See Dick Sleep

Some people have professed concern that Vice President Cheney has been photographed asleep in public twice in recent weeks, first at Hu Jintao’s briefing during the summit in Washington, and most recently during a staff meeting.

It seems that the Vice President himself, along with his China policy, is slipping into torpor.

That’s good.

For now China policy appears firmly in the hands of the State Department.

Perhaps the Vice President’s feared and secretive foreign policy cabal had decided that China was too big a mouthful to chew on for an administration already choking on Iraq but still declaring its determination to gorge itself on Iran.

But never count Big Time out.

Diminished capacity is no guarantee of reduced lethality.

When you look at Mr. Cheney, he more and more resembles Ed Woods’ muse and go-to guy for zombie roles, Tor Johnson.


It is easy to imagine his team employing the newest developments in re-animation technology to awaken Mr. Cheney and send him off with an encouraging slap on the rump to devour the brains of the living at the State Department.

We don’t want that.

Sleep, Dick, sleep.

Foggy Bottom in the Driver's Seat on China Policy

In significant testimony before the House International Relations Committee on May 11, 2006, Robert Zoellick clarified that the American snub of Taiwan president Chen Shuibian—shunted off to remote US transit points en route to South America--was no accident.

He also made it clear that expectations and priorities of the US State Department are driving US policy toward Taiwan, something that is not likely to please fans of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

From the Taipei Times:

In answers to questions about Chen, Zoellick seemed to say that the limits placed on the president -- he was offered stopovers only in Anchorage, Alaska, or Honoloulu, Hawaii -- were in retaliation for what the US administration considers Chen's reneging on the so-called "five-noes" promises he made in his two inauguration addresses, along with his efforts to fight Washington's "one-China" policy.

The five noes policy was a promise by Chen to avoid taking steps toward independence so long as the PRC did not use force to attempt to achieve unification. One pillar of the policy was a pledge not to abolish the National Unification Council.

However, Chen did exactly that.

Per Wikipedia:

On 27 February 2006 Chen dismantled the National Unification Council saying it "will cease functioning and the budget no longer be appropriated", effectively breaking the promises made in 2000. In the week prior, he told U.S. Congressman Rob Simmons that the Council and Guidelines were "absurd products of an absurd era.”

Probably the key element in the Wikipedia entry comes next:

Chen has revealed he planned to draft a new constitution, which many conjectured would be pro-separatist, before he stepped down in 2008.

Taiwan independence is geopolitical dynamite, and the US government doesn’t want the Taiwan government pursuing it without close direction from Washington.

Chen understandably feels that Taiwan independence is central to his political identity and covenant with his followers, and he has an obligation and desire to pursue it, and not soft-pedal it in deference to the priorities of the United States.

He probably also has the somewhat cynical realization that if he pushes for Taiwan independence, the US will be unable to abandon Taiwan.

This idea that the US is to a certain degree hostage to Taiwan’s policy on independence, which is in turn an existential matter in DPP politics, would account for Washington’s asperity in its response to Chen’s desire for welcoming, higher profile transit privileges.

So Chen’s getting slapped around a bit.

China watchers will be very interested by Zoellick’s desire to avoid confrontation with China over Taiwan at this time. Again from the Taipei Times:

At another point, as Zoellick was giving an animated defense of the US transit action, he seemed to link it with the fear that Chen's recent actions could provoke a war in the Taiwan Strait between the US and China.

"There are big stakes here where lives could be lost," he said.

"This is the balance ... we want to be supportive of Taiwan while not encouraging those that try to move toward independence. Because let me be very clear: independence means war. And that means American soldiers ..." he said before being interrupted by a questioner.

Admirable views, and ones which I agree with, but seemingly totally out of step with the inexorable triumphalism practiced by the Bush/Cheney administration.

To imply that anxiety over the loss of American lives might be dissuading America from its crusade to bring God’s gift of freedom to the world—or indicate to the Chicoms that we are anything less than eager to nuke it out with them over the Taiwan Strait--is close to political heresy.

This situation implies that the State Department is firmly in control of China policy, at least for the time being, and Zoellick—fresh from his Darfur triumph--is at the heart of it.

Where's the Anger?

You'd think that a president flat on his back in the polls would find time for some righteous panda-baiting.

But in two cases--Chen Shuibian's hegirah of humiliation and the most recent round of jawboning on the RMB--Washington has passed on two chances for some feel-good, base-pleasing, high-profile China-bashing.

It is interesting to speculate what foreign policy objective compels President Bush forgo the pleasure of whacking the panda across the snout, at least rhetorically, after his antics during Hu Jintao's visit and the largely successful effort to steal Hu's thunder in Africa with the Darfur peace settlement.

It is difficult to believe that Washington's restraint is reward for expected Chinese cooperation on Iran at the UN. But what else could it be?

The Darfur Gambit: Countering China While Winning Hearts, Minds, and Wallets in Africa

It appears to me that the sudden Darfur settlement has little to do with the moral challenge of confronting genocide, aroused public opinion, or even the personal and political magnetism of George Clooney…

…and everything to do with the Bush administration’s desire to one-up a certain pasty Oriental potentate.

It is surely no coincidence that the hasty agreement rushed to conclusion by Robert Zoellick of the US and Hilary Benn of the UK provided a spectacular riposte to Hu Jintao’s high-profile, politically charged trip to Africa.

I also have little doubt that the Darfur master stroke was the culmination of a painstakingly choreographed campaign to belittle both Hu and China as unworthy pretenders to power parity with the United States on the world stage.

It started with Hu’s non-state visit to Washington, with the planned and ostensibly unplanned slights, the sleeve-tugging, the screaming protester miraculously unsilenced by the Secret Service, and the ostentatious snoozing by Dick Cheney during Hu’s briefing.

It concluded with the Darfur settlement, trumpeted throughout the world just as Hu was wrapping up his worldwide trip, contrasting American responsible diplomacy in the Third World with China’s oil-grubbing moral turpitude.

The haste in which the flawed Darfur agreement was wrapped up also indicates that political objectives, rather than genuine policy or humanitarian goals, were at stake.

Two years of protracted negotiations under the auspices of the African Union were wrapped up in less than a week of brisk arm-twisting by Zoellick and Benn. It is interesting to speculate what special superpowers of logic and persuasion these First World Solomons could bring to bear in such a short period of time.

Per the Sudan Tribune:

The rebels said only the United States had the power to win concessions from Sudan’s government, though it was unclear what bargaining chips were being used by Washington…

I don’t think I’m out of line in suggesting that financial inducements, perhaps of a personal as well as a government-to-government and government-to-rebel nature, played a role in the sudden acceptance by two of the parties (out of four) of the four pages of US-proposed revisions to the AU-brokered 86-page draft agreement.

Two of the three rebel groups refused to sign the agreement, something that Zoellick, the western press, and humanitarian organizations professed to shrug off. The resistance of the rebels might have been due to issues of principles or because the gravy train of concessions simply wasn’t piled high enough.

Well, there’s always somebody ready to make a deal :

The Nur faction walked out of negotiations in the Nigerian capital before dawn Friday, as had another rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement.

…

But one of Nur’s top negotiators, Abdulrahman Moussa, said he was walking out on Nur to form his own Front for Liberation and Renaissance. He said was taking half Nur’s camp with him and they supported the peace agreement.

Nur "is not compromising and I don’t think he is seeking peace, especially after the generous offer from Zoellick," Moussa said.

Either way, one would think that negotiations devoted to tying up these loose ends would have been conducted more vigorously and responsibly if the desire to upstage Hu Jintao on the eve of his departure for China had not been paramount.

From partial press reports, it appears that the US-brokered compromise on the key bone of contention—the number of rebel troops to be integrated into the national army—wasn’t even accepted by the Sudan government. Instead of disagreeing, as we say, they agreed to disagree.

No surprise that the adjective “flawed” appears not infrequently in analyses of the deal. From the Reuters article “Darfur conflict seen continuing despite peace deal” :

Many analysts doubt the sincerity of the government, which holds the key to implementing the deal, because Khartoum has undermined so many agreements in the past.

Furthermore, the Sudan regime and its lethal Janjaweed militias seem to be getting a free pass: no sanctions, no war crimes, no commission of national reconciliation, no hard looks in the UN canteen etc. Instead, if the deal holds, Khartoum gets to hand off the burden of pacifying, securing, rebuilding, and developing Darfur to a well-heeled crowd of First-World troops and do-gooders. Not a particularly onerous outcome, in my book.

The kid-glove treatment meted out to the Sudan regime is something that the Western press and opinion have been remarkably silent about.

But the Bush administration’s stance of moral hostility and righteous confrontation toward Khartoum--as contrasted with the amoral and mercantilist Chinese position--has always been vastly overstated.

An eye-opening article in the November 3, 2004 Sudan Tribune stated: Sudan Prayed for Bush Re-election .

Let’s repeat that.

Sudan Prayed for Bush Re-election.

Because Clinton had been—and it was feared Kerry would be—too aggressive in applying sanctions to Sudan. The article also contains the interesting nugget that Sudan’s strongman, in addition to harboring bin-Laden, supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait—a rogue-state two-fer distinction I believe Sudan only shared with Taliban Afghanistan.

As I argued in a previous post , the Bush administration has willingly engaged with Sudan, not necessarily because of its vital assistance in the war on terror, but because Washington was keen to counter Chinese influence and access in that country. And of course, there’s oil there.

In this context, China can at least congratulate itself on keeping its powder dry and ignoring calls from the Bush administration, Nicholas Kristof, and outraged never-againers to sanction Sudan in the UN. Any such action would have merely alienated Sudan, and with no practical benefit.

John Bolton’s soft-pedaling of sanctions at the UN—limiting the list of Sudan bad guys to four irrelevant second bananas--indicates that the real action on Darfur was, as it has been for the last two years, in the African Union negotiations—which the US intended to butt in on anyway.

That’s another indication to me that the Darfur settlement was part of a carefully thought-out program both to belittle and one-up Hu Jintao during his world tour, and also to puncture Chinese pretensions to challenging the US for a leadership role in the Third World.

How successful will America’s new focus on countering China be?

The vindictive aspect of the campaign—the desire to publicly humiliate Hu and China—is of a piece with Bush’s well-documented knee jerk hostility to leaders and countries that do not pay him sufficient tribute as the world’s moral and military hegemon, usually expressed in impulsive, self-defeating actions like the fiasco of Hu’s Washington visit.

Symbolically kicking sand in Hu Jintao’s face may have satisfied President Bush’s tender ego and also provided some political haven from the storm of bad news battering his administration and poll standings.

The PR and spin gods seem to be smiling on the Bush administration once again after a long absence.

The most amusing element of this story has been the credulous cheerleading of the western press and the humanitarian organizations. A mishmash agreement that lets the Khartoum regime off scot-free is greeted with such hosannas that one must believe there is a deep hunger after Iraq for the West to seize the moral ground, vis a vis China at least, regardless of the facts.

Human Rights Watch's statement is all of a piece. From Chinese president ends oil safari, to mixed reactions:

But angry critics have accused Beijing of doing business with undemocratic regimes, notably Sudan, an oil-rich nation that has for several decades used oil revenues to wage deadly successive wars on dissent.

"When Western governments try to use economic pressure to secure human rights improvements, China's no-strings rule gives dictators the means to resist," Human Rights Watch's executive director Richard Roth said recently.

It is to laugh. The Sudan regime is considerably richer and stronger and legitimate today, but little thanks to China. More thanks to Washington and its desire to counter Beijing in Africa.

But the painstaking planning and successful execution—and the focus on the Third World--argues that the overarching strategy was planned by the State Department and not the White House press office or Dick Cheney’s cabal, and has a chance of enduring, just as the State Department’s anti-Russian initiatives have persisted and flourished.

The welcome news for Africa may very well be…

Checkbook diplomacy is back, baby!

American policy seems to be moving away from the coercive insistence on US strategic priorities and moral imperatives justified by our self-assumed leadership role in the Global War on Terror.

We haven’t abandoned American unilateralism and returned to the flabby bosom of the UN, but at least the United States is now competing for the attention of Third World states, instead of merely demanding and compelling it.

African states can look forward to a profitable cycle of playing off Beijing against Washington.

All I can say is, it’s better than people shooting at each other.

And if the rickety Darfur agreement survives, we’ll be grateful for that, too.

The Thousand Days

Liberals groan at the thought of another 1000 days under the reign of George W. Bush.

China, on the other hand, probably considers that 1000 days a precious, slowly closing window of opportunity.

China has 1000 days to promote cautious and self-serving multi-lateralism as an alternative to detested Bush administration unilateralism.

China has 1000 days to promote the establishment of a nuclear, friendly Iran as a counterweight to US influence in the Gulf.

Currently, the world community appears to be unwilling to frame the Iran debate in any terms that will give the Bush administration any opportunity to claim a UN, diplomatic, or moral mandate for military action or even a position of leadership against Teheran.

And with good reason.

Too much has been revealed of the bankrupt intellectual and practical foundations of the Bush preventive war doctrine, the Bush administration’s incapacity for self-examination and self-correction, and its breathtaking mendacity and arrogance in furthering its foreign policy agenda for the world to trust President Bush’s word or his judgment.

Add to that the President’s dismal political ratings, and reports that his handlers believe that confrontation with Iran is the best way to get his poll numbers up.

Ratchet up the rhetoric against Iran too much, and President Bush might take the bit in his teeth again and drag the world into another foreign policy debacle.

As somebody said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well…won’t get fooled again.”

What we see now is a grudging containment of the Bush presidency by a bizarre constellation of allies and enemies.

The world community will be happy to close the books on the Bush administration.

Once George W. Bush leaves the White House, the new president, be it Clinton, McCain, Allen, or whoever, will have the opportunity to renew the natural covenant between the United States and the prosperous world powers.

The hearts of the Europeans and Japanese do not flutter ecstatically at the idea of Hu Jintao serving as the spokesperson for the global consensus against reckless US adventurism—and they do not look kindly upon Iran’s pretensions to becoming a regional nuclear power.

In the forthcoming honeymoon, they might even let the new US president bomb Iran to his or her heart’s content—or, what’s more likely, back up Washington’s bellicosity with real sanctions and ostracization--as a sort of friendly bouquet welcoming America back to its position of leadership on the world stage.

But not yet.

Now is the time, with America sidelined, that China can really do something for Iran.

“Something” means stalling UN efforts to sanction Iran, diluting the atmosphere of crisis, and making Iran’s surreptitious march toward a nuclear weapons program appear more of a normal, ongoing element in our stress-filled world.

Currently, the Chinese have the best of both worlds.

Either Iran emerges from the current tension thanking China for making the world grit its teeth and accept Teheran’s careful crawfishing toward a nuclear weapons program as part of the global status quo…

…or the Bush administration bombs the stuffing out of Iran and the Middle East remains violently hostile to the United States for a generation.

I can’t say I blame China too much. After all, turnabout is fair play.

As Robert Dreyfuss wrote in The American Prospect, the Cheney view on foreign policy which his minions so ruthlessly and effectively imposed not only on President Bush but on the entire US foreign policy and intelligence establishment is based on a zero sum calculation against China in the Middle East.

As in Occupy Iraq: we win, Chinese lose. On to Iran.

Dreyfuss writes:

Two of the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney's Asia hands, Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney's foreign policy--which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East--can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP's broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China.

...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China's appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China's role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel's Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran.

It is more than a little ironic that Cheney’s headlong pursuit of an anti-China policy in the Middle East has given China, Iran, and their allies and sympathizers 1000 precious days of breathing space before America can resume its position of active world leadership and revive the alliance of powers seeking to limit China’s economic, political, and military reach.

King of the Hill?

King of the Hill?

…the outlines of China’s challenge to the United States are already beginning to take shape, and they are nothing less than sweeping.

What [China] proposes as a replacement for the status quo is sometimes called tian xia, or under the heavens. It is an obscure sounding but remarkably simple scheme that places all the nations of the world in a rules-based system that is not strictly egalitarian but would be governed by rules. Note to the United States: there is no room for a global hegemony.

As it evolves on a spectrum somewhere between Nazi Germany and contemporary Scandinavia, China will use its growing muscle in trade and finance to draw developing countries, particularly authoritarian ones attracted by its corporatist capitalism, into its embrace.

So when do the masks drop? When does the challenge become explicit?

Howard French, Letter from China: Is It a Peaceful Rise? US Shouldn’t Bet On It, Herald Tribune, April 21, 2006

Perhaps future historians will regard Hu Jintao’s speech in Nigeria on April 26, 2006 as the day China showed the cloven hoof, and reintroduced the world to bipolar, balance-of-power politics.

China wants a "strategic partnership" with Africa, President Hu Jintao said on Thursday, seeking to add a new political dimension to a blossoming economic romance.

In a speech to Nigerian lawmakers, Hu underlined China's respect for African "independence and sovereignty," which analysts said was a deliberate contrast with the United States' interventionist diplomacy under George W. Bush.

Tom Ashby, China Seeks “Strategic Partnership” with Africa, Reuters

His message is that we’ve probably moved beyond globalization as panacea thanks to the Bush administration’s polarizing zero sum politics and creeping confrontation with China.

Hu is also declaring we’ve moved beyond the rhetoric of the “world’s only superpower” thanks to the worldwide unpopularity of the Bush administration and the United States following our failure in Iraq.

The United States and UK haven’t gotten the memo. Either that, or they got it and are pretending they didn’t read it. They still act on the assumption that the world has reconciled itself to America’s place on top of a global moral and military hierarchy, and the Bush administration can dictate the terms of China’s participation in the world order.

But the idea that America serves as the world’s unquestioned arbiter of proper national behavior has fallen victim to America’s weakened moral and military position.

In retrospect, the rather pathetic farce of Hu Jintao’s reception in Washington, its non-state visit-lunch-only character, with its screaming protester miraculously admitted onto the White House lawn, with the sleeve-tugging, and the snoozing, looks more and more like an intentional and feckless attempt to assert America’s pre-eminence and China’s second-tier status.

But superpower status is not granted, it is earned—or even seized--and Hu took an important step in his direction with his Nigeria speech.

The reportage clearly communicates the hunger of third world countries for an alternative to brusque and unilateral American leadership, and nostalgia for the good old days of the Cold War, when fear of Soviet inroads modified and moderated US behavior and gave small states aid and alignment options. Again from Reuters:

Analysts said Hu's offer of an alternative to the United States' prescriptive foreign policy and "War on Terror" would be welcomed by African leaders.

"China is saying it wants to build a new world order based on consensus and tolerance, not the clash of civilizations," said former foreign minister Bola Akinyemi.

"It is bound to resonate in Africa, where we have 900 years of coexistence between Christianity, Islam and traditional religions."

It is a perverse credit to the current administration that only Bush’s unique combination of folly, incompetence, and cruelty could have made it possible for a rickety Communist state with an out-of-control economy to even think of defying US pretensions to world hegemony.

It’s another clear sign that we’re not in a post 9/11 world anymore. We’re in a post-Iraq world.

How long we stay in this particular world depends on the nature and quality of Bush’s response.

Bush is famously vindictive and short-sighted, especially when his jealously-guarded position and prerogatives as the world’s supreme law-giver are questioned.

Will the US response be petty and self-defeating?

Or will we mount an effective and attractive challenge to China in the battle for Third-World hearts and minds?

The answer will be important to America’s place in the world—and position on top of the heap—in this century.

P.S. The reference to "tianxia" in Howard French's quote strikes me as a reference to a passage in Zhang Yimou's film "The Emperor and the Assassin". One of the conspirators undermines Jin Ke's resolve to kill Qin Shih Huang by writing the characters "tian xia" in the sand. In Zhang's reading, Jin Ke realizes that the emperor has the power to unite the feudal states and turn China into a genuine moral actor "under heaven", instead of a collection of squabbling, self-centered princes and warlords. So Jin doesn't kill the emperor. That's not the way Sima Qian tells it (Jin Ke suffers a cartographic malfunction and his wholehearted attempt to assassinate the emperor fails). Zhang attracted a good amount of unfavorable comment for his variation on this famous Chinese historical theme, since the Qin Emperor is generally viewed as a stand-in for Mao Zedong. To some, Zhang seemed to be excusing Mao's excesses because he had unified the country and elevated it to the status of a world power.

Something Missing from the Solomon Islands Story

Thanks to EastSouthWestNorth for the link

When the Chinatown in a South Pacific nation is burned to the ground, allegations fly that the Republic of China funneled money into the political process and corrupted the elections, the overseas Chinese flee the country and turn to the ambassador of the People’s Republic of China for protection and evacuation assistance, it attracts the China watcher’s attention.

There’s something else, something important missing from most of the news stories, however—a discussion of the role of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and its interactions with Solomon Islands political strongman and magnet for corruption charges Sir Allen Kemakeza and his protégé Snyder Rini.

Smoldering indigenous resentment of Chinese economic penetration, and reckless competition between Beijing and Taipei for influence in the South Pacific, both undoubtedly played significant roles in the incident.

The Solomon Islands is one of 25 countries that recognize Taipei, providing this impoverished nation with financial opportunities and dangers otherwise beyond its scope.

A major source of Sir Allen Kemakeza’s alleged graft during his term as Prime Minister was his use of a compensation fund for victims of previous ethnic conflicts as his personal piggy bank in 2001 and 2002.

The fund was underwritten by the Taiwan Ex-Im Bank, and Kemakeza was allowed to control it. That provenance, and the fact that Kemakeza and his secretary received the two largest payouts from the account, lead one to speculate it was set up by the Taiwanese government to serve as his private slush fund.

But that wasn’t all.

Earlier this year, the head of the Solomon Islands’ Labor Party detailed accusations that the Prime Minister’s office used covert “Special Project Funds” from the ROC to bribe politicians:

Tuhanuku said he had uncovered the details of the scheme from information gathered from outgoing members of parliament and intending candidates in this year’s general election.

"Most of them are happy to boast about how easy it is to get money from Taiwan through the prime minister," he said.

He said when put side-by-side the arrangements and circumstances surrounding the funding of these special projects were strikingly similar in detail.

"Together they reveal a pattern of events that establishes a clear connection between the payment of monies by Taiwan and various political maneuverings by the Prime Minister," Tuhanuku said. "What it amounts to is that Taiwan is running a shadow aid program that is being used to corrupt our political processes and the prime minister is fully colluding with them."

…

"The request is processed and bingo! Taiwan’s dirty money comes flooding forward for the politician or candidate of the prime minister’s choice," he said yesterday.

Amusingly, Kamekeza had shown himself perfectly willing to yank Taiwan’s chain, despite (or because) of Taiwan’s desperate, no-holds-barred attempt to retain diplomatic relations with the Solomon Islands.

In a documentary that described non-swimmer Chen Shuibian’s taking his first ever ocean plunge ever during his state visit to the Solomons in order to demonstrate Taiwan’s interest in the archipelago as a surf-tourism destination, Kamekeza had this to say in 2005 about the People’s Republic of China’s courtship of his regime:

PRIME MINISTER KEMAKEZA: The approached me and my ministers, my officers at the international conferences for bilateral discussion.

CAMPBELL: But there could be a time when the Solomon’s could switch recognition?

PRIME MINISTER KEMAKEZA: Maybe. I cannot predict the future.

Ouch!

The People’s Republic of China escaped political damage in the Solomon Islands crisis, presumably not because of any greater probity—it recently engaged in a successful checkbook slugfest with Taiwan over Vanuatu—but because the Solomon Islands was still too busy nursing dry the Taipei teat to turn its attention to Beijing.

Kemakeza’s chosen successor, Snyder Rini, had the further China connection of belonging to the Association of Independent Members of Parliament (AIM), a political organization apparently under the thumb of its president, “local naturalised Chinese business tycoon” Sir Thomas Chan.

During the run-up to the vote for Prime Minister, Chan apparently grabbed two independent MPs arriving at the airport and attempted to detain them at his Honiara Hotel—which also served as Rini’s campaign headquarters-- for some impromptu coalition building before they were extracted with no little difficulty.

The result of all these alleged shenanigans was that, even though an apparent majority of reform MPs had been returned in this year’s elections, they somehow turned around and voted Rini into power as Prime Minister.

The catastrophic riots of April 16 and 17, 2006 were the result. Not unexpectedly, Chinese interests, regardless of their connection to Taiwan, were targeted and Chan’s Honiara Hotel was torched.

But one interesting element of the story is the setback Australia suffered executing its antipodean version of the global war on terror.

As a useful article in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian informs us, John Howard took seriously his appointment by George Bush as “sheriff” in Southeast Asia.

When the Solomon Islands sank into ethnic and factional strife in 2002 and Kamekeza called on Australia for help, Canberra abandoned its post-colonial aversion to intervention in the affairs of the neighboring states. There was talk of the dangerous vacuum a failed state in the region would create. What if the next domino to fall were…Papua New Guinea?

Thereupon, the Howard government dispatched RAMSI—the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands—force of about 2000 police and soldiers to restore order.

Though Australian personnel made up the bulk of the force, in the spirit of President Bush’s cry of “What about Poland? Don’t forget Poland”, let’s give a shout out to all the members of the mini-coalition: New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Samoa, Vanuatu and Nauru.

The term “shock and awe” was even employed, proudly and approvingly, as RAMSI forces swept the islands to disarm warlords and confiscate weapons.

For a while it looked like Australia had found the sweet spot in the post-9/11 world of military intervention.

The Solomon Islands is a rough, corrupt place and the appearance of a powerful, prosperous “honest broker” to take law and order in hand was apparently welcomed at first. Local troublemakers dispersed and the RAMSI forces could soon be drawn down to a few hundred people.

But according to a left-wing regional website—and apparently the Solomon Island’s own bishop--Australia might have avoided an Iraq quagmire but found itself in something like Haiti: an impoverished, factionalized nation cracking along class lines, where the temptation for the occupier to simplify matters by choosing sides may have proven too strong:

Writing in the January 18 Solomon Star newspaper, Solomons Anglican Bishop Terry Brown, who had initially supported the RAMSI intervention, observed that “there is a major disparity between RAMSI’s rhetoric of staying for ten to 15 years in the Solomons, bringing peace and prosperity, and the reality of re-emerging violence, increasing poverty and unemployment, high school fees, a downward-spiralling economy, higher inflation and lower incomes, declining medical services, ongoing corruption in government ministries, lack of planning and implementation of how Solomon Islanders will competently run all parts of their own government, crumbling infrastructure, millions and millions of RAMSI funds spent on Australians with the money going back to Australia with minimum cash benefit for Solomon Islanders, continued centralizing of everything in Honiara, etc.”

Doug Lorimer, Solomon Islands: Howard Props Up Corrupt Regime, Green Left Weekly, April 26, 2006

The Solomon Islands had been run by allegedly corrupt bastards, one of whom, Kemakeza, had invited the RAMSI forces in. Corruption had not been cleared up while the economy continued to limp along and government officials continued to enrich themselves and their friends. RAMSI ignored the issues of graft and entrenched power, and settled into the role of the bored and not particularly friendly cop on the block.

From David Stanley’s South Pacific Travel Blog:

RAMSI appeared to be propping up the Kemakeza government through military and economic aid. The Australian High Commission even pressured opposition politicians like Fred Fono to support Kemakeza, to give the appearance of stability so European Union aid money would be released.

The Australian RAMSI contingent was unpopular among Honiara residents. They appeared sullen and hostile, wouldn't say hello on the street, sped around in official vehicles without regard for other traffic, refused to allow their helicopters and planes to be used for humanitarian purposes, and hung out among themselves in expensive Chinese restaurants, most of which were burned down last week. The RAMSI presence led to a sharp jump in rental accommodation prices and an increase in prostitution.

Stanley also makes the very interesting allegation that the deciding factor in the RAMSI intervention was that Kemakeza had been shopping his country’s security needs to Indonesia as well as Australia. This consideration may have compelled Australia to be sensitive and flexible in response to Kemakeza’s priorities, in order to ensure that peace and progress in the Solomon Islands would remain part of the white man’s glorious burden and not get outsourced to Jakarta instead.

With such a background—and Kemakeza’s bargaining power--it would be understandable if the invitation to Australia to intervene would include the understanding that any aggressive law enforcement would be directed at Kemakeza’s enemies and not at his party.

This April the parliament elected the current allegedly corrupt bastard, Snyder Rini (Kemakeza’s anointed successor and ex-Finance Minister), as Prime Minister amid allegations that he had obtained money from the local Chinese businessmen (and they perhaps had received the money from the ROC) in order to buy the votes of opposition MPs—some of whom had been elected on a reformist ticket.

The capital city exploded and, as we all know, Chinatown got burned to the ground as punishment for colluding in Rini’s re-election.

But RAMSI was there taking the heat as well as it secured the parliament building and provided protection to Snyder Rini. Again, from David Stanley’s blog:

But the spark which actually ignited the rioting and led to the burning of numerous Chinese businesses scattered around the capital was tear gas fired by Australian members of RAMSI into a restive but still non-violent crowd waiting for answers outside the parliament building in Honiara. Later, RAMSI and local police they had trained stood by on the left bank of the Mataniko River and took no action as a mob of around 1,000 Solomon Islanders looted and burned Chinatown on the river's right bank. Honiara's Chinese community, a large majority of whom took no part in the corruption and exploitation practiced by a few of their fellows, was forced to flee.

RAMSI forces were treated roughly for their role in defending Rini and his discredited order, suffering injuries though thankfully no fatalities in the fracas, and having their vehicles burned.

What fueled the angry outburst in Honiara was something new and sad: the dangerous intersection of foreign money, muscle, and diplomacy.

Solomon Islanders felt they were losing control of their political as well as economic destiny.

From the Green Left Weekly:

“This is worse than the ethnic crisis last time”, Solomon Islands Labour Party leader and former MP Joses Tuhanuku told the Australian. He said that “people feel they have lost control of their country” and that “the Solomon Islands is no longer in the hands of Solomon Islanders, it is now in the hands of the Chinese”, who “control the economic life of the country, and now they are working on taking over the political life of the country”.

The crisis illustrates the perils of intervention, in their military and monetary forms.

On the Australian side, it shows how easy it is for foreign powers embedded in near-failed states to give up on the very difficult job of nation-building and backslide to the easier and lazier habits of occupation and factional politics.

It also shows how rapidly resentment of a foreign military presence, no matter how benign, can serve as a rallying point for a political movement…and inflict collateral damage on a largely innocent non-indigenous population.

On the Taiwan side, it also demonstrates how foreign money, disbursed carelessly, cynically, and with lax controls, can corrupt and perhaps even overwhelm the political system of a small country.

The Solomons experienced the worst of both worlds, afflicted by the recklessness of local political assets confident they had Chinese money (in this case from the ROC) and first-world muscle (RAMSI) backing them up.

Thanks to the one-night spasm of violence, the Solomon Islands’ commercial and investment base has been destroyed and it is now unfortunately another decade behind in its desperate struggle to regain the 1970s levels of personal income and services it enjoyed at independence.

That’s a disaster, and should stand as another object lesson of the dangers of applying the big money and the big guns to fragile nations and societies.

Of course, that’s not the takeaway for the Australian government and press, now happily reporting Rini’s resignation and the return of RAMSI-supervised democracy to the Solomon Islands

Let’s turn to The Australian for the conventional wisdom instead:

There are many lessons from this week's tragedy. One is that Australia desperately needs a larger army. As Neil James of the Australian Defence Association points out, the horror scenario is a crisis in PNG which the Australian army is not big enough to deal with. One way or another, the Australian military, police and broader institutional involvement in the South Pacific is bound to increase.

On to Papua New Guinea! That’s the spirit!

That’s what’s missing from the Solomon Islands story: common sense, that’s all.