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sauce for the Chinese gander By
Peter Lee
For the Chinese leadership, the
ominous tottering of Middle East dominoes - and
the foundations of authoritarian doctrine -
continues. The Chinese media have become fixated
on Libya as an object lesson of the dangers of
revolutionary and humanitarian enthusiasm run
amok.
Certainly, the Libyan adventure
presents a less than edifying spectacle: Western
military powers, led by France, exploited a United
Nations resolution allowing humanitarian
intervention to engage in a freewheeling attack
against military assets of the Libyan government
with the apparent motive of assuring the survival
of rebel forces in the eastern part of the
country.
The Barack Obama administration
is trying to bolster the case for
humanitarian intervention
with the kind of loose, hypothetical talk that led
to the invasion Iraq in 2003 to prevent potential
mushroom clouds over Cleveland.
Politico's
senior White House reporter Glenn Thrush revealed
during a radio program that the administration was
briefing congressional leaders with the dubious
claim that "there could have been 50 to 100,000
deaths associated with allowing Muammar Gaddafi's
forces to over-run Benghazi". [1]
It took
Hafez al-Assad three weeks of shelling, bombing
and ground operations against the virtually
defenseless city of Hama, Syria to kill perhaps
35,000 people in 1982. That is currently the gold
standard for massacres by Arab despots perpetrated
on their own people. It is questionable whether
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi would be in a position to
exceed this figure in Benghazi, especially when
reports indicate that the actual stock of trained
rebel fighters opposing him there might only be on
the order of 1,000. [2]
Gaddafi should be
grateful that the State Department didn't declare
he was planning to annihilate Benghazi's entire
population of 700,000.
There is no good
number for how many people have died to date in
what the ex-Libyan ambassador to the United
Nations characterized as the "genocide" of Libya,
but the most detailed estimate is 2,000 - 500 of
whom were Gaddafi loyalists. [3]
Once the
humanitarian needs of the Libyan rebels are met,
short of regime change in Tripoli a friendly
regime in eastern Libya would presumably be the
absolute minimum outcome acceptable to France and
Italy, which lean on Libya for energy supplies.
There is already an available precedent
for partition of Libya, which would leave a
pro-Western regime in Benghazi in control of most
of Libya's petroleum resources and Gaddafi
presiding over an impotent and defunded rump
state; that would be the US-brokered peace
agreement in Sudan, which led to the establishment
of a pro-Western regime in Juba in control of most
of Sudan's petroleum resources and left Omar
Bashir presiding over an impotent and defunded
rump state.
Funny coincidence if the West
ends up on the positive side of the oil equation
in both instances.
The Chinese government
abstained from the UN no-fly resolution; since
then media has been full of criticisms and dire
warnings over the consequences of the Western
military intervention.
On March 21, the
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson declared:
China has noted the latest
developments in the Libyan situation and
expresses regret over the military strike
against Libya. China always disapproves the use
of force in international relations and
maintains that the purposes and principles of
the UN Charter and relevant norms of
international law be adhered to, and Libya's
sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial
integrity be respected. We hope to see Libya
restore stability as soon as possible and avoid
the escalation of military conflicts and more
civilian casualties. [4]
Xinhua also
gave prominence to a report that called into
question the "no boots in the sand" avowals of the
West in enforcing the UN resolutions: the dispatch
of the amphibious assault vessel USS
Bataan, with 900 marines and perhaps three
dozen attack helicopters, to join the Libya
operation in the Mediterranean. [5]
In
what is unlikely to be a propaganda windfall for
the United States, the Bataan gained a
certain notoriety when it was identified as a
prison ship used to detain terrorism suspects
incommunicado in the Indian Ocean in late 2001 and
2002. [6]
In an ironic aside - and an
indication of how murky things are over there -
Time Magazine dug up a US Army report that Libya
provided the highest number of anti-US foreign
fighters in Iraq per capita based on their home
country. They virtually all came from the
impoverished and neglected environs of Benghazi,
Darnah, Ajdabiyah, and Misrata - the heartland of
the current rebellion. [7]
Certainly,
there is plenty to criticize, and China is not
alone.
The African Union, Russia's Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin, Brazil, and India have
all repudiated the ad hoc intervention which, in
addition to its myriad contradictions and dangers,
has the additional disadvantage of being led by
the French.
With implicit eye-rolling,
Russia's RIA Novosti reported a news item that
neatly encapsulated the opportunistic pandering of
the rebels and the invincible self-regard of the
French government:
France says it feels a sense of
responsibility for Libyan rebels after its flag
was raised over the rebel stronghold of
Benghazi, France's prime minister said on
Tuesday.
"There is hope in Benghazi now,
the French flag is being waved there, and also
the flag of a different Libya which dreams of
democracy and modernization," Francois Fillon
told the French parliament. [8]
To
make things worse, France's Libyan adventure was
reportedly concocted as a side project of France's
much-mocked premier philosophical poseur,
"intellectual dandy", and ubiquitous media hound
Bernard-Henri Levy. Diane Johnstone writes in
Counterpunch:
Bernard-Henri Levy held a private
meeting in Benghazi with Moustapha Abdeljalil, a
former justice minister who has turned coats to
become leader of the rebel "National Transition
Council". That very evening, BHL [Bernard-Henri
Levy] called Sarkozy on his cellphone and got
his agreement to receive the NTC leaders. The
meeting took place on March 10 in the Elysee
palace in Paris.
As reported in Le
Figaro by veteran international reporter Renaud
Girard, Sarkozy thereupon announced to the
delighted Libyans the plan that he had concocted
with BHL: recognition of the NTC as sole
legitimate representative of Libya, the naming
of a French ambassador to Benghazi, precision
strikes on Libyan military airports, with the
blessings of the Arab League (which he had
already obtained). The French foreign minister,
Alain Juppe, was startled to learn of this
dramatic turn in French diplomacy after the
media. [9]
Writing for Stephen Walt's
realist blog at Foreign Policy, Mark Sheetz of
Boston College characterized BHL, perhaps with a
tinge of envy, as "another vain French rooster
strutting around looking for glory". [10]
For China, the temerity of France's
philosophers in usurping the US role as the verbal
and military scourge of inconvenient dictators is
beside the point.
The issue in Libya is
the astounding ease with which a regime that found
itself at cross-purposes with the United States
was unilaterally stripped of its legitimacy and
exposed to military intervention through
aggressive and creative interpretation of an
ambiguous UN resolution - in a mere three days.
This issue is important enough that
People's Daily has been carrying the propaganda
burden itself, instead of relying on its
stridently nationalistic but less official
international mouthpiece, Global Times. A
selection of People's Daily headlines provides a
taste of the official Chinese mood: - China
reaffirms its reservation to part of "no-fly zone"
resolution on Libya. [11] - How humanitarian
is Western intervention in Libya? [12] - Libya
intervention: Driven by oil or humanitarianism?
[13]
China's liberal bloggers, on the
other hand, appear to be brimming with enthusiasm
for military intervention by Western democracies.
On February 26, China's "Great River" -
the nom du Web of journalist Zhang Wen -
had already written a piece entitled "Support
America Taking Military Action Against Libya".
Indeed, he supported US unilateral action
even if UN sanction was blocked by "the resistance
of some countries" aka China. This put him several
steps in front of the Obama administration, which
had serious reservations about intervention, was
stampeded in abandoning its cautious stance by
domestic and international pressures, and found it
politic to proceed only after the Arab League and
the UNSC were on board. [14]
(Zhang, with
blog posts like "Why Is It That My Predictions So
Accurate?" - "Answer: It's simple. One has to
understand human nature and grasp the overall
situation", seems a worthy contender for the crown
of China's Bernard-Henri Levy.) [15]
China's most popular blogger, Han Han,
also picked up the theme that human rights trumps
national sovereignty - and that the need to
protect people from slaughter is more important
that what happens to the oil-with a post titled,
"Dictators Don't Have Internal Affairs". [16]
Within the Chinese tradition of
remonstrance by analogy, the implication is that
sauce for the Libyan goose might also suit the
Chinese gander.
Regardless of its duration
or outcome, the West's oily, self-righteous,
violent and disorganized adventure in Libya will
probably provide ample grist for the China's
government's propaganda mill. Whether it will
shake the convictions of China's interventionist
liberal hawks is another matter.
However,
the matter of closest interest to Beijing may be
the fate of another Middle East authoritarian
government that has explicitly modeled its
doctrine of economic development and political
control on China's example.
That country
is Syria, and the outlook for Bashar al-Assad's
regime has darkened with a local manifestation of
the regional unrest, in the southern town of
Daraa. Syria is one of three Chinese strategic
partners in the region, together with Iran and
Turkey.
With its secular, single-party
Ba'athist rule, its liberalized but
state-dominated economy, its lack of an oil
cushion, and hostility of the United States and
its regional allies (last year Israel's Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced that Syria
had replaced Iraq in the "axis of evil",
apparently to uphold the principle that the axis
must always have three members - the other two are
Iran and North Korea), Syria occupies a political
and social space analogous to, if much smaller
than, China's.
It also incorporates the
characteristic Chinese problems of princeling rule
and corruption. The president of Syria, Bashar
al-Assad, is the son of the previous president,
Hafez al-Assad. His relatives pervade the
government and economy and have aroused
considerable resentment.
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