International Affairs: December 2005 Archives

In the coming decades it will be incredibly important that China continues to open up its economy and political process, and it's good to see that President Hu Jintao is saying many of the right things. I'm not sure how sincere he is, and it's important to remember that we can't trust China, but in the long run I think China is moving in the right direction.

This is quoted from a Drudge flash report, so the link will go bad pretty quick.

Chinese president stresses commitment to peaceful development in New Year Address Sat Dec 31 2005 09:22:59 ET

BEIJING Chinese President Hu Jintao reiterated China's strong commitment to peaceful development in his New Year Address broadcast Saturday to domestic and overseas audience via state TV and radio stations.

"Here, I would like to reiterate that China's development is peaceful development, opening development, cooperative development and harmonious development," Hu said.

"The Chinese people will develop ourselves by means of striving for a peaceful international environment, and promote world peace with our own development," Hu said in the address broadcast by China Radio International, China National Radio and China Central Television.

Notice there's no mention of Taiwan or terrorism, but holidays are the time for vague platitudes, not concrete policy.

He said the Chinese people are willing to join with peoples of all nations in the world to promote multilateralism, advance the development of economic globalization toward common prosperity, advocate democracy in international relations, respect the diversity of the world and push for the establishment of a new international political and economic order that is just and rational.

I'm not sure if "democracy in international relations" is the same as regular old democracy, or if it means equal representation and voting among nations, as is seen in the UN General Assembly. If it's the former, great, if it's the latter, then it's meaningless.

He pledged that China will adhere to its fundamental national policy of opening to the outside world, continue to improve the investment environment and open the market, carry out international cooperation in a wide range of areas and seek to attain mutual benefits and win-win results with all countries in the world.

If they continue to open their economy, it's inevitable that their political process will follow.

He mentioned in particular that China will do its best to help developing countries accelerate development and help people suffering from war, poverty, illnesses and natural calamities in the world.

I don't think they have the resources to help other countries much at this point, considering that most Chinese subjects live in third-world conditions, but it's a nice thought.

I've written about the follies of foreign aid and derided the UN for calling America "stingy", and the recent devestating earthquake in Pakistan has provided America with yet another opportunity to prove our critics wrong.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--From the air, the town of Balakot, at the lip of the Kaghan Valley in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier Province, resembles pictures of Hiroshima circa late summer 1945: All but a few buildings have been reduced absolutely to rubble. There were some 50,000 people in this town on the morning of Oct. 8; a six-second earthquake that day killed an estimated 16,000 outright. Now survivors live mainly in scattered tent villages, not all of them properly winterized. And winter has begun.

The people of Balakot and dozens of other devastated towns are much on the mind of Rear Adm. Michael A. LeFever, 51, the man in charge of the U.S. military's 1,000-man, $110 million-and-counting relief effort here. "I'll never forget landing and smelling gangrene and smelling death," he says of his first trip to the disaster zone where 73,000 died. "The first couple of days were overwhelming."

It was Pakistan's good fortune in those critical days that Adm. LeFever could call in heavy-lift helicopters, particularly the tandem-rotor Chinook, from bases in nearby Afghanistan. Every road into the Frontier Province and the neighboring Azad Kashmir region had been rendered impassable by huge landslides. Every hospital in the region except one had been destroyed. The Pakistan government, which lost nearly its entire civil administration in the region as well as hundreds of soldiers, lacked the airlift capacity to bring adequate relief north and the critically injured south. The Chinooks were among the few helicopters able to reach, supply and evacuate places that, even under normal conditions, are some of the most inaccessible on earth.

Since then, U.S. helicopters have flown 2,500 sorties, carried 16,000 passengers and delivered nearly 6,000 tons of aid. Just as importantly, the Chinook has become America's new emblem in Pakistan, a byword for salvation in an area where until recently the U.S. was widely and fanatically detested. Toy Chinooks (made in China, of course) are suddenly popular with Pakistani children. A Kashmiri imam who denounced the U.S. in a recent sermon was booed and heckled by worshippers. "Pakistan is not a nation of ingrates," a local businessman told me over dinner the other night. "We know where the help is coming from."

The American military is one of the greatest forces for good in the world at this moment, perhaps second only to Christianity.

My wife has been attending Saddam's trial in Iraq and has the inside scoop on the proceedings, including information that substantiates Saddam's claims of abuse.

Saddam Hussein claims he's been beaten and tortured while in captivity, making it obvious yet again that the enemies of America are quick to grab every lifeline the Democrats throw to them. Although I personally think it would be great if his allegations were true, I doubt they are; it wouldn't make any sense for his guards to risk their necks beating such a high-profile prisoner. Anyway, I've yet to hear a MSM outlet point out that al Qaeda training manuals instruct captured terrorists to make accusations of torture and abuse even when they aren't true, and why? Because they know that the American left is eager to believe such accusations and quick to use them against America's interests... and to just coincidentally help the terrorists.

Update:
And how long will it be until we see a terrorist try to free himself by citing an "illegal" NSA wiretap?

Four months ago I proposed an idea for an international aid organization to be called Guns Without Borders whose mission would be to deliver weapons to oppressed people around the world. As the genocide in Darfur continues to worsen, Dave Kopel argues that "the victims of an on-going genocide have an over-riding right to acquire and possess defensive arms, notwithstanding any contrary national or international laws on the subject", and I agree. I don't have the knowledge or wherewithal to organize such a charity, but I'd be will to donate money to send weapons to the Darfuris who are being slaughtered by their own government.

Perhaps my earlier belief that the majority of UN member states are tyrannical dictatorships was mistaken, seeing as how Freedom House rates 147 out of 192 nations as "free" or "partly free".

Freedom House listed 89 countries as "free," meaning that 46 percent of the world's population now enjoy a climate of respect for civil liberties.

Another 58 countries were judged "partly free," while the number of countries considered "not free" declined from 49 in 2004 to 45 this year, the lowest number in over a decade.

Of course, depending on the methodology, "partly free" nations could be pretty tyrannical, and the total number of "partly free" and "not free" states is greater the number of "free" states in the United Nations. So, for the moment I'm going to stick by my earlier assessment and continue to consider the United Nations to be a dictator's playground with no moral or philisophical standing whatsoever.

It's always interesting to hear a terrorist labeled as "al Qaeda's number-three man", but apparently these terrorist rankings are pretty subjective.

The reported killing of a senior al Qaeda operative by a CIA-launched missile in Pakistan on Dec. 1 has sparked debate among terrorism experts over the true identity of the target and the accuracy of numerical rankings that the Pentagon and White House have attached to other captured or killed terrorists. ...

On Dec. 3, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told reporters that Abu Hamza Rabia had been killed in an explosion two days earlier. An aide to Musharraf told reporters that Rabia was "very important in al Qaeda, maybe number three or five" in the terror group's hierarchy. Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao added that Rabia's death was a "big blow to al Qaeda."

Several American news organizations, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, then quoted multiple, unnamed U.S. intelligence officials as saying that Rabia was al Qaeda's number-three man, the operational commander or military commander, all terms typically used interchangeably. Headlines around the world trumpeted the death of the "al Qaeda number three man". ...

But the day before Hadley's appearances, terrorism expert and author Christopher L. Brown was labeling it all a case of mistaken identity. Rabia was wanted for plotting to assassinate Musharraf, Brown said, was probably a local senior member of al Qaeda, but was far from being its military mastermind. ...

Rabia has never appeared on the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list and no known reward has been posted for his capture, Brown points out.

A LexisNexis database search turns up no news articles written about Rabia prior to his reported killing, except for an Aug. 18, 2004, announcement by the Pakistani government of a reward for his capture and that of six other al Qaeda suspects accused of attempting to assassinate President Musharraf on Dec. 14 and 25, 2003.

The 'real' al Qaeda number three, Brown contends, is Saif al-Adel (also known as Muhammad Ibrahim Makkawi), who was previously reported by numerous independent sources to have become al Qaeda's chief of the military committee (operational commander) following the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

Anyway, there's a lot more info to be found online, and I wouldn't trust Pakistani rankings too far.

Iraqis are voting at this very moment. I'm going to ink my finger in purple tomorrow to show my support.

Update:
Looks like it's going pretty well. Big winners: Iraqis, President Bush. Big losers: terrorists, Democrats. Funny how those tend to line up.

I tend to think military strikes are more effective than economic sanctions at persuading rogue nations to comply with international will, but there's no denying that sanctions can have significant indirect effects. For instance, consider the recent plane crash in Iran in which more than 120 people were killed when an American-made C-130 crashed into an apartment building.

Iran has a poor airline safety record following a string of air disasters in the past 30 years although most have involved Russian-made aircraft.

U.S. sanctions have prevented Iran from buying new aircraft or spares from the West, forcing it to supplement its fleet of Boeing and Airbus planes with aircraft from former Soviet Union countries.

This plane crash was an indirect result of economic sanctions. Aside from the general economic hardship caused by sanctions -- and the resulting illness and poverty -- specific instances of civilian death like this incident should lead us to consider whether or not sanctions are actually more civilized than direct military confrontation. Poor civilians bear most of the costs of economic sanctions, and in the tyrannical dictatorships we're likely to oppose they're also the people with the least control over their nation's foreign policy.

A surprising number of commenters that I respect lined up to defend Ramsey Clark when I attacked him for defending Saddam Hussein. Wrote jez:

Ramsey Clark's job is entirely necessary. This trial must be fair, so Hussein must have representation. (afaik, Clark was mostly appealing for adequate protection for the remaining defence team, after two lawyers were murdered).

Remember, this is why we're the good guys, and they're the bad guys. If we cut any corners on the trial, we loose the moral high ground.

But I think he's giving Mr. Clark far too much credit. Ramsey Clark isn't interested in defending the rights of Saddam Hussein; his only goal in life is to use his stature as a former United States Attorney General to oppose and humiliate America at every turn. Ramsey Clark doesn't care about Saddam, but the trial gives him a stage from which to hurl insult at the United States. Just look at Wikipedia's "Ramsey Clark" entry for a list of people he has represented.

* Nazi concentration camp boss Karl Linnas

* The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Advisory Board during late 1970s and early 1980s

* Branch Davidian leader David Koresh

* Antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan

* American Indian prisoner Leonard Peltier

* Crimes of America conference in Teheran in 1980

* Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia

* Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide

* PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair bound elderly tourist who was shot and tossed overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1986

* Camilo Mejia, a US soldier who deserted his post in March 2004, claiming he did not want any part of an "oil-driven war"

* Radovan Karadzic, of Yugoslavia and accused war criminal

* Counsel to Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Yugoslavia, accused war criminal

* Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq and accused war criminal

In every instance Mr. Clark's goal was to hinder and harrass the United States. He opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start as a war of aggression, but he defends Saddam's massacres as legitimate self-defense. Christopher Hitchens in Slate mentions a few more interesting facts:

Clark used to be Lyndon Johnson's attorney general and in that capacity tried to send Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, and others to jail for their advocacy of resistance to the war in Vietnam. (In a bizarre 2002 interview in the Washington Post, he took the view that he was still right to have attempted this, even though the defendants were all eventually exonerated.)* From bullying prosecutor he mutated into vagrant and floating defense counsel, offering himself to the génocideurs of Rwanda and to Slobodan Milosevic, and using up the spare time in apologetics for North Korea. He acts as front-man for the Workers World Party, an especially venomous little Communist sect, which originated in a defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. ...

The first charge being brought against Saddam Hussein is that in 1982, after his motorcade came under fire near the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, he ordered the torture and murder of 148 men and boys. It's a relatively minor item in the catalog, but there it is. The first prosecution witness in the case, Wadah al-Sheikh, has actually testified that he knows of no direct link between Saddam and the killings. The defense team has to hope that it can prove the same, or perhaps suggest that no such massacre occurred. Not so Ramsey Clark. In a recent BBC interview, he offered the excuse that Iraq was then fighting the Shiite nation of Iran:

He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.

Just go back and read that again. Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam "had this huge war going on." He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq's favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.

Ramsey Clark isn't an altruistic legal purist, he's anti-American scum.

Update:

Grotian Moment, a blog dedicated to Saddam's trial, speaks similarly of Mr. Clark.

Clark is founder and current Chairman of the International Action Center, the largest antiwar movement in the United States. A vocal critic of U.S. military actions around the globe, in Op Eds and newspaper interviews, he calls US government officials "international outlaws," accusing them of "killing innocent people because we don't like their leader." Clark has said that rather than Saddam Hussein, it is the U.S. that should go on trial, pointing to the unlawful invasion, the subsequent destructive siege of Falluja, torture in prisons and the military's role in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42165.

Clark is known for turning international trials into political stages from which to launch attacks against U.S. foreign policy. He has represented Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia; Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Hutu leader implicated in the Rwandan genocide; PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair bound elderly American who was shot and tossed overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1986; and most recently Slobodan Milosevic, the former leader of Serbia who is on trial for genocide before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Update:

Meanwhile, it appears that Ramsey Clark heads several anti-American groups... all out of the same office!

Moonbat Fun House What do terrorists and "antiwar activists" have in common? Here's one nonobvious thing: On Friday and again yesterday we noted the tendency of terror groups to use a variety of names in order to create an illusion that they are more numerous than they are. Turns out left-wing fringe groups do the same thing here in America. Consider this list of "groups":

* International Action Center

* People Judge Bush

* Troops Out Now!

* No Draft, No Way!

* People's Video Network

According to their Web sites, all of these groups are located in the same room, at 39 West 14th Street, #206, in New York City, and all share a phone number. According to this page, that room also is the headquarters of the Mumia Mobilization Office, which doesn't appear to have its own Web site. The International Action Center, run by crackpot (or, as the New York Times calls him, "contrarian") Ramsey Clark, seems to be the moonbat mother ship. Clark is off in Baghdad representing Saddam Hussein, which tells you something about what these "antiwar" "groups" actually stand for.

Liberals are always wanting to give up, and always whining about how things are going to go wrong and fail. Whatever, losers. The key to success is tenacity, and the key to tenacity is confidence. Unfortunately the Democrats appear to have neither.

(SAN ANTONIO) -- Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democrat National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democrat Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years.

Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

My understanding of Vietnam is that we lost for political reasons, not military reasons. Is that even controversial? Do Democrats actually think we couldn't have won if we hadn't chickened out? Anyway, if Iraq is like Vietnam it's that the only way we're going to lose there is through political failure. And yes, the Democrat politicians can bring that about if they try hard enough... although if we pull all our troops out tomorrow it's hard to see how even the current status could be considered anything but a huge win for America.

"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarkawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.

What "friendly neighboring country" would that be? Last I checked, putting troops in Saudi Arabia was part of what pissed Osama off in the first place... and the Saudis are hardly friendly. In fact, I can't think of any government or populace in the Middle East that's more friendly to America than Iraq... except Israel. Yeah, that'd be great, let's put our troops in Israel.

"The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing, but that could have been done in a very different way. But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."

I doubt that statistic, but even if it's true, why does the country belong to Iraqis rather than to some tyrannical dictator? Hm. There must be some reason.

I don't have much to say about it, but seeing pictures of Saddam on trial rather than peacefully retired in Qatar or Syria sure is nice.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Saddam Hussein's defense team walked out of court Monday, the former leader yelled at the judge, and Saddam's half brother shouted "Why don't you just execute us!" in an often unruly court session that also saw former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark speak on behalf of the deposed president.

Hopefully we'll be able to oblige Saddam and his brother. Ramsey Clark, however, probably won't get what he deserves.