Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
The refrain which the Chinese used to chant in the Sixties and Seventies – “the United States imperialists are paper tigers” – seemed a bit unrealistic.
After all, the US had the most powerful nuclear weapons on earth. It also had a vast arsenal of conventional weapons, which could bomb any adversary into the Stone Age.
It was the Vietnam War that made one think that the Chinese had a point after all. Day after day, the US bombed and napalmed Vietnam. But instead of disappearing into the Stone Age, the Vietnamese introduced a new dimension into modern warfare. The Tet Offensive and other campaigns, coupled with Dien Bien Phu, became a metaphor for demystifying Western military superiority.
And now it is the Chinese, again, who have proved to the world that the armed might of a US-led Nato is more or less a paper tiger. If war is the pursuit of politics by different means, then Nato lost the Kosovo war the moment it bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
For the bombing of the embassy has demonstrated to the whole world that despite the availability of technology that is supposed to enable military planners to identify the face of an individual on the ground, by focusing on him with equipment from a satellite orbiting thousands of kilometres above the Earth, the wrong building can be targeted by a bomb.
That is, if one accepts the Nato story that the bombing of the embassy was a “mistake”, caused by the use of a map that was four years “out of date”. (I must say I am personally inclined to believe this, for I have often consulted the CIA Factbook on the Internet, only to find that it needs some serious updating.)
You ask, how can obsolete material be used by intelligence services that absorb so much money and never tire of blowing their own horns? Your guess is as good as mine: perhaps the disease known as “built-in obsolescence” has moved from machines to men.
Whichever way you look at it, the matter is a thorough disgrace. How can the US, which has, quite properly, received the warm sympathy of the world whenever its own diplomatic missions have been subjected to attacks, do something like this?
Even if the bombing of the Chinese embassy was truly a mistake, and not a deliberate act as the Chinese seem to believe, it demonstrates a carelessness that is as inexcusable as a deliberate act of criminality would have been. The point is that the Nato bombing has been going on for a whole month now, during which several wrong targets have been hit. A bus here, a train there, a house instead of a military barracks.
After each mistake, Nato says, “We never target civilian installations.” Yet a television studio was hit. Such mistakes had already exposed the Nato bombing as a callous operation that obeyed few rules. Against that background, one would have thought that any target situated within a civilian area would either be totally spared, in case the surrounding area were hit, or pored over with meticulous care to eliminate the possibility of a mistake.
The cumulative effect of the “mistakes” Nato has been making is to make the world wonder, if this is the effect of a Nato military action against Yugoslavia that was conceived with a humanitarian objective in mind, what would have happened had the Nato objective been to wage a war of aggression?
I started off by saying that war is the pursuit of politics by different means. If that is true, then Nato is fast losing the war, and will lose it in an even more devastating manner if it manages to level Yugoslavia to the ground. Yugoslavia is not one of the world’s richest countries. Marshal Josip Broz Tito built it up out of very little, waging a heroic political struggle against both the Soviet empire and the West.
Now all Yugoslavia’s bridges and factories, roads and railways are being levelled to the ground because Tito is dead and the country has had the bad luck of falling into the hands of an obstinate and misguided leader called Slobodan Milosevic. And half-a-million of the Kosovo people whom Nato was going to save from the savagery of Milosevic are dispersed into refugee camps, suffering, suffering, suffering – and all under the glare of the world’s television cameras.
But maybe Nato hasn’t in fact lost any political war because Nato doesn’t give a toss about world opinion. Maybe Nato went into Yugoslavia merely to demonstrate to the world that it intends to use its tremendous firepower against whoever goes against its wishes. Maybe the real target is actually Russia, which has to be taught, albeit indirectly, that it is no longer a world power.
If that is the case, then the attack on the Chinese embassy would need to have been deliberate. And it would make sense. For then Nato would have told both Russia and China: “You guys think that because you’ve got the veto in the United Nations Security Council you’re somebody? Well, you go take that veto and stuff it. And if you don’t like that, you come and tell us just what you’re gonna do about it!”
You see, the trouble with paper tigers is that they don’t know they have in-grown nails that can cripple their feet. So they can trample over everything they see. Until …