Schrijft: Door Eugene Robinson

Voor bijna vijf decennia, hebben de Verenigde Staten een beleid naar Cuba nagestreefd dat ongelooflijk zou kunnen worden beschreven stom.

Raúl Castro gaat geen Cuba in een free-market democratie omzetten. Maar hij geeft elke aanwijzing van zich het bewegen onderaan de weg die de leiding van China, naar het maken van zijn land tot free-market, éénpartijenautocracy heeft genomen. Dat is geen perfect resultaat, zoals getoond door recente gebeurtenissen in Tibet. Maar het is onmogelijk om te ontkennen dat de Chinese mensen veel van grotere persoonlijke vrijheid genieten dan zij, namelijk, 20 jaar geleden deden. Waarom zou Washington geen Havana om meer als Peking te worden willen aanmoedigen?

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China, it seems, has never seen a conflict in Africa it did not want to fun. For Beijing, bad governance sometimes means good business, to spite ‘western’ democracy.

The rejection of a shipment of weapons to Zimbabwe three weeks ago confirms China’s race to catch up in exploiting Africa’s potential. The Asian giant wants oil, gas, copper, iron, fish and timber. And it is sometimes ready to trade these with arms.

China’s propensity to get its timing wrong, especially with arms exports, is legendary. Darfur bleeds as China celebrates. In the eyes of ordinary citizens of Darfur, China is as much an enemy as the Arab junta in Khartoum. The junta, whose source of arms is China, has been accused of financing the Janjaweed militia that kills villagers in Darfur.

Arms trade

Aviation Week and Space Technology journal reports China has sold the Islamic government weapons and $100million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including 12 supersonic F-7 jets. Helicopter gunships reportedly used to terrorise civilians in Darfur may have been from China.

During their border war between 1998 and 2000, China was reportedly selling arms to Ethiopia and Eritrea. In January and February, Kenya bled as China reaped. There was an excuse of “wrong timing” for the legitimate business of exporting arms.

Zimbabwe moans as China enjoys an arms export boom. International Broadcast Bureau says China provided a radio-jamming device to Zimbabwe that allows the Robert Mugabe regime to block broadcasts of independent sources like Radio Africa from a military base outside Harare.

In 2000, China is reported to have swapped a shipment of small arms for eight tonnes of ivory. Those arms may be in the hands of ‘war veterans’ who terrorise civilians for change.

China does not mind inflaming conflicts provided there is a business opportunity. After all, the West exploited conflicts in Africa during classical imperialism.

Now it is China’s turn.

Three weeks ago China was caught with its pants around its heels trying to export arms to Zimbabwe to prop up a drowning Mugabe.

The Zimbabewean despot is drowning under an avalanche of pro-democracy votes, whose outcome he was too embarrassed to publish. Mugabe, a former liberator, could not believe he is no longer wanted. But even the vote recount that confirms he lost, even after rigging, has not opened the dictator’s eyes to the reality of rejection. Instead he is scheming to rig a runoff with his thrasher Morgan Tsvangarai, the Movement for Democratic Change presidential candidate.

Military generals who have always supported Mugabe are restless. Cushioning war veterans and generals against a dead economy as Mugabe has always done, won’t help.

A former Mugabe ally and Minister for Information Prof Jonathan Moyo, was quoted, as saying: “The generals around Mugabe experience (economic problems) in ways that are different. They have access to subsidised fuel. They have State vehicles, they get subsidised foreign currency so they are able to live in a fantasy world within hell for everyone else.”

Mugabe hangs on, and wants to move on, because he holds the instruments of power and violence. But it is dockworkers of South Africa who exposed China’s plot inflame abuse of human rights in Zimbabwe. The workers refused to unload weapons from a Chinese ship.

Reuters quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, saying: “To my knowledge, the Chinese company has decided to recall the ship and the relevant goods bound for Zimbabwe.”

The ‘relevant’ goods aboard the ship, An Yue Jiang were 77 tonnes of ammunition, mortars and rifle grenades. The ship arrived amid claims Mugabe is mobilising against the people. A number of these people have been brutalised in anticipation there could be a runoff.

Again China’s timing was wrong, as did the arrival of such goods in Kenya in January when the country was bleeding. But that is China, increasingly known for cutting deals with bad governments and arming them to subvert ‘western’ democracy.

China was a late starter in the arms trade, and especially its trade ties with Africa are nascent. But the haste to catch up, and beat the West at its own game, should not justify blatant complicity in human rights abuses, under the guise of official policy that de-links business from politics. But the business of selling arms is always political.

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About The Author: Farid Zakaria is Newsweek’s International editor and PostGlobal co-moderator. Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000, overseeing all Newsweek’s editions abroad. The magazine reaches an audience of 24 million worldwide. He also writes a regular column for Newsweek, which also appears in Newsweek International and fortnightly in the Washington Post. Starting this year, he will host a new foreign affairs show on CNN Worldwide.

“The Post-American World,” examines how the world will change as the U.S. slips further from its decades-long position of dominance. In The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria argues that the “rise of the rest” is the great story of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com: After the Iraq war, Fareed Zakaria argued in his Newsweek column that the world’s new organizing principle was pro-or anti-Americanism. But as the Iraq muddle drags on and China rises, the larger story of the post-Cold War era has come into sharp relief: We are not the center of the universe. It matters less that particular countries are pro- or anti-American than that the world is increasingly non-American. We need to get over ourselves.

Zakaria’s The Post-American World is about the “rise of the rest,” a catchy phrase from one of the most widely cited writers on foreign affairs. His prism is correct: We should focus more on the “rest,” even if America is still the premier superpower. But within this broad approach, Zakaria leaves policy-makers to figure out how to rank challenges and restore U.S. legitimacy.

Zakaria zooms in on Asia, especially India and China, which he uses as proxies for “the rest.” The first third of the book sets out his thesis — “For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth” — and the next third describes how China’s economy has doubled every eight years and how India may have the world’s third largest economy by 2040.

This year has brought a flood of books on Asia’s rise, including Bill Emmott’s Rivals and Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere. For the most part, they embody the “world is flat” thesis — lots of economic statistics, little geography. But geopolitics is about more than growth rates. It matters that China borders a dozen more countries than India does, isn’t hemmed in by a vast ocean and the world’s tallest mountains, has a loyal diaspora twice the size of India’s and enjoys a head start in Asian and African marketplaces. Zakaria’s chapters on China and India, though of equal length, should not connote equivalency, and all “the rest” cannot be happily lumped together. Does China’s example tell us what has gone wrong in Venezuela and Pakistan, and could go wrong in Egypt and Indonesia?

Ironically, the final third of The Post-American World, which focuses on us rather than on “the rest,” is the strongest. Zakaria argues that America’s world-beating economic vibrancy co-exists with a dysfunctional political system. “A ‘can-do’ country is now saddled with a ‘do-nothing’ political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving,” he writes. That makes it hard to devise a grand strategy, and Zakaria offers just a few “simple guidelines” on the need to set priorities, build global rules and be flexible. But in this non-American world, it may be too late to restore U.S. leadership. “The rest” is moving on…Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Description: One of our most distinguished thinkers argues that the “rise of the rest” is the great story of our time.

“This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” So begins Fareed Zakaria’s important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the “rise of the rest”—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world.

The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

See all Editorial Reviews

Notes: The Roots of Anti-Americanism

Barack Obama Likes Farid’s Book Too!

….and, Barack Obama Dialed My Number - And I am Not Even An American

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By: Dr. Megalommatis Muhammad
Shamsaddin (Pictured Below)
Going through the vast literature that is being daily produced with focus on the ongoing Democratic campaign, one gets the idea that rich conceptual thinking, innovative approaches, and nuance are all there.

Yet, the field where nuance seems to be permanently absent in America is the US foreign policy. This does not concern the present campaign only, but the situation has certainly been exacerbated over the past weeks. From the comical comments of Senator McCain about the US staying in Iraq another 100 years () to the hysterical reaction of Senator Clinton as regards to US ‘policy toward Iran‘ Ayatollahs, one gets the impression that the US foreign policy risks being entrusted in irrelevant hands precisely at a moment when the unipolar world of one and sole superpower seems about to end.

With the American economy in the middle of a serious crisis that can be tremendously deteriorated, with a great number of social issues unresolved, with a wide range of very preoccupying global problems (energy, food crisis, bio-fuel, environment), America’s foreign policy needs reconsideration, reassessment and re-evaluation from scratch.

The need for an immediate shift in the US foreign policy consists in the most urgent demand for America as it hinges on all other issues, energy, environment, commodities prices, economy, to name but a few.

In a rising multi-polar world where China, India, Russia, the Islamic World, Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Japan vindicate their position next to the US and the EU, America needs to think out-of-the-box, and devise a global strategy that will promote the US interests genuinely conceived.

To briefly comment on the aforementioned oversights, we would focus on US-Iraq issues, and ask the following:

• - What is the benefit of the US staying 100 years in Iraq, if the Christian Aramaeans who are the ethnic majority of Mesopotamia (Iraq is a false term that severely damages the US interests) are thus eradicated from their fatherland?


• - To whose profit is this sort of extended American presence in Iraq going to be?


• - Are Americans able to understand that the US-led invasion of Iraq turned to the unique advantage of the Islamic terrorists?


• - Is Senator Mac Cain mentally capable of envisioning an 100-year long American presence in Iraq that would not be to the profit of the terrorists? If yes, why doesn’t he publish an overview of this policy so that people be able to appreciate the pillars on which it may be based and be convinced about it? If not, for whom is he working in order to practically extend US damage (present policy has been clearly assessed as such thus far) due to the invasion of Iraq for another 100 years?

One can therefore understand that what matters in Iraq is not whether the US military stay there 3 months, 3 years or 3 centuries but whether US presence in Iraq can let Justice prevail, help repair damages caused to several ethno-religious groups over the years of colonialism and post-colonialism, and promote a culturally – educationally genuine, democratic nation building that has long been deliberately averted.

As we have entered, since 2001, in the period of the so-called War against the Islamic Terrorism (irrespective of the veracity or not of the events of September 11), America should consider whether the infantile US foreign policy has so far committed, in this new era, precisely the same errors that have been perpetrated in the period of the foremost waste of US national resources, namely the Cold War.

Absence of Nuance

To be more precise, we will circumspectly present two models of consideration. Evaluating America’s performance during, and contribution to, the Cold War (1950 – 1990), one could conclude that the US, by forging an alliance with Western European democracies, managed to contain and in time to cause the downfall of the Soviet regime.

This is the conventional thinking that does not take into consideration the resources and the time wasted, the loss in other fronts (Europe, Africa, China, Latin America), as well as the impact on the image and the perspectives of America. Even worse, this conventional way of thinking does not take into account the fact that the so-called collapse of the Soviet Union consists in an absolutely false myth; in real terms, it was a 10-year moratorium that ended up with the replacement of the former Soviet Union by Russia.

As conventional thinking is based on a quantitative approach, defenders of this interpretation would say that Russia is now much weaker (comparatively speaking) than Soviet Union in the mid-70s. This is absolutely wrong because America is similarly weaker now, as Europe, China, and to lesser extent India and Brazil have risen to significance.

This ominous way of conventional thinking is what publicly unseen but real and omnipotent centers of power promote in order to besot the vast masses of the Americans, divert them from global issues, and then effectively run them without them even understanding it.

According to an unconventional approach and interpretation, after WW II, all the administrations failed to understand that ’superpower’ (anytime anywhere) means above all ability to deal with nuance.

Of course, the Russians are quite the same. And perhaps, this is the reason for which the Cold War lasted that long. If France or England had been in the position of (as powerful as) America in 1945, the Soviet Empire would have collapsed in the early 60s.

America cannot be an ally for Colonial England and France

As a matter of fact, the lack of nuance made America (under either Democrats or Republicans) perceive itself as an ally of colonial empires that following their collapse managed to turn the colonial rule to postcolonial rule (which is just another form of colonial rule) under America’s nose - and the US started understanding this reality only in the 90s.

For Eisenhower or Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon, Carter or Reagan, the Search for Freedom could not have a positive exit if undertaken in alliance with the most vicious enemies of Freedom, France and England. The two colonial countries are not only guilty for Serial Crimes against the Mankind because of their deeds in Africa, Oceania, and Asia but also responsible for terrorism, oppression and cultural genocide practiced in Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Occitania, Corsica, Bask Land, Catalonia and French Polynesia.

The oppression in Corsica was not different from the oppression in Estonia. If Ukraine is now an independent country, so Scotland and Catalonia must. Today, in 2008, France cannot possibly dare demand of China to respect the rights of the Tibetans because France has long implemented far crueler practices of oppression in Brittany under the infamous emblem “In the streets it is prohibited to spit and to speak Breton.”

It would be a terrible political mistake to identify ‘anti-colonial’ with “Democrat”, ‘left’ or even ‘leftist’. Anti-colonialism is Americanism, the essence of the Declaration of Independence. It has to be undertaken / promoted / implemented by either Democrats or Republicans.

Lessons to take from the Cold War

Conventional thinking and traditional approach to foreign policy are responsible for the following oxymoron - all due to the lack of nuance:

Anti-colonial (by nature) America was the ally of the colonial powers England and France (1950 - 1990), while they promoted postcolonial structures in Africa and Asia, involving state run economies, totalitarian regimes, and at the same time a great dose of Anti-Americanism.

Was it not a form of American suicide?

In fact, the Cold War was in itself a terrible anti-American trickery of England and France. It helped the colonial powers ensure the implementation of the following projects for some decades:

1. America would waste an incredible amount of resources in the Cold War.

2. England and France would recover financially.

3. They would maintain the colonial control in most of their former colonies.

4. Soviet Union would also waste an incredible amount of resources.

5. Every liberation movement would be triggered by the Soviet Union, thus
contributing to a good public image of that monstrous realm for decades. It would however be without real effect as the Soviet system was never viable.

6. Americans would try to prevent ‘Soviet expansion,’ thus triggering anti- Americanism, and identifying themselves as the ‘bad’ guys!

It is all being currently reproduced in the equally fake War against Islamic Terrorism. By this I don’t imply that there are no Islamic extremists! On the contrary! Simply, the setup is fake. All the US has done against Islamic extremism thus far is just a mere unilateral damage of the US image, influence and potential allover the world. America rather contributed to severe worsening of the case.

It is high time for Obama to envision an American policy able to redress the current ordeal. The only way would be rethinking from scratch without endorsing anything in the world that contradicts America’s basic principles and values as defended by the Founding Fathers. Political realism is a monodrama for which the US has an expiry date.

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Experts say, the Clinton-McCain proposal will save Americans $28 on average(about half a tank of gas) — during the length of the summer. Clinton is airing an Ad in Indiana, in which she attacks Obama for refusing to pander to the stupidity of the “Working Class,” ……..or, is it the “IDIOT class.”

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN explains:

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

“Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.”

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