[PEN-L:6856] With Malice Toward None - American Style

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Apologize to China?

                        By William Buckley
                        Published May 12, 1999

                        The big mistake was to apologize.
                        It's OK to regret killing three
                Chinese in the embassy in Belgrade, but
                what is one apologizing for? It is as
                nonsensical as the words one hears on an
                airline. "We apologize for the late arrival."
                That gives off the sound of the pilot having
                come in late, or getting lost. You do not
                "apologize" if fog or dispatch instructions
                made you late, and you do not apologize if a
                bomber unintentionally bombed a foreign
                embassy.

                But then there was obviously something
                more afoot than the death of three Chinese.
                The Chinese government, it quickly
                transpired, was if not directly behind the
                anti-U.S. riot, (a) tolerant of it, and (b)
                pleased by it. We are talking about hundreds
                of thousands of people whose parents lived
                through the Cultural Revolution and may
                have been among those many thousands
                who told marauding Red Guards that the
                neighbor over there had been seen listening
                to a foreign broadcast, leading to public
                execution. The idea that the wretched
                Chinese, 35 million of whose progenitors
                paid for China's love affair with Maoism, are
                shocked by the accidental death of three
                journalists causes one to wonder.

                During the 1930s, Henry Wallace, as
                secretary of agriculture, ordered the
                slaughtering of pigs, in an effort to maintain
                the price of pork. There was a great uproar.
                Wallace countered with the only witticism
                ever attributed to him. "You'd think," he said
                about his critics, "they were all related."

                We couldn't, one supposes, really expect the
                president of the United States or even the
                secretary of state to say it, but someone
                "close to the White House" might usefully
                have been quoted: "Under strict
                understanding of anonymity, the source said
                that the unofficial government line is: What is
                Peking complaining about? If the Chinese
                are against random killing, they should be
                exercised about what Milosevic is doing. A
                second White House source said it would be
                helpful to the cause of human freedom if
                Peking organized a volunteer force to go to
                Kosovo to fight the aggressor. 'They could
                call it the Belgrade Memorial Expeditionary
                Force,' he said."

                We learn that the Chinese government is in
                fact continuing what the Cultural Revolution
                types did routinely. It was to picture the
                United States as an imperialist power
                insensitive to the rights of other people and
                prisoner to the capitalist/imperialist
                imperative to commit aggression. The Wall
                Street Journal reports that the identical thing
                is going on in Russia, with readers and
                viewers enjoined by state media to believe
                that NATO, led by the United States, is
                engaged in crude imperialism. Counter facts,
                of course, have not the faintest possibility of
                prevailing against the official line.

                Here is a true challenge to U.S. diplomacy.
                We have been courting the Chinese
                throughout the tenure of Mr. Clinton. If it
                were youth acting on their own impulses, we
                could ignore the event -- youth were born to
                be ignored, when they give way to political
                impulses. But this is not what is going on. We
                have not heard Official Peking raise its
                authoritative hand and say, "Stop!
                Comrades, the United States government
                has expressed its regret and will pay
                damages to the aggrieved families." We have
                to deduce that the Peking government thinks
                it productive to antagonize the United States.
                Which requires us to answer the question:
                Why?

                The protest might have been generated by
                some kind of nationalist scorn for defective
                Western intelligence. The CIA was using old
                maps, and should have been using
                up-to-date maps that marked with a big X the
                Chinese embassy. But then one thinks back
                on the line used by National Review 40 years
                ago: "The attempted assassination of
                Sukarno had all the appearances of a CIA
                operation. Everyone in the room was killed
                but Sukarno."

                In fact, any attempt at such finely calibrated
                bombing as to guarantee immunity is
                surrealistic. Wars inevitably swoop down on
                people who are not engaged in them, and
                while true regret can be expressed at
                incidental casualties, it is unreal to expect
                either that there will be none such in the
                future, or that a heavy obligation in
                conscience rests with the offender. The
                NATO alliance, led by Mr. Clinton, has a
                great deal to be achingly remorseful about,
                but none of it has to do with the object of
                concern of rioting young Chinese.

                Write to William Buckley at Universal
                Press Syndicate: 4520 Main St., Kansas
                City, Mo. 64111.