Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Like him or hate him, there is no denying the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a master at making people uncomfortable. His presence in New York these days, where he is set to address the UN General Assembly, was accompanied by an invitation by Columbia University for him to deliver a speech, which he did last night amid high security and thousands of rowdy protesters. The invitation for the head of a so-called “state sponsor of terrorism” to visit a bastion of the country’s higher-learning institutions was not without controversy, and Columbia’s president received a fair amount of heat from US representatives and citizens for opening the university doors to a man who has been dubbed anything from a “tyrant” to “cruel dictator” to “super-terrorist.”

But the fact of the matter is, despicable or not, honest in his skepticism of the extent of the Holocaust and his messianic calls for the “destruction of Israel” or a mere political opportunist, Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia was necessary, as it came at a time of great tension between Iran and the US and within the region as a whole. Aside from the longstanding accusations by Washington and its allies that Tehran is attempting to acquire and develop nuclear weapons, in recent weeks the US has accentuated its accusations that Iran is meddling in the affairs of, and arming militants in, Iraq and Afghanistan. A great part of the saber rattling on those issues is the result of miscommunication — or worse, the absence of any communication — between the two states, something that has long characterized US-Iranian relations.

So here was the occasion, in an institution of learning, for people to hear first-hand, without media distortion, what Ahmadinejad had to say about the US, Iraq, Palestinians, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other topics. There was ample material in his speech to disagree with (including his farcical assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran), and to be honest the former engineer lacks the charisma and moral suaveness of his predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, whose own presence in the US years ago, when he called for “dialogue between civilizations,” also sparked controversy. But all that notwithstanding, only when leaders can express their opinions without the countless filtering layers of diplomacy and biased media and exchange those ideas with students and professors, in collegial fashion, will nations that make it a tradition to talk past each other manage to see eye-to-eye. For all in attendance yesterday saw a man, faults and all, before them — not the devil some media have portrayed him as incarnating, not a nuclear-weapons wielding, religiously deranged mullah posting checks left and right to Hezbollah and the Taliban and Iraqi Shiite rebels — a man, who even smiled as his host welcomed him with a barrage of accusations.

Irrespective of whether one agrees with the content of Ahmadinejad’s speech yesterday, at the end of the day his presence at Columbia University will probably have accomplished more for Iranians and Americans than his address before the General Assembly, which like that of other leaders there, will be wordy but ultimately less than pithy.

(An aside: For reasons that are all too obvious, Ahmadinejad was prevented from visiting the World Trace Center site to pay his respects to the victims of 9/11 — this despite the fact that Iran had absolutely nothing to do with those attacks. And to those US politicians who shook with indignation at the thought that the Iranian leader could be allowed to step on US soil, well, what can one say but to point out that, after all, he is responsible for far less deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan than his US counterpart.)

So kudos to Columbia University, which took a not inconsiderable risk inviting the Iranian leader. And congratulations to those who attended — from the angry crowds to the academics — for, unlike the occasion in 2002 when former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Concordia University in Montreal, sparking such unruliness and violence by protesters that his speech had to be canceled, they greeted the controversial leader with commendable maturity.

One would hope that universities the world over would do this more often.

Slanted Time reporting on Taiwan's UN bid

Kathleen Kingsbury’s piece “Taiwan’s War of Words with the U.S.” published in the Sept. 17 issue of Time magazine was replete with the one-sidedness and bias of the kind that Robert Fisk (Pity the Nation, The Great War for Civilization), Edward Said (Covering Islam), Richard Falk and Howard Friel (Israel-Palestine on the Record) have deplored in reporting on the Middle East. Not only does it completely fail to provide counterarguments to the overtly pro-Beijing position, but its portrayal is entirely predicated on the views of an old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hand past his prime as well as on recent comments by a handful of US administration officials who, despite their rhetoric, can hardly be said to be democracy’s best.

The allusion of Taiwan as a child used in the article plays right into Beijing’s hands, which has always portrayed Taiwan as a youngling that needs to be smacked (as are the Palestinians in the equally biased reporting on their struggle). It is disheartening to see that an otherwise reputable magazine like Time would choose to treat a democracy as an unreasonable child while painting a repressive authoritarian regime as a responsible father figure.

The voices of millions of Taiwanese and their supporters all over the world were completely silenced by the report, an omission — intended or otherwise — that can only but harm a worthy and by no means lost cause.

The article also contains a few inconsistencies regarding Taiwan and the UN. First, while a vote did take place at the UN to give the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a seat in 1971, the Republic of China (ROC) was not expelled; Chiang Kai-shek pulled the ROC out of the UN because he could not stand dual PRC-ROC representation in the world body.

Secondly, Kingsbury writes that “Taiwan has tried — and failed — to regain membership,” (my italics) in the UN, which would mean that (a) at one point in the past Taiwan (not the ROC) was a member of the UN; and (b) that given (a), Taiwan must be a country, as membership (which it is trying to regain) is contingent on that precondition being met.

Time would do itself and its readers a great service by publishing a corrective on the matter, one that tells the other side of the story.

Letter to the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations

Readers who agree with the contents of the following letter, sent today to the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations, are encouraged to copy and paste, sign and send it to the address below, or alter it so that it will reflect whichever mission they would like to send it to. If a response is received from the Permanent Mission, I will post it here.

Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
885 Second Avenue, 14th Floor
New York, NY 10017
USA

Monday, September 17, 2007

Ever since the creation of the United Nations in 1945, Canada has prided itself in — justly so — being an active participant at, and promoter of, this most indispensable of international institutions.

Through its unflinching dedication to multilateralism as a means to tap into the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts ingenuity of civilization and its having taken a leading role in UN endeavors ranging from peacekeeping to environmental protection to human rights, Canada has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, its commitment to inclusiveness and universality, two principles that constitute the very foundations of the international body. Canada’s favorable image abroad, which opens doors to its citizens wherever they go, is in part the result of its longstanding commitment to the UN.

And yet, when it comes to the ongoing repression of the 23 million people of Taiwan, which against all odds turned into a vibrant democracy in the1990s, Canada, like other UN members, has been conspicuously silent — a situation that, sadly, has only deteriorated since Ban Ki-moon assumed his position as UN Secretary-General last year.

Despite what it claims, Beijing does not represent the interests of Taiwanese. Rather, for years it has threatened to use force against Taiwan (the “Anti Secession” law, passed in 2005, along with the odd 1,000 missiles bristling Taiwan-wards, attest to this). Unable to be a responsible stakeholder when it comes to the health of its own population, as it clearly demonstrated, among other instances, by hiding the severity of its SARS outbreak in 2003 and arresting those who tried to make the threat public, China certainly cannot be expected to represent — though it says it does — the 23 million people of Taiwan at international institutions. As for human rights, the daily news speak for themselves, with activists thrown into jail by the thousands and far more expelled from their homes as China builds its economy.

Beijing continues to pressure, blackmail and threaten UN member states into ignoring the rights of Taiwanese, and has been so successful doing this that on numerous occasions Taiwanese representatives have been discriminated against and humiliated whenever they sought to represent Taiwanese at such bodies as the World Health Organization, the World Health Assembly and, just recently, the Basel Convention on Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.

Every UN member state that, at modicum, fails to raise the issue — on moral grounds or for the sake of international cooperation of the kind that is so needed to address the plentiful challenges facing humankind in the 21st century — can but be accused of being complicit in Beijing’s repression of Taiwanese and of choosing to ignore a continued aggression that is diametrically opposed to everything the UN stands for.

True, the UN and the international community face more immediate and serious problems, such as continuing genocide in Darfur, security challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AIDS epidemic, global warming, poverty and so on. But the presence of these challenges should not by any means obviate the need to fight for justice whenever a situation arises that calls for intervention, as in Taiwan’s case. Failure to do so would be tantamount to buying the argument, voiced by some, that world powers should not have intervened to stop ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Bosnia/Croatia because simultaneously a genocide was going on in Rwanda. Greater emergencies do not necessarily mean that we must abandon other worthy causes.

As such, we, citizens of Taiwan and expatriates who have come to love this nation, call upon the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations to reflect the spirit of the UN, of Canada and of humanity by raising a voice of opposition to Beijing’s unforgivable isolation of Taiwan at the UN and its affiliated institutions. Just as it has done in the past, Canada should take the lead and defend the values of humanity it, and the UN, supposedly stand for.

Respectfully yours,

(Signed.)

For once, Tehran's response to the US may be right

In an article published today in the Taipei Times, I turn to a US court decision last week to allow the families of the 241 US marines killed by the Lebanese Hezbollah organization in the 1983 bombing of the marines barracks in Beirut.

By arguing that families of soldier victims can sue individuals, groups or governments responsible for killing soldiers while the latter are in the line of duty, District Judge Royce Lamberth is not only turning military duty into a fantasy — where, against logic, killing a soldier who is occupying your country means breaking the law — but he is also opening a can of worms Washington had fain make sure remained closed. For if, as in the case at hand, a government (Iran) that is suspected of sponsoring an otherwise independent organization (Hezbollah) can be sued by a third party (the US), then it would follow that the families of, say, an Iraqi man killed by the US-trained Iraqi military could seek reparations from the US — or, for that matter, the families of slain Palestinians could sue the US government for its support and arming of the Israeli Defense Force, and so on, ad absurdum, from Colombia to Indonesia to wherever else the US is propping up security forces in the name of security, an endeavor that, sadly, is only intensifying (for more on this, see, among others, Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts and Dana Priest's The Mission).

Sad as it is for soldiers meaning good to be killed in the line of duty, and howsoever their mission is regarded back home, using terms such as peacekeeping or liberation or stabilization, the truth of the matter is, being a soldier in a foreign land entails a series of risks — deadly risks — that cannot, ex post facto, be questioned in the court of law. Unless, that is, the families of the victims are (a) suing their own government for sending soldiers into a situation that was illegal in the first place; (b) the means utilized to kill said soldiers were deemed illegal by the Geneva Convention — e.g. chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear; or (c) the victims were not military but rather civilians, in which case said attack would indeed constitute terrorism and justify prosecution in court.

Readers can access the full article, titled “For once, Tehran’s response to the US may be right,” by clicking here.

Bias and mythmaking in the news

Though accusations of bias in the news, or of government censorship, since Washington launched its campaign against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have reached a strident level, those phenomena — antipodes locked in a perpetual dance, if you will — are anything but new. In fact, they have haunted the business of reporting since its inception.

Anthony DePalma’s The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times takes a shot at untying that Gordian knot by following the controversial travails of the famous, or, to some, infamous, reporter who in 1957 went to Cuba and interviewed a young rebel named Fidel Castro, who until then had been believed killed, in the Sierra Mastra. The series of three articles that emerged from that fateful meeting, all published in the New York Times, became part of the myth that enshrouded Castro — and, as the leader’s image of a principled savior of Cuba soured with time, Matthews’ undoing.

Part history, part biography and part essay on history and revisionism, DePalma’s relentlessly captivating narrative describes not only the complex lifelong relationship that developed between Castro and Matthews, but also those that sprung between the US State Department, US ambassadors to Cuba, the CIA, the FBI (which put Matthews on its index over J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicion that he was a closet communist), the editorial staff at the Times, which as public and political pressure mounted failed to stand by its seasoned reporter, other journalists, and Cuban expatriates who at times hailed him as a hero while others (pro-Bastista or anti-communists) sent him hate mail and even death threats.

Throughout all this, the increasingly isolated Matthews never yielded to the growing criticism that his romantic coverage of the Cuban Revolution, and of Castro, had allowed a monster to emerge, contending throughout his life that he had always been right and that Castro, rather than having been a communist all along, only to deceive the world, had instead used the Soviet Union to maintain his hold on power. Later in life, in books and articles revisiting the revolution, Matthews did criticize Castro, especially over his dangerous gamble during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But enamored as he was of powerful figures, he never failed to balance his criticism with admiration for Fidel’s qualities. Accused of disrupting the truth, Matthews defended himself with the claim that he had never reported anything he did not believe was true.

But regardless of what he wrote later on, the damage had been done, and the public never abandoned the view that Matthews, if perhaps unintentionally, had been complicit in a political heist of global strategic proportions. Just as the Castro myth had been born in 1957, so was Matthews’, and to this day those illusions would be extremely hard to dispel.

Aside from shedding important light on this moment in Cold War history, DePalma’s book also asks important questions about the responsibilities of newsmakers and editorialists. Here again, the author uses Matthews — who through a special arrangement did both at the Times — to guide the reader. Under ideal conditions, reporters are supposed to be neutral in their coverage of events, while by virtue editorialists are expected to be opinionated, to “disturb the peace [...] to challenge accepted ideas and principles if they seem outworn or unsuited,” as Matthews himself once put it. What happens, then, when an individual is asked to wear both hats? Can he or she reasonably be expected to keep the two separate at all time, or is there not a risk that the lines will eventually blur until newsmaking becomes editorialized, with the author’s biases “polluting” the news item? Or is pure, unbiased news itself, as Martha Gellhorn, the future wife of Ernest Hemingway, who during the Spanish Civil War befriended Matthews, once famously put it, nothing but “objectivity shit,” something altogether impossible to achieve, given human nature?

Being an editorialist myself for a leading English-language newspaper in Taiwan, those questions were of special interest, especially as newspaper editorials are in fact not the author’s opinion but rather reflect an institutional position, that of the paper. The conflicts that arise — and there are many — stem from the eternal tug-of-war between the individual’s biases and those of the publisher, which do not necessarily always dovetail. In Matthews’ case, these differences led to a conflicted relationship with the editorial board, which toward the end of his career virtually shut him out (the news department had done this much earlier, on one occasion even barring him from visiting Cuba at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis).

Political editorials are especially troublesome and Matthews, writing about Cuba and Latin America, experienced more than his share of angst writing them for the Times. Aside from the views of the newspaper itself, the context of the Cold War (much like today) and the ongoing witch hunt for supposed communists led to tremendous pressure from the White House on the media to toe the line, and the Times was not impervious to this. (Taiwan, being no less political than Cuba and the US were at the time, presents a daunting challenge to editorialists, as every word is weighed, with the assurance that whatever one writes will create anger in the opposite camp, such as exists in Taiwan’s overly polarized politics.)

In all, The Man Who Invented Fidel is a superb piece of reporting on an issue that remains much alive today. Without falling into an apology for Matthews, it nevertheless manages to portray him as a complex individual — much like el Jefe Maximo — in a way that defies the Manichean inflexibility of the imagination that sadly characterizes much of the reporting we encounter in the news, back then and in contemporary times.

With the benefit of hindsight and knowing what we know about Castro today, there is no question that with our without Matthews’ reporting, Castro would have found his way to power, and DePalma’s essential book does us all a tremendous service by dispelling the belief that Matthews is to blame for all the ills that befell US-Cuban relations. Matthews may have played an early role in helping create the image in the US — and to a similar extent in Cuba, despite the heavy censorship that prevailed there at the time — but in the end, Fidel did not need Matthews to achieve his objectives as much as Matthews needed Fidel to attain his as a reporter.

It won’t be spooks, but it’s coming

As the presidential election in Taiwan approaches, the US will likely increase pressure on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government in a manner that is tantamount to a coup d’etat. The reason is that as it has tried to make Taiwan’s presence on the international scene more felt — through such means as writing a new constitution and applying for UN membership under the name “Taiwan” — the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration has created a set of problems for Washington at a time when it would fain concentrate its resources elsewhere (hint: where oil resources are more bountiful).

Going back into history, starting with the overt, CIA-led coups against Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 through the less-obvious but equally successful interference in the domestic politics of Canada in 1963, one can trace a long, if oftentimes misguided, tradition in Washington of pressuring governments — foes and enemies alike — in order to achieve what it believes is in its interest.

Troublesome Taiwan, which continues to fight for its rights as a democracy, is now causing Washington enough of a headache, especially as the latter cozies up to Beijing, to warrant some form of intervention, which I argue will not come in the form of a CIA covert operation, but rather as a barrage of criticism and misinformation through communiqués and the US media. For too long, Chen and the DPP have, through their actions, exposed the lie that underpins the US’ alleged support for democracy, and this is making Washington increasingly uncomfortable.

The end goal, therefore, is to bring back the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to power, a party that is less likely to rattle the Taiwan Strait cage and force the US to act on its avowed values if and when push comes to shove.

Authoritarianism with a friendly face

Usually reviled for the harsh and overt manner in which it represses dissidents at home, the Chinese government this week turned to an unusual tactic to ensure it maintains its grip on power: cuteness. Starting on Saturday, Web sites registered with portals in Beijing will begin featuring animated cartoon police officers — in all fairness male and female — that every half hour will pop up on screen and remind users, in an ostensibly friendly manner, smiles and all, of the limits to their freedom.

Though news of the ploy has circulated round the world and been treated with mild amusement (the officers are indeed appealing, in a Manga sort of way), the truth of the matter is that there is nothing mild, or cute, about the new device, as it masks a relentless control of access to information and cynically disguises repression as an object of admiration.

In an article published today in the Taipei Times, I argue that Beijing's reliance on cute cartoons is anything but innocuous and poses a renewed danger to Chinese — especially children, whom the new tactic seems to be targeting — as it renders the repressive banal and portrays something fundamentally evil as an object of seeming harmless beauty.

Readers can access my article, titled “Authoritarianism wears a new face,” by clicking here.

Canada’s Achilles’ heel

Private Simon Longtin, Master Warrant Officer Mario Mercier and Master Corporal Christian Duchesne, the last three Canadian soldiers to die in Afghanistan, had one thing in common: they all came from the French-speaking province of Quebec, a province that historically has always been more reluctant to participate in wars abroad than the rest of Canada.

A Canadian Press-Decima Research survey conducted in July showed that 67 percent of Canadians viewed Canadian casualties in Afghanistan as unacceptable. In Quebec, that number was 76 percent — and that was before the three soldiers killed on Aug. 19 and Aug. 22. Judging from the coverage those deaths received in Quebec newspapers (I happened to be in that province when the deaths occurred) and the soul searching that ensued, it can be expected that opposition to Canada’s participation in Afghanistan will increase in Quebec. And casualties from that province could grow as well, as its Francophone Royal 22nd regiment — known as the Vandoos (a corruption of “vingt-deux,” or 22 in English) — took over the lead of the battle group in Kandahar earlier this month. Within weeks, three of its soldiers had already fallen.

From the looks of it, the killing of those three soldiers — one by improvised explosive device and two by landmines — was random and was not the result of specific targeting by the Taliban or other Afghan rebels. But if I were a Taliban intelligence officer bent on pressuring the Canadian government to pull out its troops before the mission ends in 2009, I would ensure that future attacks focused on soldiers from that regiment. The more soldiers from the 22nd Regiment are injured or killed, the greater the outrage in the province of Quebec will be and, consequently, the greater the pressure on the Conservative government — whose survival relies to a large extent on Quebec votes — will become to pull the troops out or shift their role from a combat mission back to support, as was initially the plan, for provincial reconstruction.

With Canadian soldiers dying at more than three times the rate of soldiers from other countries in Afghanistan — including troops from the US and the UK — the Taliban could now break Canada’s back by turning to a war of polls. All they need to do is kill or injure as many Quebec soldiers as they can and then log on the Internet, or contact friends back in Canada, to get the latest polls. Should the Taliban adopt this strategy, it won’t be too long before the growing opposition in Quebec becomes politically untenable for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

A flash

The sudden flash of light occurred in mid-flight on the China Airlines flight from Vancouver to Taipei, just as the main character in the Spiderman 3 movie first confronted his evil alter ego. All as one, the occupants of the cabin looked in stupefaction toward the source of light, waves of palpable fear rolling through the plane. Partaking of that recoil, I, too, could only think back on the scenes of the China Airlines aircraft going up in flames in Okinawa a little more than a week ago. It took me — and I would say most passengers — a good minute to calm down after realizing that the source of light was not something that had gone terribly wrong with the plane, but rather a kid who, caught in the action of the movie, could not refrain from taking a picture of the large screen in front of us.

Air accidents — even those than do not result in loss of life — continue to awaken nightmares in people’s imagination, especially so when, as with other catastrophes, the images are repeated over and over again in the media. This barrage of images in the past week turned an innocuous event — a child seeking a shot of his favorite cartoon — into a source of dread.

Not that I want to play film critic or anything, but that moment when the flash went off was, for me, the only source of excitement throughout the whole movie.

On the road

This entry is being composed from back home, in Canada, on my first visit there since I relocated to Taiwan two years ago. Having traveled from Vancouver, and thence to Toronto, Montreal and now Quebec City, what strikes me most is, of course, the vastness, the space. And to be honest, the air quality in Quebec City is worlds apart from that in Taipei.

Another thing that hit me was how security at Canadian airports has tightened, especially in Vancouver. To give but one example, as passengers from my China Airlines flight awaited our luggage, customs officers would walk round us like vultures and question anyone who looked different (which means anyone with tattoos, long hair or a beard). If this is the treatment reseved Taiwanese and East Indians when they come to Canada, I cannot imagine what it must be like when the plane is from the Middle East.

Another shocker, which found its way into the editoral that I published today, was the ignorance of the customs officer who processed my entry into Canada. According to this misinformed individual, Canada is, hum, liberal enough to have solved the Taiwan issue by making it coterminous with China. And no amount of explanation would persuade him to change his views. So, upon being asked how long I had been in China, I replied: three days, in Hong Kong, in May last year. Obviously, this sense of humor did not go down too well with the official, but to my surprise I was nevertheless spared the expected search through my luggage. (Metal detectors and checks on electronic devices, even on domestic flights, were also much more thorough than what one is subjected to in Asia.)

All that being said, this response by the first-line officer - and therefore first person of contact for visitors to Canada - got me thinking about how Taiwan needs to change its approach to how it advertises itself to the rest of the world. In my editorial, I suggest that the prevailing top-down approach, with Taipei seeking recognition at the UN and other world bodies, is turning logic on its head, and that it stands a better chance of gaining the emotional response it needs by connecting from the bottom up, with individuals, who can then pressure their governments to give Taiwan the space it deserves on the international stage. I also call on expatriates living in Taiwan to lend a hand - or their voices, that is - in that endeavor, by becoming emissaries for Taiwan whenever they visit home.

Beijing caught in a lie

A little while ago I wrote about Beijing’s increasingly aggressive intelligence-collection program in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games, activities which could compel foreign governments to assist the authoritarian regime by sharing intelligence with it.

The picture became even uglier this week when police in Beijing clamped down on a group of foreign journalists and Reporters Sans Frontieres advocates who were calling Beijing’s bluff and accusing it of not respecting the commitment it had made to ensuring press freedom in China. Given the long list of precedents set by Chinese authorities on human rights across the spectrum, one wonders how anyone could have taken that pledge seriously. In fact, the indelible blotch behind all this is the fact that the Olympic Committee and the international community gave Beijing the games despite knowing fully well that they were being lied to, fully cognizant of the fact that China would continue to repress its people and bar reporters — domestic and foreign alike — from painting a complete picture of what’s going on in China.

Sadly, China has so far been able to get away with the lies and has been rewarded diplomatically and economically as if it were a responsible, law-abiding stakeholder.

But there might be hope. Foreign reporters in China may turn out to be worthier adversaries to the authoritarian regime than the diplomatic pushovers Beijing is used to dealing with — or, for that matter, the Chinese activists and reporters whom it can crush with impunity. Judging by some of the reactions, a number of foreign journalists did seem to believe things would improve in China and that they would have the liberty to do their job. Gullible as this might have been, their disillusionment and the attendant anger could put Beijing in an uncomfortable position, as they are unlikely to accept being censored. Moreover, Beijing would be hard pressed to imprison them, for unlike Celil Husayin, a Uighur rights activist with dual Canadian citizenship who was jailed in April (see “Why Celil doesn’t stand a chance,” April 27, 2007), the great majority of reporters are not Chinese. In other words, if those were to be thrown in jail, foreign governments responsible to those foreign nationals would, in contrast to how the Canadian government responded to Mr. Celil’s case, be hard pressed not to come to their assistance.

All in all, Beijing is caught between a rock and a hard place: either it clamps down on foreign reporters and thereby risks sparking an international incident, or it throws them all out, which would be detrimental to the image it is trying to conjure as the games approach. Its last option is to give foreign reporters the rights it promised to give them, with the result that the dire human rights and environmental situation — the rottenness underneath the veneer — will be exposed.

Beijing sought glory by hosting the games, but just as the mythical Icarus, it may see that the glare is just too hot for its own good.

Olympic games for the hollow men

As it prepares for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, the Chinese government has launched an unprecedented intelligence-collection operation targeting individuals and organizations it perceives as a threat. In an article published today in the Taipei Times, I weigh Beijing's security-related efforts against the precedent set by other Olympics, with special focus on the Salt Lake City games, which, following on the heels of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US, were unequalled in their militarization; and the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics, in which I played a small role as one among many analysis who, every morning, read intelligence reports about and wrote threat assessments on the games.

My brief study reveals something very alarming about Beijing's preparations for the games, as it threatens to force a great number of international intelligence services to participate into China's repression of dissent. Furthermore, in the coming months and as the games approach, Beijing's foreign intelligence agencies are certain to accelerate their collection of intelligence abroad, with targets as varied as Taiwanese, environmentalists and human rights activitsts, to name but a few of Beijing's areas of interest.

Readers can access the full article, titled "Olympic games for the hollow men," by clicking here.

Fixed in time

Whether history is taught well or not, its use never fails to determine the kind of world we live in. In places like Serbia, to name but one, the stubbornness of some to not let go of ancient history — or rather, an ancient interpretation of history — has long given rise to conflict, which even to this day, after long years of intervention by NATO, the UN, the EU and others in the alphabet soup of interveners, remains as unresolved as it was on the day before NATO dropped its first bombs on Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies. Without a complete abandonment of a certain view on history, namely that on Kosovo and Milosevic’s justification for doing what he did to reclaim it, it will be impossible for that country to move on.

Similar phenomena exist the world over, with people being taught things about events and people that, upon scrutiny or with the outsider’s advantage of distance, would seem ludicrous. Through reverence for Mao Zedong (毛澤東) to that for Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Robert Mugabe, Yasser Arafat, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler — all, by various versions of history alive today heroes to some — people remained fixed in the past, unable to see events and motivations with enough emotional distance to make judgments of their own. Of course, a pre-digested version of history, which is what is given adherents of the “fixed” historical model, also requires less effort than reaching one’s own conclusions through the study of it.

This is the power of myths and why they manage to survive down the ages, as the ideas and concepts that lie at their core remain untouchable, cannot be questioned. And they are easy. Dangerously easy, bereft of the complexities, of the grey areas, that true history is made of.

When, for example, Palestinian children who can barely walk are taught to hate Israelis and, wearing those cute little military uniforms or explosive belts or mock AK-47s, to revere mass murderers before the camera, or, on the other side of the fence (palpable and metaphorical), when same-age Israelis are taught hatred for Palestinians and instilled admiration for “heroes” with hands as bloodied as those of their Palestinian counterparts/nemeses, it becomes nigh impossible to break the vicious circle of violence because those views, once perpetuated, do not allow for the progression of history, for a fresh take on events ancient and recent. When such history is taught children, it robs them of the possibility of a better world, as if parents were unable to accept that their offspring should be spared the calamities they had to go through.

Sadly, Taiwan is no exception from this rule, and many are those today (including children the same age as the young Israelis and Palestinians mentioned above) who are taught that dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), whose responsibility in the 228 Incident, where tens of thousands of Taiwanese were killed (see “Remembering the 228 Incident,” February 28, 2007) is becoming clearer (to some) by the day and whose role in the subsequent regime of White Terror and thirty-eight years of Martial Law, during which people were imprisoned, disappeared or killed by the thousands, is undeniable, was a savior of the people. Whose savior he was, exactly, is unclear, as he mismanaged China, lost the Civil War to the communists and for all intents and purposes invaded Taiwan, where he imposed a foreign regime on a people, whom he ruled with an iron fist while dreaming of retaking China. This is not to say that the generalissimo did not make a contribution to history, for he certainly did — and under the direst of circumstances, facing both Japanese invasion and communist guerrillas. Heaven knows what would have happened to Taiwan if it had been Mao, and not Chiang, who fled there in 1949. But mythmaking and undue reverence for a very flawed and ultimately morally compromised man does everybody a disservice and in the end robs him of his humanity, of the tremendous moral struggle he faced — and eventually succumbed to, turning him into a tyrant.

It was with those questions in mind that I wrote an article, titled “Revisionism is Taiwan’s big enemy,” published today in the Taipei Times. Readers can access it by clicking here.

A dirge for our time

Not since my review of David Kaplan's excellent Fires of the Dragon more than a year ago have I chosen to write about a book for The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato, but having just finished reading Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, I felt compelled to write one.

As with his previous novels, Rushdie's convoluted and idiosyncratic storytelling in Shalimar may be challenging, if not daunting, for readers accustomed to a more standard style. My first attempt at reading it took place days after its North American publication, sometime in the fall of 2005. Back then, weeks after my resignation from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), where I had worked in counterterrorism, Rushdie's angered take on our times proved too much emotionally and I found myself unable to go beyond the very vivid scene of a decapitation.

It was only two years later, with emotional distance and a book about my experiences at CSIS between me and that institution, that I could pick it up again — and what an experience it has been.

Shalimar the Clown is nothing less than a fable for our troubled times, where politics and religion interact, with devastating effect, with the sometimes destructive power of love. It presents Rushdie at his angriest and most unsparing, who offers us scene after scene of the ravages of war, from World War II Strasbourg to the paradise-turned-hell of Kashmir as it gets caught between the Indian-Pakistani war, followed by its own divisive conflict and descent into madness.

Out of this emerge characters — Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown, and Max Ophuls — who are done and undone, made and unmade, by the defining storms of time eternal: war and love. Rushdie, with the surgeon's expert hand, brings his characters, with all their suffering, anguish and fears, to all-too-real life and allows us to draw our own conclusions about what it is that animates them, that forces them to act in the cruelest of manners. When the opportunity is ripe, those who are shaped by history will, in turn, shape history — or so we think. Ultimately, however, Rushdie presents us with a landscape of inevitable devastation, with parallels between Kashmir and the Philippines, Afghanistan and Los Angeles, making for a very pessimistic plunge into human nature, one in which the very hope of redemption through love is crushed at the very last moment, where the terrorists of the future are formed not by politics — or politics alone — but also by matters seemingly much more simple, such as a wife, seeking unknown, illusioned liberty, running off with the charismatic former Resistance Francaise hero (at times frighteningly reminiscent of real-life John Kenneth Galbraith, whom in the story he actually replaces, before real-life Chester Bowles does so) turned US ambassador to India turned US counterterrorism czar.

The beauty — and, simultaneously, terrible ugliness — of Rushdie's dirge is that it shows the numerous paths leading to madness, from the occupation of one's land by a foreign army to the torturing of loved ones to the lure of intransigent religion to cold, hard politics to matters of the heart. Nothing, mind you, is necessarily teleological and many are those who, even in the face of atrocities, will adopt more peaceful ways to cope, only to die of old age while youth are blowing themselves up for a cause. Some, like Shalimar, become "terrorists" by proxy, drawn not to the cause itself, which takes him down a path familiar to anyone who has read about terrorism in Southeast Asia, but rather to the need to inflict violence, a corridor that leads him to his ultimate act of terror in the US, before the very eyes of a daughter.

Although the novel takes place before the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US (the backdrop to the end of the novel is the 1993 bolbing of the World Trade Center), the undertones of the road there, the seeds of future history being sown, are ever-present, and it is unlikely that this novel, in this form, could have been written absent 9/11 and everything else that ensued. As the novel progresses, as chaos envelops Kashmir, we can see emerge, in the shadows of coalescing networks, the future headline-makers. One can also feel the anger, the fear generated by the religious edict — or fatwa — made against Rushdie himself by Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of The Satanic Verses, yet another iteration of violence against the individual. Anger at the US, at its creation of an inevitable future of violence that should have been anything but inevitable, is also palpable, as epitomized by Max Ophuls himself, who is animated by goodness and evil, with the all-too-human capacity for stupidity and mistakes.

Shalimar the Clown is about violence, is violent itself, and despite its gazing deep into the pit of man's inhumanity to man for the multifarious reasons that we have created for ourselves, it leaves it to the reader to answer the question that Max, pondering the cycle of violence that we have created following the death, in an IRA bombing, of a friend, asks us all. "Perhaps violence showed us what we meant, or, at least, perhaps, it was simply what we did." We can attempt to intellectualize, to comperend the reasons why a person chooses to go down the path to violence, and sometimes the plainness of truth, as he writes, suffers by comparison with paranoid scenarios, but in the end it doesn't mean that we can, or will, forgive.

The shame of democracies

(Readers should note that a slightly different version of this posting appeared in the July 11, 2007, editition of the Taipei Times under the title "Conduct unbecoming the self-proclaimed exporter of democracy," which can be accessed by clicking here.)

If anyone who despises the George W. Bush clique ever needed additional ammunition, it was provided over the past two days with two more examples supporting the argument that in the United States today there are two classes of people: the unaccountable Bushites and the rest.

While countless individuals have been wasting away in jail on suspicions of "terrorist" activity that, if carefully looked at, would not hold water — people whose religion and skin color happen, not by coincidence, to differ from those of white Anglo-Saxons — others, like former World Bank chief and co-architect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq Paul Wolfowitz, whose abuse of authority at the World Bank led to his forced resignation, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, US Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, seem to be regulated by a different set of laws.

Wolfowitz, who before his appointment at the World Bank was the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, will now be visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based conservative think-tank whose views on the Middle East and the use of force very much reflect those of the Bush administration. Frequent readers of The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato should by now be familiar with my low opinion of that institution. Odd though his World Bank appointment may have seemed, Wolfowitz will now once again find himself among like-minded people, where he will be able to do the greatest damage.

As for Libby, the Cheney aide who was implicated in the “Plamegate” scandal, in which in retaliation for Joseph Wilson’s accusations that Washington was misleading the world during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame (Wilson’s wife) was leaked to the press by the White House, for all intents and purposes ending her career as a covert operative — he, too, has been touched by the hand of injustice. Libby, on the brink of serving a 30-month prison sentence and having lost his appeal to delay the sentence, saw President Bush commute his prison sentence, on the premise that it was “too harsh.” But this wasn’t a pardon, Bush said, as Libby remains “on parole” and will still have to pay a US$250,000 fine for lying and obstruction of justice.

“Libby’s conviction,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “was the one faint glimmer of accountability for White House efforts to manipulate intelligence and silence critics of the Iraq war.”

“Now, even that small bit of justice has been undone.”

With Libby’s contacts in Washington and his “damaged” reputation notwithstanding, it shouldn’t be too long before he, like Wolfowitz, lands a job — likely as a visiting scholar — somewhere. In fact, I would be surprised if he didn’t. After all, the like-minded stick together, right? Regarding his fine, given that, as Media Transparency (www.mediatransparency.org) shows, the salary range for scholars at AEI, for example, ranges from about US$60,000 a year for virtually unknown researchers to US$200,000 a year for better known ones (the median appears to be US$150,000), that US$250,000 fine suddenly doesn’t seem too formidable.

Would the poor recently landed Ahmed, or the hard-working Carlos, ever be extended that hand of justice? Of course not. What is 2.5 years in jail for a faceless immigrant — even when the charges against him are laughable? But for a ranking official in the US administration? Oh my, 30 months is unconscionably long. After serving their sentence, the Ahmeds and Carloses will be deported and likely fail more imprisonment, if not torture. For the "whites," however, what awaits them are lucrative jobs in comfortable think-tanks in Washington. How just.

Colonialism of the most despicable kind — that based on racism — dear readers, is alive and well.

These, sadly, are not isolated case and US history is replete with similar examples of high-level pardons, commutations and exonerations. Nor is the US alone in this. But this, a legal system that rides roughshod on the general population — and does especially so when it comes to certain groups of people — but spares, if not compensates, crooks, certainly isn’t something supposed healthy democracy should be proud of.

Taiwan and the art of the irrational

Proponents of Taiwanese sovereignty have placed such high hopes on the law that they have begun to sound like the old woman who complains to the police that the burglars should not have broken into her house because break-and-entry and robbery are against the law. Not a single week passes by that the newspaper doesn’t receive at least one op-ed about some document, signed fifty years ago, showing that China has no legal right over Taiwan. The Cairo Declaration (“Communique”) of 1943, signed by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (seen left, at the Cairo Conference), for example, or the Peace Treaty signed by Japan, are often the object of scrutiny by academics, as a close reading clearly shows that, despite Beijing’s claims, they never intended for Taiwan to be handed back to the People’s Republic of China.

Right though the authors may be, the problem is that theirs is a futile battle, and slash wildly as they might, their sword keeps slicing air, as the enemy chose long ago not to fight that battle.

Even though Beijing has, at times, also resorted to the “legal” aspects of its claim over Taiwan by, for example, including the opinion of so-called “experts” in state-controlled publications, it ultimately pays little attention to the law and no amount of legally based argumentation on Taipei’s part will persuade it to abandon what it sees as its own.

In an article published today in the Taipei Times, I argue that if Taiwan is to prevail in its quest to obtain recognition from the community of nations, it must focus more on the irrational. In other words, to sell itself, what it and any entity striving to achieve a similar goal must bring to light is not so much dusty legal documents that no one can dispute as arguments that appeal to the imagination.

Readers can access the article, titled Taiwan and the art of the imagination, by clicking here.

The spymaster in boots

Four years ago, give or take a week or two, I, along with another 19 individuals, was on the brink of “graduating” from what is called IOET — the Intelligence Officer Entry Training — at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Back then, our trainers spared no effort drilling into our young minds that what we did in the course of our work, the places we visited — hell, the very nature of our work — should be kept secret from others at all cost. Some took this directive to such a level as to hide everything from their families.

As I have written a book, provisionally titled Smokescreen, about CSIS and its deficiencies (the manuscript is currently in the hands of my literary agent), I shall refrain from going into details in this entry, lest I give away too much of what readers will find in my book if it ever hits the shelves. Suffice it to say, however, that I experienced no small amount of surprise when, in the May 25, 2007, issue of the Toronto Star, I came across an article about Jack Hooper, the former Director of Operations (DO) and for a short period Acting Director at CSIS (www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/217952). Part of the surprise lay in the fact that a high-ranking official would have an article published about him in a national newspaper (remember: we had been told to hide the true nature of our work from others, including officials in other branches of the Canadian government, which we did, to the best of our abilities, through the use of obliqueness and outright lies). Se there he was, the former man at the top, revealing his identity to any Canadian — to the entire world, in fact, thanks to the Internet.

The second shocker in the article was its candidness in describing some of the places Mr. Hooper had visited in the course of his work, places like Uzbekistan, Yemen, Kandahar and Lima. The heart of the matter is that readers are fully aware Mr. Hooper visited these locales in the course of his professional activities and not, as it were, as a private citizen — in other words, he wasn’t on a personal vacation there. Again, during our training, it had been repeated ad nauseam that under no circumstances were we to divulgate trips to or contacts with operational areas, as we were to maintain the myth (a pretense that had so many holes in it that it was more a sieve than a shield) that CSIS only operated domestically. So here he is, the spymaster boasting about his exploits in some of the world’s hot spots. This makes me wonder if this article was ever cleared by CSIS — as all CSIS employees, current or retired — are supposed to do, or if perhaps some of its members are just above the law. Maybe the explanation is simpler. Maybe, as is often the case, CSIS is being inconsistent, if not altogether incompetent.

For many months after I resigned from CSIS in the fall of 2005, I would avoid revealing where I had worked and be cautious in how I characterized my former employer when applying for a job. Part of me still wanted to play spy or simply wanted to respect the agreement that I had made with CSIS not to reveal where I had worked, what I had done. Some still do, choosing to hide behind a screen when testifying at the Air India inquiry, as did my former Director-General. But for the DO to open up the way he did, in an article where he is seen standing, hands in pockets, on a quay in British Columbia — that does it for me. No more hiding. If a 22-year career intelligence officer can unfold the way he did, there is no reason why someone who only practiced the same job for 29 months could not. (I had always wondered, anyway, why former CIA officials, from Robert Baer all the way to former DCI George Tenet, could publish their memoirs with such freedom while their Canadian counterparts were prevented from doing so. Case in point, on two occasions during my stint at CSIS, officials there warned me against ever writing about my experiences at CSIS).

Aside from epitomizing the greater liberties former CSIS officials now seem to enjoy in terms of talking about their former employer, what does the article in the Toronto Star have to offer? Sadly, precious little, aside from exposing a man who unfortunately stands as the perfect mascot for the macho attitude that guides CSIS and how it carries itself in the intelligence community. Here, for example, Hooper talks about CSIS and its dealings with governments that are known to disregard human rights:

“Here’s the deal. Everybody would like to believe that we have an array of choices that are good choices and bad choices. But we’re going to a dance where every girl is ugly, okay … They’re all ugly. And all we can do is get the least ugly girl to dance with. But you know, when you bring her home your dad is going to tell you, ‘That is one ugly woman.’ And you're going to say, ‘Yeah dad, but she was the best looking of that lot.’ Does that make you smart? Not in the eyes of your father.”

The above quote was in reference to the Syrian government and how CSIS became involved in the Maher Arar case, the Syrian-born Canadian who, thanks to information given the US by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), was deported to Syria, where he is believed to have been tortured. Besides being a repugnantly misogynistic and elitist analogy, Hooper’s “ugly girl” is indicative of the mindset that prevails at CSIS, one in which the consequences of one’s actions are discarded. The proverbial man in the bar always has a choice, and if all the girls are too “ugly,” he can just leave. He doesn’t have to dance — especially when he knows that choosing to dance will harm innocent people.

Speaking about Justice O’Connor, who presided the Arar Commission, Hooper then demonstrates another undercurrent at CSIS, that of the agency that knows better than everybody else:

“Nobody knows what the right thing is to do [,] so it’s left to us to make the decision about who the least ugly girl is.”

Therein lies the danger for all Canadians, when CSIS is left to decide what is best for Canada, without the accountability and checks that can ensure the survival of a democracy. Unfortunately, these two lines perfectly describe the aversion and contempt that CSIS has shown the court system as well as the Security Intelligence Review Committee and the Inspector General, the two supposed independent yet outright fangless accountability bodies charged with monitoring how CSIS conducts its operations.

But accountability isn't the object of the Star interview. It is about the man. And above all, the one impression it leaves the reader with is that of an unpolished bully, which comments such as “I would never let my guys drink Merlot [wine]. It’s not allowed. It’s a sissy wine … It’s light and girls drink it. And it sounds funny when you say it. Mer-lot. Men should never say that,” cannot but — to pun — leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. Why would any self-respecting career official say such things in a “first-time” interview with a national publication? How unrefined a mind must one have to use such derogatory terms to make a point (about what, one wonders)? Beyond that, if CSIS can allow such a person to climb to the top, what does this entail for the minority groups that will be targeted by the organization in Canada? If Hooper can show such outright disrespect for women and homosexuals, how does he treat Muslims, Sikhs, Aborigines, Africans, to name a few? (See “They’re Like Us, But They’re Not,” June 2, 2006, on this blog for more on Hooper and racism).

In my 29 months at CSIS I did not have much interactions with Hooper — “the CSIS chief who has a lot to learn about the Middle East but talks far too much,” as veteran reporter Robert Fisk wrote on June 10, 2006. When I did, however, I was sitting at a long oblong table on the fifth floor of the CSIS National Headquarters building in Ottawa. Next to me was my supervisor, or "head," and at table with us were lawyers and a handful of other officials. At the opposite end, oozing cowboy-like confidence, was Jack Hooper. Every time we went in that room, it was to renew a warrant or request to add targets to our investigation. We would make a short presentation, followed by a mockery of a question-and-answer session. Usually, Hooper would have the final, or next-to-final, word — a blessing of sorts — and we would leave, added powers granted.

The uncomfortable question is, given the man that has been exposed in the article — and by rebound the organization that permitted him to reach the pinnacle of power — how confident can we be that the individuals we asked to be allowed to target in that stuffy room should be targeted?

Perhaps, like ugly girls and Merlot wine, targets can just as easily be spit out.

Of surrender, identity and one big happy family

As is always the case, it is only when one sits down and listens to people's testimonies and experiences that he or she can come closest to truly understanding a people and its history. No amount of history books — which usually focus on politics and economics while giving social aspects short shrift — can compare with a Taiwanese man, say, telling of his experiences of discrimination while working in China. Only novels, I have found, can approximate this intimacy with history. One that does that very well for the Taiwanese experience is Wu Zhuoliu's Orphan of Asia.

It was with this in mind and after having had such an encounter with living personal history that I set out to write an article on the espionage and discrimination that Taiwanese living in China are subjected to, a problem that in fact goes back well before 1949, when the Nationalist forces "lost" China to the communists and fled to Taiwan, giving rise to the cross-Strait conflict we see today.

As a colonial people with a geography and a history all their own, Taiwanese have never really belonged — despite what the Chinese say — to anyone who has put a claim on them. In reality, Taiwanese are neither Japanese nor Chinese; they are Taiwanese. True, the generation of Chinese that came to Taiwan with the retreating Nationalists still has an attachment, or an emotional link, to the Mainland, but the children born to that generation were born in Taiwan, as were all the generations born since the first Chinese came to Taiwan hundreds of years ago. Orphan of Asia, itself written by a Taiwanese living under Japanese colonialism (the book was originally written in Japanese), does an apt job portraying this sense of not belonging anywhere, a condition that is exacerbated by how Chinese and Japanese react to the Taiwan reality and how this forces Taiwanese, then as today, to hide their true identity.

If they were one big happy family, or "cousins," as Beijing refers to Taiwanese, then why must Taiwanese be treated with contempt whenever they are in China, entrepreneurs facing extortion, racism, threats and spying, not only in time of conflict, as today, but as Wu's novel shows us, well before that as well?

Readers can access the full article, titled "The myth of the big happy family," by clicking here.

Stuck in a moment

While attending the G8 summit in Germany last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper may finally have revealed just how behind the times he is. Not that many of his conservative stances on numerous issues — from same sex marriage to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer — had not already revealed the telltale signs of an antiquated mind, but this time around, by publicly snubbing an international celebrity-cum poverty activist who in recent years has done a lot of good for the world’s destitute, Harper may have reached a new low.

Or rather, he may have shown the extent to which his world view is tainted by big money. After all, the G8 summit is about the world’s wealthiest countries, which can afford to dine and wine while bickering about where to park their next anti-ballistic missile systems and so on. So no time to meet U2’s lead singer Bono (hence is stiff mug not appearing next to the popular musician above). Even US President George W. Bush could find the time, as did German Chancellor Angela Merkel — in the process giving publicity and lending legitimacy to a man who genuinely endeavors to find solutions to one of the planet’s worst scourges, that of poverty.

Adding insult to injury, Harper said that unlike his predecessor, he had no time to meet mere “celebrities,” that it wasn't his "style." Paul Martin, whom Harper never misses an occasion to snipe at, had met Bono, along with other celebrity activists, on a number of occasions. The implicit message in Harper’s comment was that Martin was either wasting his precious time or simply seeking to brush elbows with pop stars.

Busy prime ministerial schedule or not, a true leader should make the time to hold talks with activists who have successfully used their star status to publicize a cause. In more ways that one, it is such individuals nowadays — the Bonos, Gates and so on — who are making a true difference, not government representatives who, not unlike Harper, are too busy talking defense and business, in the process kowtowing to the US and, increasingly, to Beijing (how quickly Harper forgot about jailed human rights activist Husayin Celil).

A true leader is one who realizes that the world we live in is now much more than the sum of its countries and governments, a world where ideas and the capacity to make a difference come from technologically super-empowered individuals, to quote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, along with media-savvy non-state actors such as NGOs and the Bonos of this world.

A visionary leader who takes his responsibilities to the world seriously would recognize that someone like Bono, even if said leader cannot look beyond the “pop star” status, has the capacity to affect much more lives in places like Africa than any government department in Canada ever could. Bono and his like have a mobilizing power and have gained a level of respect that allows them into households with much more ease than politicians and government officials, who are often the object of suspicion, if not cynicism. Imagine for a second all the good that could be accomplished if Bono were to move the Wall Street high-flyers to give but 1 percent of the year-end bonus they collectively received last year — yes, just the bonus — which reached a whooping US$23.9 billion (Canada's total budget for foreign aid this year is C$3.45 billion, or about seven times less than that year-end bonus). Think governments, people like Stephen Harper, can accomplish such a feat? Think again. If anyone will, it will be someone like Bono.

But no. Not Harper. To realize this would be asking too much of him. Stick to old, safe protocol and the status quo (in other words, to his so-called "style"), whereby heads of state give the impression they are doing something while in reality all it is they do is perpetuate a system that leaves nearly half of the world’s population behind while rich countries continue to enrich themselves (activists have been accusing Canada of trying to block a deal that would ensure Western countries will live up to their promises to boost aid to Africa).

So in the name of many Canadians who actually care, my sincere apologies, Mr. Bono, for the man we put in office and the disrespectful manner in which he snubbed you. Harper wasn’t too busy to meet you; he simply didn’t have the vision, stuck in a moment as he is (to paraphrase one of your songs) to do so.

A corrective of sorts

For all its support for liberty and democracy, the Taipei Times has, over the years, run a great number of op-eds written by specialists from American conservatives and right-wingers whose connections to the defense establishment cannot but taint their views and diminish their credibility. In opinion piece after opinion piece, writers like John J. Tkacik of the Heritage Foundation, or Kurt M. Campbell, CEO of the Center for a New American Century, to name but two, have relentlessly argued a highly paranoid perspective on China’s military, unflaggingly called for a robust militarization of Taiwan and Japan (always contingent on and preparing for the worst-case scenarios) and unwaveringly provided arguments for US primacy through military means. From China’s less-than-transparent modernization of its military to its potential acquisition of aircraft carriers to a military budget equivalent of US$45 billion that, if we are to believe them, is in reality thrice that, these writers and others have adopted a realist, zero-sum take on regional matters, one that shows absolutely no promise of resolving tensions across the Taiwan Strait and that can only but increase the risk of something going wrong, some mistake being committed, which could very well engender catastrophic results. By banking on military deterrence alone, these writers and the decision-makers they influence are only making the problem worse by adding complexity and firepower. Of course, I strongly suspect that these pundits’ connections to right-of-the-spectrum think tanks and the defense industry play a large part in their understanding (or misunderstanding, I should say) of the situation in North East Asia, in that they are part of a system whereby its adherents enrich themselves by (a) painting a grim picture and (b) selling weapons to give the illusion that it will solve problems. Once one digs a little into the matter, it soon becomes clear that these supposed friends of Taiwan are anything but.

The fact that today’s edition of the Taipei Times contains an op-ed that I wrote on the subject gives me some relief, as it shows that by allowing me to articulate a position that goes counter to the general, pro-armament view found in its opinion pages, its owners are not merely puppets of the US military-industrial complex. Visitors to The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato will realize that this piece, A regional arms race is no answer, is a shorter and revised version of the May 10, 2007, posting titled “How the US is sparking an arms race in North East Asia.”