A
GAUNTLET THROWN
The
Chinese say that the American plane, having intruded into
their airspace, suddenly veered into one of two Chinese
jet fighters on its tail. This is hardly credible: you
don't have to be a military specialist to figure out that
a jet fighter has a lot more maneuverability than the
propeller-driven EP-3. Either the ChiComs are sending
their pilots to the Chinese equivalent of the Comedy
Driving School, or something else occurred that neither
side is talking about. But word, as usual, is getting
out. According to a
report in the Taipei Times, the spy plane was
collecting information on China's most advanced warship
when the alleged collision took place. The spy plane then
tried to hightail it out of there, when it was forced
down by warning fire from the other Chinese fighter. Citing
an anonymous "intelligence source," the Taipei newspaper
reports that "the source – who had monitored the
incident by radar and also listened to cockpit exchanges
– said he believed the EP-3 was forced to land by
the Chinese fighter plane at an airport on Hainan." While
none of this is confirmed, it sounds very credible, or
at least possible: if true, it points to a deliberate
provocation, a gauntlet hurled in the path of the American
hegemon – one that the Bush administration is all
too eager to pick up.
THE
LADYBUG AND THE FROG
The
American side of the story is even more dubious than the
Chinese version. US officials claim that the collision
was so damaging to the spy plane that it had no choice
but to send out a "Mayday" signal and make an "emergency
landing" – at one of the biggest and most strategically
important Chinese military bases in the region! Pardon
me for asking, but isn't the idea of running a military
spy operation to avoid capture at all costs? If
they had fallen into the sea, surely the area would have
been swarming with US ships in very short order –
or else what do we have all those bases over in Japan
and the Philippines for? The Taipei Times
reveals that "this is not the first time that a US surveillance
plane such as the EP-3 has tried to collect information
on the most advanced fighting ship in the Chinese navy,
which poses a major threat to US aircraft carriers with
its lethal Sunburn anti-ship missiles." The US has also
complained that this aerial game of cat-and-mouse occurred
with greater frequency in recent weeks. In that case,
why was this great turtle of an airplane –
propeller-driven for god's-sake, and packed with
highly-sensitive spying devices – dangled in front
of the Chinese, like a big fat ladybug lazily circling
a frog?
WHATEVER
HAPPENED TO GARY POWERS?
We
don't have a lot of answers, yet, just questions: but
perhaps, in looking at history, and searching for precedents,
we can find some clue as to what is going on here, with
the image of Gary
Powers, downed over the Soviet Union at the dawn of
the cold war, coming immediately to mind. On May 1, 1960,
Powers took off in the top-secret U-2 spy plane, which
had so far eluded all Soviet efforts to down it. The Soviet
Sputnik had just been launched, and US military
circles were in an uproar: after a short lull, overflights
of Soviet territory were resumed, even as preparations
were under way for the Paris peace summit. When the Soviets
announced, on May 5th, that they had shot down
an American spy plane, the US government at first tried
to push the story that that plane's mission was entirely
meteorological – but this was rendered completely
untenable by the reappearance of Powers as the captive
of the Soviets. Brought before a Soviet court and charged
with espionage, he was slapped with a ten-year sentence
– and wound up serving only 17 months. Exchanged
for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel, Powers returned to the
US a hero, but eventually wound up a somewhat embittered
man, convinced – as he says in his memoirs –
that he had become a political pawn in the cold war chess
game. His book, Operation
Overflight, was very critical of the CIA. After
his release from a Soviet prison, he was hired by Lockheed
as a test pilot. Unaware that the US government was his
hidden benefactor, Powers worked for Lockheed for seven
years, but when they got wind of his book – and that
it was highly critical of the CIA – the hero was
promptly dumped. He died in a helicopter crash, in Los
Angeles, while piloting for a radio station.
EERIE
PARALLELS
The
parallels between the U-2 incident, and the Hainan collision,
are eerie and unsettling. As with the U-2, the downing
of the EP-3 was the climactic denouement of a series of
incidents, in which American surveillance efforts were,
at first, largely successful – only to have the whole
program come crashing down on the heads of embarrassed
US policymakers. While this was not exactly an American
overflight – the U-2 penetrated deep into Soviet
airspace – the Chinese consider the arena of the
encounter to be under Chinese sovereignty. Indeed, this
is one of the major regional issues, second only to Taiwan:
how far out from the mainland into the South China Sea
does Beijing's authority extend? What the US considers
"international waters" are seen by the Chinese to be within
their rightful jurisdiction. This question, in turn, is
intertwined with the issue of the Spratley
Islands, a collection of practically useless atolls
that at least 6 different nations lay claim to: not only
China, but also the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei,
and Taiwan. This is a region fairly bristling with flashpoints,
any one of which could set off a major military conflict
involving the US, China, and inevitably dragging in others.
FOR
REASONS OF STATE
In
this case, as in the U-2 incident, both sides appear to
be lying, to some extent, for reasons of state: and both
sides, as in 1960, are using this as an opportunity to
make propaganda, with the Chinese demanding an apology,
and the Bush administration making good on secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld's startling thesis, revealed
barely two weeks earlier by the [London] Guardian,
that China was now "the principal threat to American global
dominance."
FLIP
THE SCRIPT
Indeed,
the newly-aggressive behavior of the Chinese, exemplified
by the Hainan incident, can in large part be seen as a
direct response to this new American stance. The recent
decision to end all negotiations with the North Koreans,
the news that the US sale of sophisticated Aegis weaponry
to Taiwan is imminent, and the stepped up propaganda campaign
aimed at Beijing in such international forums as the United
Nations – this is the context in which the interception
and downing of the American spy plane has to be understood.
The Chinese are reacting to a perceived threat. At the
risk of committing the sin of "moral equivalence," if
we "flip the script," as Tony
Karon of Time magazine puts it, it is easy
to see why the Chinese are p-o'ed:
"Imagine
a Chinese plane flying a surveillance mission off the
Florida coast colliding with an Air Force F-16 sent on
an aggressive monitoring mission. The U.S. fighter goes
down and the pilot is lost; the Chinese plane is forced
to land on US soil. The incident occurs at a moment when
China is about to supply a package of sophisticated weapons
to Cuba."
PRIVILEGES
OF EMPIRE
But
an imperial nation, such as ours, is hardly willing to
put itself on the same level as others: by definition,
the world's only superpower is allowed to do things impermissible
for others. What would be an act of war, committed by
anyone else, is, for Americans, a simple act of droit
de seigneur. But in f*cking-over the rest of the
world, we provoke a reaction that, in Asia at this moment,
seems to be breaking out all over. What Chalmers Johnson
calls the "blowback"
from the ongoing military occupation of much of Eastasia,
and America's "forward stance" in the Pacific, is already
happening in Japan: not only on account of the Ehime
Maru, but due to the long history of violent incidents
involving US troops stationed at Okinawa. The
latest incident, involving the sudden appearance of
a US submarine at a Japanese port without notice, takes
the resentment to a higher level, raising as it does the
stark picture of Japan as a US vassal whose consent is
not required. In South Korea, the resentment of US bases
is combining with anger at Washington's abrupt dismissal
of the ruling government's "Sunshine policy" toward the
North. The springtime of Korean reunification has been
spoiled by a Bushian frost, as Cold War, Version 2.O,
is released by the Rumsfeld-Rice faction, now in the ascendant
in the foreign policy councils of this administration.
HOW
TO REANIMATE A CORPSE
Both
sides, I want to emphasize, need this new cold war: Beijing,
because the economic consequences of the global downturn
in Asia are particularly harsh – and, politically,
potentially catastrophic for the regime. The downturn
could not have come at a more inauspicious time for the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP): just as the ongoing crisis
of the state-owned sector is reaching climactic proportions.
Without an external enemy to focus the hatred and frustration
of the average Chinese, and divert it away from its proper
target – the CCP – the economic crisis would
turn all that energetic hatred inward, and the whole system
would implode. As a means to pump up the economy, as well
as political support, a foreign threat to the very sovereignty
of the Chinese nation has the revivifying effect of a
sudden shot in the arm. The jolt of military spending
can reanimate, for a time, the corpse of a collectivist
economy, either "market socialist," or state-capitalist
– and, more importantly, direct those short-term
benefits to the politically well-connected.
THAT
MAGIC MOMENT
The
same principles operate here in the US. We need the same
kind of jolt, and for the same reasons. There is also
the psychological and political need for foreign enemies
– a necessary diversion away from the domestic problems,
such as high taxation and government intrusion, that threaten
the political status quo. We shall have a new cold war
because both sides require it, the Americans no
less than the Chinese. America is always in search of
enemies, it seems, and it is no wonder that it has found
another. This has been the abiding passion of many conservatives
of the "neo" variety since the end of the first cold war.
Having once allied with the Chinese Communists against
their "revisionist" former comrades in the Kremlin, right-wing
circles in the US are now embarked, in Orwellian fashion,
on a holy crusade against the "godless" Commies of Beijing.
Richard Nixon's opening to China was the beginning of
a long, and bizarre partnership, in which Chinese Communist
propaganda was indistinguishable from material that appeared
in, say, Commentary magazine, or National Review:
the Soviet Union was "the principal enemy of the world's
peoples," declared the Beijing Review, a line that
was faithfully echoed by the dwindling band of pro-Beijing
communists in the West, including the US. For a while
there, from the mid-70s up until the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the Committee
on the Present Danger and the Beijing-loyal Communist
Party (Marxist-Leninist) marched in lockstep. But,
alas, it was an ironic moment that, being too good to
be true, could not last.
CLUELESS
CONSERVATIVES
It
is typical of our hypocritical and generally clueless
"movement" conservatives that they would declare holy
war on Beijing as it moved away from Marxism-Leninism
and toward a much freer economic system, one which allows
for the potential of greater political diversity. But
our hardliners reinforce theirs. China's hardliners have
been handed a pretext for overruling and silencing their
moderate, or even pro-Western factional opponents. With
reformers already in retreat, and China generally withdrawing
from the radical privatization plans initiated by the
Communist party only a few years ago, the Hainan incident
is bound to become the rallying point and symbol of rising
Chinese nationalism, especially among the young –
a generation that could have and should have been pro-American.
A
RETROGRADE TREND
I
am not at all surprised at the news that the
Chinese government may put the captured American crew
on trial: the [London] Times posted a story
to that effect as I finished up this column, as if to
confirm my ominous sense of deja-vu. It is Gary Powers
all over again, only this time to the 24th
power. I have the uneasy feeling that we'll all soon be
digging bomb shelters in our back yards, while, over at
the local elementary school, they go through the "duck
and cover" air raid drills that gave life its weird, surreal
edge for those of us who grew up in the 1950s. To complete
the picture, even Russian spies are back in the news.
We are going back in time – not back to a golden
age, but regressing to a more primitive, less promising
era, a kind of intellectual and political ice age, in
which all foreign policy discussion is frozen in place,
Big Government is a military "necessity," and the prospects
for peace and liberty are dim indeed.
NO
GOOD ANSWER
Amid
the gloom, there are still glimmers of humor, however
dark. When told of the US claim that the inside of the
downed spy plane constituted sovereign US territory, and
that the Chinese had no right to enter it, a top Chinese
official asked: "Well then how is it that it landed in
China?" For the Bush administration, there can be no good
answer to that question.
