs to launch an attack against Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor. As I have written on many occasions on this site, it’s all connected.

The ashes had barely settled in Beirut following the July 2006 war against Israel than prospects of a renewal of hostilities — especially if Hezbollah renews its rocket attacks against Israeli positions or launches raids from Lebanese territory — seem to have become more likely, if not inevitable.

Involved in many deadly operations during his lifetime, even in death Imad Mugniyeh risks leading to many more.

Cheers for Mr. Spielberg

Renowned filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s announcement today that he was bowing out of his participation in the Beijing Olympics ceremonies is a welcomed development for the human rights movement worldwide. After months of pressure from various rights groups, the director of such movies as Schindler’s List and Empire of the Sun must have realized that the image he had groomed over the years — that of a wise artist embracing such worthy causes as the history of the Holocaust and the personal sacrifices of soldiers during World War II — risked being cast as fraudulent should he become complicit, however indirectly, in the crimes of the Chinese government in Darfur.

Sadly, in his press release Spielberg only focused on Darfur and failed to address the equally serious shortcomings of Beijing on human rights, or its equally nefarious activities in other countries, such as Myanmar. Although the pressure on Spielberg came from groups whose imagination was sparked by images of atrocity in southern Sudan, his credentials as an artist of conscience and role model would have shone even brighter if he had used the occasion to decry the numerous other areas where Beijing clearly fails to act responsibly — including Taiwan — and stated that those shortcomings had also weighed in his decision to cancel his role in the Olympics.

Nevertheless, Spielberg should be commended for his decision. His move will give renewed hope to rights organizations — in China and abroad — that even Beijing, whose official position on the Olympics is one of hardened indifference to criticism, is not exempt from world opprobrium and that individuals can still choose to say no to it.

An artist like Spielberg — the very personalization of Mr. Hollywood, if ever there was one — who depends on the Box Office for his livelihood and who cherishes, not undeservedly, the mantle of morality, Beijing had simply become too radioactive.

Movie Review: Charlie Wilson’s War

Readers may wonder why Afghanistan, seven years after the US and its allies bumped out the Taliban, remains a quasi failed state, where violence, opium and starvation continue to dance with and feed upon one another, or why, after billions of dollars in investment and major contributions by NATO and the UN, it doesn’t seem any closer to falling back on its feet. Of course, the roots of the problem lie in the country’s geography, its limited natural resources and the geopolitical neighborhood it is in, with Pakistan and Iran having long influenced its internal politics.

But a shortcut to understanding the source of the present troubles exists, however, and lies with the soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent US-led undercover efforts, with Israel, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the coup, to arm the mujahidin with the necessary weapons — mostly surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank weapons — to fight the mighty Soviet army.

The principal character behind this endeavor is Charlie Wilson, a debauched, scotch-breathing congressman from Texas who, simmering in a tub in Las Vegas with buxom strippers, has an epiphany when he sees footage from Afghanistan and wonders what should be done.

What comes next is a descent into the unaccountability of political power, where a single congressman, using his influence on the United States House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the panel responsible for funding CIA operations, embarks on a mission to double the initial US$5 million US funding to the Afghan resistance. After an eye-opening tour of an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan and a chat, back in Texas, with disgruntled CIA operative named Gust Avrakotos, Wilson plays the levers of power, uses and, in turn, is used by ideological, socialites and wealthy Christian fundamentalist high rollers, to raise funds and increase the amount of money and weapons sent to Afghanistan via Pakistan.

The rest is history — in fact, one of the turning events of modern history. Wilson’s efforts pay dividends and an increasing quantity of soviet helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft are shot down with SA missiles, leading to the Soviet withdrawal — its first defeat at the hands of another people — and ultimate implosion. That year, about US$1 billion in military assistance was flowing into Afghanistan, mostly from the US and Saudi Arabia.

Though Charlie Wilson’s War (based on a 2004 book by George Crile, with Tom Hanks playing the role of the congressman and Philip Seymour-Hoffman that of Gust Avrakotos) causes laugher throughout, the humor conceals terrifying truths about a catastrophe in the making, perfectly encapsulated in the unfailingly undiplomatic Avrakotos’ recounting, toward the end, of a Zen master parable of a boy and horse. We may have won the war and defeated the communists, but is it a good thing? We’ll see. As he says this, he hands Wilson a report about the “crazies,” the very fighters Wilson et al had funded for years, who were seizing power in Afghanistan, replacing a bloodbath with another. The dialogue, crude, sarcastic and violent, is done to perfection and can be interpreted at different levels. In one unconfortable scene, Avrakotos tells Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Jesus-loving, communist-hating Houston socialite who played a major role in Wilson's cause, why the CIA should never mix with politics. When it does, he tells her, he loses sight of who it is he is supposed to be shooting at.

The beauty of the movie is that it doesn’t force its agenda on the viewers, nor does it feel compelled to spell out what the consequences of winning the war in Afghanistan, only to abandon its destitute people, would be for the future. The audience knows that, and pictures of passenger aircraft obliterating the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, would have been unnecessary, if not bad moviemaking.

For those of us who have had a chance (if such a term can be used) to work in intelligence and/or politics (or where the lines intersect), the movie has a special flavor, from Avrakotos’ shouting match in his supervisor’s office (reminiscent of my own altercations) to the mundane operative talk in the CIA cafeteria, from the religious belief in a cause to the myopic view of the consequences and resistance to dissent, all are humorously exposed, and though they draw a laugh, we know too well that the risibility of politics and intelligence also leaves piles of charred bodies by the roadside.

Whatever happens next in Afghanistan, will it be a good thing? We’ll see.