China’s J20 Stealth Fighter: Made in America...via Belgrade

I have an article up at Asia Times titled The tearful origins of China's stealth.

It addresses a rumor circulating in China that the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 in order to destroy wreckage of a F117A stealth fighter shot down during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia.

Regardless of whether or not the stealth wreckage legend is true, it appears highly probable that the embassy was bombed on purpose.

Certainly, a lot of people inside China believe the bombing was intentional.

The bombing of the Belgrade embassy is something of a 9/11 moment for China.

It galvanized the Chinese elite in its determination to upgrade China’s military capabilities.

It also occasioned a sea change in Chinese public opinion.

In 1989, I remember a resident of Beijing plaintively asking why the U.S. couldn’t send some B-52s to help out the pro-democracy demonstrators.

In 1999, when the U.S. bombers did show up—at the Chinese embassy in Belgrade—the reaction inside China wasn’t so favorable.

Warm and fuzzy affection for the United States as a paragon of democratic values were replaced, to a significant extent, by nationalist perceptions of the U.S. as a dangerous and unscrupulous adversary.

To the Chinese government’s satisfaction, the Belgrade bombing complicated the unfavorable post Tian An Men narrative of democracy-loving Chinese populace preferring the USA system over the PRC.

In a couple of posts in 2007, I covered the embassy bombing incident in considerable detail:

The Belgrade Bombing, the F-117 Cake, and the Tears of Premier Zhu Rongji 

and

Why China Hates Satellite Guided Munitions, Part 1: The Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999

They are particularly useful because some interesting information has subsequently vanished from the net, and my posts are a good place to find them.

Here’s a taste, drawing on a 2006 report from a Chinese magazine called Global Views:

1960s tube amplifier enthusiasts will be thrilled to learn that the Yugoslavian air force attributes the shootdown of the F117A to P-12 type vacuum tube-technology Russian radars so old the U.S. considered them obsolete.

According to their account, the F117A Stealth fighter was detectable by antique radar operating at wavelengths of 2 meters—a detail that had supposedly escaped the Stealth designers, who operated on the assumption that the plane would only have to be invisible to modern centimeter and millimeter wavelength radars.

On the evening of March 27, Yugoslavia’s anti-aircraft defenses detected an aircraft entering Yugoslavian airspace at a distance of 80 km. The radar was immediately shut off, since U.S. planes were armed with radar seeking missiles that would fire automatically within 20 seconds and track the signal to its source and destroy it. The Yugoslavian anti-aircraft crews had been rigorously trained to either acquire and fire on a target or turn off their radio within this 20-second window. The radar was switched on when the target was about 15 km away and a barrage of SA-2 SAM missiles were fired manually. The F117A fell to earth. Witnesses said, “It looked like a sparrow shot from the sky.”

The shootdown raised an important tactical and strategic issue for NATO. Bad weather had limited helicopter operations and the U.S. was relying on high-altitude bombing to advance its war objectives. Therefore, a great deal of attention was paid to identifying and disabling Yugoslavia’s anti-aircraft facilities.

The Global Vision article reports that the headquarters of the 126 Mid-Air Detection and Anti-Aircraft Battalion—which had detected the plane—was attacked 11 times, each time with 5 JDAM bombs. The 250th Battalion—which fired the offending SAMs--was attacked 22 times.

The Yugoslav asserts that the 3rd Brigade of the 250th Battalion, whose missiles actually brought down the plane, suffered no fatalities or casualties during the war, leading them to brag: “We’re the real Stealth”.

The F-117A shootdown provided a psychological boost to the Yugoslavs which lives on to this day.

Every year on March 27 the 250th Battalion, now part of the Serbian Air Force, holds a raucous party. The main event occurs when a large cake bedecked with candles is rolled out. On the top is a rendering of an F-117A Nighthawk in chocolate. At precisely 8:42 pm, the exact time of the shootdown, the first slice is cut—through the port wing, which is the one severed by the SAM barrage.

No word as to whether the cake is inscribed with the taunt “Neener Neener” or the Serbian equivalent.

Happy New Year.

Hu Jintao's Visit: 2011 is not 2006

I wrote the obligatory Hu Jintao in America article for Asia Times, For Hu, Style Is the Substance.

I was able to make some useful points about how the red carpet treatment for China creates a few fissures in the US/ROK/Japan alliance and points up problems for conventional containment strategy against the PRC.

Also, I provided some interesting perspective that I haven't seen in the gazillion of other articles covering Hu's visit:

2011 is not 2006.

In 2006, the occasion of Hu's previous visit, George W Bush was still riding high in the early years of his second term. The "war on terror", with a few bumps, was rolling along and doing in the surviving members of the "axis of evil" - North Korea and Iran - was at the top of the foreign policy agenda after the third member, Iraq, had already been dealt with. Confronting China - long a preoccupation of vice president Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne Cheney - to moderate its support of North Korea and Iran was an important priority.

In April 2006, when Hu visited, the US campaign to financially isolate and destabilize North Korea - initiated with the Treasury finding that Macau's Banco Delta Asia (BDA) was a "financial institution of money laundering concern" and toppled it into insolvency - was in full swing.

And China was feeling the heat.

As the architect of the effort, David Asher, subsequently testified to the US congress, the objective of the BDA designation was an aggressive effort to "kill the chicken in order to scare the monkey", that is, intimidate China into actively participating in the financial blockade of North Korea by threatening its own institutions such as the People's Bank of China with a BDA-type designation if it continued its dealings with the Pyongyang regime.

The campaign, led by Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Stuart Levey, was global in reach and reportedly successful enough to force some Chinese banks into cutting banking ties with North Korea. However, the US did not succeed in getting the Chinese government to change its North Korea policy or even abandon its support for BDA.

China's role as an impediment to Bush administration policies did not make for a particularly hospitable environment for Hu's visit.

As Dana Milbank reported at the time:

    The protocol-obsessed Chinese leader suffered a day full of indignities - some intentional, others just careless. The visit began with a slight when the official announcer said the band would play the "national anthem of the Republic of China" - the official name of Taiwan. It continued when Vice President Cheney donned sunglasses for the ceremony, and again when Hu, attempting to leave the stage via the wrong staircase, was yanked back by his jacket. Hu looked down at his sleeve to see the president of the United States tugging at it as if redirecting an errant child.

    Then there were the intentional slights. China wanted a formal state visit such as Jiang [Zemin] got, but the administration refused, calling it instead an "official" visit. Bush acquiesced to the 21-gun salute but insisted on a luncheon instead of a formal dinner, in the East Room instead of the State Dining Room. Even the visiting country's flags were missing from the lampposts near the White House.

In addition to his sunglass-donning transgression, Cheney also had to deny he had marked Hu's Oval Office briefing by taking a nap in his chair (thereby, perhaps inadvertently, leaving the impression that he had actually chosen to feign sleep in order to show his contempt for the red supremo).

The capper to the disastrous visit was the outburst of Dr Wang Wenyi, Falungong's point person on the issue of vivisection and organ harvesting allegedly inflicted on Falungong practitioners by the Chinese government.

Despite having been denied press credentials by Maltese security during a previous overseas trip of Hu's, somehow Wang was able to evade the scrutiny of the White House press office and acquire a one-day credential for Hu's visit as the press rep of Falungong's Epoch Times.

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody in the press office thought it might be a fun prank to throw Hu together with a Falungong activist.

In 2006, the Secret Service did not cover itself in glory, either, as Milbank described:

    90 seconds into Hu's speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, "President Hu, your days are numbered!" and "President Bush, stop him from killing!"

    Bush and Hu looked up, stunned. It took so long to silence her - a full three minutes - that Bush aides began to wonder if the Secret Service's strategy was to let her scream herself hoarse. The rattled Chinese president haltingly attempted to continue his speech and television coverage went to split screen.

Even if the U.S. commentariat doesn't remember the nitty gritty of the 2006 visit, Hu Jintao undoubtedly does--and finds the contrast extremely gratifying.

Eyesight to the Blind on North Korea

I have an article up at Asia Times on North Korea as the pivot point for competing U.S. and Chinese ideas of the North Asian security order.

Asia Times’ crack editors titled it Eyesight to the Blind .

Not sure what that’s about, unless they are referring to the fact that I haven’t seen other commentators making my point: that the U.S., ROK, and Japan are trying to assert a apply Free World vs. Communists template to guide relations with China and North Korea, while China wants to break this system down as a Cold War relic, and replace it with a series of bilateral relations.

North Korea is China’s wedge against the alliance: by asserting the continued viability of North Korea (with Chinese support, natch), it is declaring that a US/ROK/Japan tie-up can’t solve the Nork problem and is not an effective paradigm for North Asian security as a whole.

There is some anxiety that the U.S. is going to go all wobbly and make a separate peace with China, as Stephen Walt observed during his current trip to Vietnam:


I given several lectures since my arrival here, and met with a number of Vietnamese officials. One theme that has come up repeatedly is the fear that the United States and China will reach some sort of great power condominium. at the expense of the weaker powers in the region. There is clearly considerable concern that the United States will "do a deal" with China, in effect granting it a free hand in its neighborhood in exchange for concessions elsewhere.

I agree with Walt that the U.S. is unlikely to throw Vietnam (and the ROK and Japan) under the bus for the sake of the China relationship—even though there are signs that the Obama administration sees the current Korea policy as a cul-de-sac and wouldn’t mind extricating itself.

[It occurs to me that the Vietnam issue neatly illustrates the US conundrum. We want to frame Asia policy as a good guys vs. bad guys issue, but it turns out that the bad guys are all China and its allies--North Korea and Burma--but Vietnam, another single-party mixed-market autocracy, gets a free pass because it's at loggerheads with the Chinese. So it's hard to get away from the contain-China core of the policy, with all the risks and divided loyalties for the U.S. and its allies that the policy entails. Ironically, Vietnam, which is closest to the PRC in polity and economic strategy, is probably also the closest to serving as China's purest zero-sum adversary in Asia. CH 1/18/11]

The Lee Myung-bak government in Seoul and the DPJ regime in Japan are entirely vested in the pro-US/anti-North Korea security setup. There isn’t enough evident China upside to justify betraying two committed U.S. allies.

Also, national security theater has its own, supremely powerful constituency. Confronting a Chinese threat means fat defense budgets for US, ROK, and Japanese military and industrial establishments for at least half a century.

Andrew Cockburn titled his look at the J-20 Pentagon Ecstatic Over New Chinese "Threat" and wrote:

For much of the 1990s, luck deserted our military industrial complex. Its formerly reliable Soviet partners ceased to play their part, leaving the Pentagon to scour the world for a “peer or near peer competitor.” There were hopes, always futile, for a reconstituted USSR, or perhaps an emergent China (always popular on the right in those days) which was followed by the putative menace of regional competitors, (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) combining against America.


...


Now... the Chinese have stepped up to the plate.


Our Asian friends have suddenly offered a titillating peek from an airfield in Chengdu at their newest warplane, described as a radar-evading "stealth" fighter like our own F-22.


The reaction from some quarters has been predictably enthusiastic. "From what we can see, I conclude that this aircraft does have great potential to be superior in some respects to the American F-22, and could be decisively superior to the F-35," claims Richard Fisher, a senior fellow on Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington-based security think tank.


Other denizens of the military-industrial complex have pushed hyperbole further, with predictions that the plane — though it looks enormous in the photographs — may be pretty much invisible to radar.


"You can tell it has some serious stealth technology," proclaims one former Navy pilot now in the defense investment business quoted by Fox News. "My F-18 looks like an 18-wheeler on radar. That thing might not even show up."


...


We should not have to wait too long before some obliging member of Congress calls for the reopening of the F-22 production line, cut off by Gates in 2009 after a mere 187 planes had been built.

My personal feeling: the best play for the United States might be to decouple from ROK’s hardline policy, engage in some reverse wedging i.e. rapprochement with a (very willing) North Korea to distance it from China, and, at least for the purpose of geopolitics, take the much-touted threat of “instability on the Korean peninsula” as the Chinese put it, off the table.

With China’s self-declared role as problem-solver for the DPRK headache diminished, negotiations with Chinese could focus directly on the things that China is doing itself that disturb its neighbors: military buildup, island and atoll shenanigans, and so on.

What we’re doing right now is exactly the opposite: feeding into the Chinese narrative by touting North Korea as an existential threat that, unfortunately, we don’t seem to be able to do anything about without Chinese assistance.

Re Eyesight to the Blind, most people know it as a song off the Who’s Tommy rock opera. The Who were actually covering a tune by bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson.

Sonny Boy Williamson was a member of the great 1950s Chess blues triumvirate including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf that fueled the rise of the Chicago record label in the pre-Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley days.

He was a master of the blues harp and a sly, underplayed style that contrasted with the more assertive stance of Muddy Waters and Howlin’Wolf. He recorded Eyesight to the Blind as a 78 for Trumpet Records in Mississippi in the early 1950s. Arhoolie has issued his Trumpet (pre-Chess recordings) as Sonny Boy Williamson: King Biscuit Time (since it includes a 15-minute recording of a radio show—sponsored by a flour company—that he hosted in the mid-1960s).

Here’s Eyesight to the Blind and a link to get the Arhoolie CD.






Youtube uploaded by randomandrare

What Julian Assange Is Doing Is Not So Terrible...

...But What We're Doing to Bradley Manning Is Terrible

There seems to be an increasingly bright line in the foreign affairs realms of the blogosphere separating those who are concerned about the public relations and legal jihad against Julian Assange and the affliction of Bradley Manning, and those who mock, snort, and maintain the proper air of sniggering condescension and ostentatious outrage to please their bespoke sources at the State Department.

On the left, there's an interesting recapitulation of the split between the opponents of the Iraq war and the liberal hawk supporters of the get-Saddam crusade.

Today, in my opinion, Glenn Greenwald, Counterpunch, and Antiwar.com are on the side of the good guys.

From his prosperous perch at Salon, I imagine Glenn Greenwald needs little more than moral support.

But I think Counterpunch and Antiwar.com wouldn't mind some more tangible, financial indication of appreciation.

Please visit their sites to subscribe (in the case of Counterpunch) or make a donation (in the case of Antiwar.com).

Here's an excerpt from a recent interview Daniel Ellsberg gave to Antiwar.com's radio arm:

Horton: Okay, good. So, welcome to the show. Tell me, there’s a lot of talk in the media saying that, “Yeah, well, we all give Dan Ellsberg respect for leaking the Pentagon Papers” – now at least there’s somewhat of a consensus that maybe that was the right thing to do – “but WikiLeaks is a totally different thing. This guy Assange has a terrible agenda to hurt America,” not help it like you wanted to do, and I think that’s at least part of it. What do you think about that?

Ellsberg: Well, Floyd Abrams, who defended the New York Times in front of the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case, where the question was injunction, prior restraint against the New York Times, just had a Wall Street Journal article in which he quoted me, critically I could say, and he says, “Daniel Ellsberg says that there is a myth that Pentagon Papers good, WikiLeaks bad.” And that’s true, I did say that and I do say that and it is a myth.

And then he went on to say, “But the real myth is not that one, but the real myth is that they’re the same.” Well, nobody said they’re the same. Obviously there are all kinds of differences which certainly I can identify as well as anybody. But there are some fundamental similarities, both in the motive and the kind of war there and the need for the revelations that they’re presenting.

And in terms of the charges that are made against them, including by Abrams, but especially by others, again there’s a very great similarity in the situation. People are implying that everyone could see that the Pentagon Papers – which was a history of a single conflict over a period of time; it was focused on one thing and it revealed deception by a succession of administrations – everybody could see that that was a worthy thing to do, or at least, you know, conscientious, and my motives were good, etc. etc. etc. Not everybody saw that at the time. Not the administration, the White House, which called it treason, with a little [laughs] a little more basis – how to say this: I am a citizen. I do owe allegiance to the United States. To say that Julian Assange is guilty of treason has some problems since he’s an Australian citizen.

But anyway, I was called a traitor, which was no more true of me than it is to say Bradley Manning, who is accused now of leaking, sitting in a jail in Quantico – he’s no more a traitor than I am, and I’m not. Neither of them are terrorists any more than I am, and I’m not.

So I did get these comments. I didn’t get the “terrorist” at the time, because that wasn’t in vogue as a demonizing label then 40 years ago, but I would be called a terrorist now. I have no doubt at all, if I put out the same documents now, they would call me a terrorist, because that’s the bad thing now.

Now, more than that, of course, I was – they’re searching now for a law with which to indict Assange for what he did, and of course Assange’s role is that essentially of the New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers or of WikiLeaks. There really is no basis in law that they’re going to find that can nail or can entrap or indict Assange that doesn’t apply to the New York Times exactly as well, since they have put out these clearly classified documents to the public.

In fact, they’ve made the choice, along with the other four newspapers, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and El Pais in Spain – they made the choice so far which documents in this Cablegate series to put out. Assange has put out on his own website essentially only those, with a few exceptions, but almost entirely those that have been chosen to be referred to or put out by these mainstream newspapers.

So there is no judicial basis, no legal basis, for charging Assange with anything that doesn’t apply equally well to the New York Times, and it’s clear that the administration is not anxious to get in a legal fight with the New York Times. So they’re trying to distinguish Assange not only from me and the Pentagon Papers, but from the New York Times, and that’s really pretty impossible to do.

But finally, to get back to the initial point that I was making, in fact all the charges that were made against Assange now – he’s interfering with diplomatic relationships, he’s disrupting diplomacy, he’s producing embarrassing things that make our relations with other countries harder, and he’s endangering the lives of troops – all of those were said about the Pentagon Papers, and that was the basis, after all, for the attempt at prior restraint, which they didn’t do in this occasion, presumably because they just couldn’t. You know, with the electronic means, there was no way of stopping it. But they could have tried to restrain the Times very well from putting out any more, but in the clear recognition that the information would get out anyway from other newspapers and from the Internet.

So, they said at the time, for instance, that the Pentagon Papers were disrupting our relations with Australia because it embarrassed the measures we took to encourage or coerce Australians into sending troops to Vietnam. Actually that’s something they certainly deserved to embarrassed about. They actually started the draft in order to send Australians to Vietnam, which is a scandal, really.

So, as I say, these accusations were made. They were all found to be unfounded in the end, although it was indeed embarrassing to relations. The idea that in these documents there are criticisms by American diplomats of their counterparts [laughs] – and that was not true of the Pentagon Papers? Almost any – most pages at random would find extreme criticisms of the government of Saigon, our puppets in Saigon, for example, and in complaints about our allies, whether they were doing enough in their relationship, one way or the other.

So I come to the point: Condemn this, and you do condemn the Pentagon Papers, and the question is then, was it a good thing or not for the Pentagon Papers to come out? Was it legitimate in a democracy? Did we need it or not? And there were plenty of people who said not, at the time, that it shouldn’t have happened. And those have basically the same point of view that is condemning Assange now.

An article by Jean Casella and James Ridgway from their site Solitary Watch, via Counterpunch, puts Manning's treatment in a sobering perspective:

For the past few weeks, progressive online media sources have been alive with outrage against the conditions in which accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being held. Manning is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact with family and friends. He has now been in isolation for more than seven months. The cruel and inhuman conditions of his detention, first widely publicized by Glenn Greenwald on Salon and expanded upon by others, are now being discussed, lamented, and protested throughout the progressive blogosphere (ourselves included). Few of those taking part in the conversation hesitate to describe Manning's situation as torture.

Meanwhile, here at Solitary Watch, we've been receiving calls and emails from our modest band of readers, all of them saying more or less the same thing: We're glad Bradley Manning's treatment is getting some attention, but what about the tens of thousands of others who are languishing in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails? According to available data, there are some 25,000 inmates in long-term isolation in the nation's supermax prisons, and as many as 80,000 more in solitary in other prisons and jails. Where is the outrage–even among progressives–for these forgotten souls? Where, even, is some acknowledgment of their existence?

...

Frequently, writers and readers make the point that Manning is being subjected to these condition while he is merely accused , rather than convicted, of a crime. Perhaps they need to be introduced to the 15-year-old boy who, along with several dozen other juveniles, is being held is solitary in a jail in Harris County, Texas, while he awaits trial on a robbery charge. He is one of hundreds–if not thousands–of prisoners being held in pre-trial solitary confinement, for one reason or another, on any given day in America. Most of them lack decent legal representation, or are simply too poor to make bail.

We have also seen articles suggesting that the treatment Manning is receiving is worse than the standard for solitary confinement, since he is deprived even of a pillow or sheets for his bed. Their authors should review the case of the prisoners held in the St. Tammany Parish Jail in rural Louisiana. According to a brief by the Louisiana ACLU, "After the jail determines a prisoner is suicidal, the prisoner is stripped half-naked and placed in a 3′ x 3′ metal cage with no shoes, bed, blanket or toilet…Prisoners report they must curl up on the floor to sleep because the cages are too small to let them lie down. Guards frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers…People have been reportedly held in these cages for days, weeks, and months." The cells are one-fourth the size mandated by local law for caged dogs.

There is, rightly, concern over the damage being done to Manning's mental health by seven months in solitary. Seldom mentioned is the fact that an estimated one-third to one-half of the residents of America's isolation units suffer from mental illness, and solitary confinement cells have, in effect, become our new asylums. Witness the ACLU of Montana's brief on a 17-year-old mentally ill inmate who "was so traumatized by his deplorable treatment in the Montana State Prison that he twice attempted to kill himself by biting through the skin on his wrist to puncture a vein." During his ten months in solitary confinement, he was tasered, pepper sprayed, and stripped naked in view of other inmates, and "his mental health treatment consists of a prison staff member knocking on his door once a week and asking if he has any concerns."

Finally, many have argued that the nature of Manning's alleged crimes renders him a heroic political prisoner, rather than a "common" criminal. Those who take this line might want to look into the "Communications Management Units" at two federal prisons, where, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Center for Constitutional Rights, prisoners are placed in extreme isolation "for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system." Or they might investigate the aftermath of the recent prison strike in Georgia, in which several inmates have reportedly been thrown into solitary for leading a nonviolent protest against prison conditions.

All of these cases are "exceptional," but only in that they earned the attention of some journalist or advocate. Most prisoners held solitary confinement are, by design, silent and silenced. Most of their stories–tens of thousands of them–are never told at all. And solitary confinement is now used as a disciplinary measure of first resort in prisons and jails across the country, so its use is anything but exceptional.

All across America, inmates are placed in isolation for weeks or months not only for fighting with other inmates or guards, but for being "disruptive" or disobeying orders; for being identified as a gang member (often by a prison snitch or the wrong kind of tattoo); or for having contraband, which can include not only a weapon but a joint, a cell phone, or too many postage stamps. In Virginia, a dozen Rastafarians were in solitary for more than a decade because they refused to cut their dreadlocks, in violation of the prison code. In many prisons, juveniles and rape victims are isolated "for their own protection" in conditions identical to those used for punishment. And for more serious crimes, the isolation simply becomes more extreme, and more permanent: In Louisiana, two men convicted of killing a prison guard have been in solitary confinement for 38 years.

...

The treatment of Bradley Manning, which has introduced many on the left to the torment of solitary confinement, may present an opportunity for them to measure their own humanity. They might begin by asking themselves whether prison torture is wrong, and worthy of their attention and outrage, only when it is committed against people whose actions they admire.

The Most Dangerous Man in Korea is Not Kim Jung Il

I have an article up on Asia Times titled The Most Dangerous Man in Korea.

The man I’m referring to is South Korean president Lee Myung-bak.

Provocative, n’cest pas?

The point of the article is that Lee wants the U.S. to support his hands-off policy toward the DPRK until the Kim regime staggers off and dies.  Then the ROK can swoop in and reunify the peninsula on its terms.

Of course, any US or Chinese engagement that prolongs the life of the DPRK (or creates conditions conducive to the emergence of an independent successor regime) is anathema to Lee.

Trouble is, North Korea is still in good enough shape militarily to give Lee more trouble than he can handle.

So the North Koreans goad Lee with provocations like the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents—to which Lee apparently dares not respond with anything stronger than moral suasion and a call for more sanctions and military exercises-- in order to demonstrate to the South Korean electorate and the United States government that Lee’s policy of ignoring Pyongyang is not the best way to go.

I concluded my discussion of the situation on the Korean peninsula with the rather prescient passage:

Pyongyang has presumably noted that Lee's approval ratings, which reached a high of over 60% after hosting the prestigious Group of 20 summit, fell to 45% after the Yeonpyeong shelling and the government's tepid response.

The North Koreans may succumb to the temptation to push his approvals down another few notches with another provocation and see if he really pushes back or finally turns to the Chinese to mediate.

Or, for that matter, if the United States decides to abandon its hands-off policy and restart the denuclearization negotiation and food and energy aid circus desperately desired by Pyongyang.

Enter Bill Richardson, ex-governor of New Mexico, who has used his involvement with Korean issues to burnish his foreign policy credentials.

Mr. Richardson was in North Korea last week to do various unspecified stuff and presumably pass a message from the Obama administration that it preferred that the cycle of Nork provocation and ROK chest-thumping to end before something awful happens.

Bill Richardson also figures in a book about the detention and release of two American journalists that came out recently, Somewhere inside: one sister’s captivity in North Korea and the other’s fight to bring her home, by Lisa and Laura Ling (New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2010).

Lisa, the captive, was employed by Al Gore’s media operation, Channel One, when she was detained, together with her colleague Euna Lee, by North Korean border guards in 2009.  Laura, her sister, a media-savvy ball of fire (worked on The View, Oprah) took charge of the PR campaign to create and sustain suitable conditions for Lisa and Euna’s release.

Laura climbed the political clout ladder, starting with Al Gore and Bill Richardson.  The North Koreans cagily dismissed them as political small potatoes.

Then, through the State Department, she was able to get the OK for Jimmy Carter to go to Pyongyang..

At this point, I have to believe that Kim Jong Il was running around his office in paroxysms of excitement and telling his doubting diplomats, We’ve got them on the hook!  Go for Clinton! Go for Clinton!

And, indeed, after the US side was told that Carter was too old, wrinkly, and irrelevant, Bill Clinton made the trip in Steven Bing’s private jet, to what we can imagine was the gracefully disguised chagrin of Carter, Gore, and Richardson.

Just so you know that the United States knows exactly what North Korea wants (direct engagement with the United States and to hell with the Chinese), here’s a brief excerpt from the book:

[Richardson] asked me if the State Department had a plan for how to deal with our situation, and I told him that Beijing was being solicited for assistance.  “The North Koreans hate dealing with China!” he tersely warned.  “Trust me, the North Koreans wil become very upset if the U.S. tries to involve China in any way.”

He went on to say something that would be repeated to me by a number of ardent North Korea watchers:  “What they [the North Koreans’ want is to deal directly with the United States.  North Korea is insulted by the six-party talks.”...[Later] he went on to say that he’d told the State Department to cut China out of the process.

By, the way, “ardent” is an obvious flub.  What she really meant to say was “discerning and incisive”.

Happy holidays.

Cancun Wrapup: Is Your Portfolio Ready for the End of the World?

I have an article up at Asia Times, US, China Lead Merry Dance at Cancun.

It makes the case that the invective and verbiage spewed at the climate conference in Cancun reflects a shared but largely unspoken belief that the chances of coordinated global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are basically zero.  The key then, is reducing the financial pain and suffering for rich and large developing countries by finding ways to disregard the genuine pain and suffering for small and vulnerable countries.

There have been a few interesting and significant developments since then.

The delivery of the Cancun communique, a towering pile of steaming mush deposited on the world's doorstep, was not one of them.

Here is a more nutritious helping of news nuggets.

Killing Kyoto: The Sequel

Cancun was basically another episode in the excruciating snuff serial, Killing Kyoto, officially inaugurated at Copenhagen and designed to conclude at Durban next year (when Kyoto expires).

The United States is distinctly uncomfortable with the current Kyoto structure.  Beyond the obvious problem of the free ride for Annex II countries like China, there is the profoundly awkward moral issue of carbon reparations.

A lot of countries fundamentally threatened by climate change (represented in the G77 bloc), want the West to own up for chunking the majority of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.  Kyoto--a global consensus mechanism--has served as a way for them to get their voices heard, together with demands that the industrialized countries take the economically onerous step of drastically reducing their carbon emissions and funneling tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars to the vulnerable countries in climate aid.

The US, on the other hand, is embarrassed by these small, insignificant states that, in the US view, treat their own survival as an entitlement to be guaranteed by the richer nations.

Better to let bygones be bygones, get the important players in a room, and deal with problems as they arise, seems to be the US policy.

In other words, let the poor nations beg for aid, and give it to them only if they satisfy grantors' requirements for convenience, political and diplomatic utility, and overall value for money.

One more thing: better cap the amount of aid, so it’s clearly a Western initiative, rather than open-ended compensation for screwing up the planet with 150 years of industrialization.

How about...$30 billion in fast track aid with a rampup to $100 billion per annum by 2020.

Oh, and one last thing: don’t even agree to disburse the aid until the Chinese yield on MRV—even if the Chinese aren’t receiving the aid--so it’s even more clear the aid is discretionary and not obligatory.

It’s a good deal for the West.  Getting the poorer nations to accept it involves a certain amount of heavy lifting for a certain superpower.

In my article, I touch on the Wikileaks cable reported in the Guardian that describes US outreach to the Maldives.  "Outreach" looks a lot like a bribe of a few million dollars up front to the tiny island nation to support the US position on a post-Kyoto regime.

Todd Stern, the chief US climate negotiator, went distinctly undiplomatic in his effort at Cancun to neutralize the unfavorable effect of the Wikileak.

In an article entitled US envoy rejects suggestion that America bribed countries to sign up to the Copenhagen Accord, the Guardian reported:

Stern added: "We can eliminate any cause or accusation of bribery by eliminating any money."

Stay classy, Todd.

To make it clear that we're talking discretionary grease administered by the US to compliant and deserving allies, and not payment of some carbon blood money out of moral obligation, Stern illustrated his middle-finger posturing with an anecdote of an innocent Western moneybags victimized by an odious Third World beggar (from the same Guardian article):

Speaking at the UN climate summit in Cancun, Todd Stern, the US special envoy on climate change, suggested that countries that wanted climate aid were in no position to criticise.

Citing, with approval, a confrontation at the Copenhagen summit in which a Norwegian official berated a counterpart from a developing country, he said, "he just stood up and blasted the person, 'you can't on the one hand ask for and make a legitimately strong case for the need for the need for climate assistance and then on the other hand turn around and accuse us of bribery'."

The BASIC bloc made political hay from Stern's oafishness by pointing out that they are not candidates for climate aid from the US (they are enthusiastic diners at the trough of Clean Development Mechanism funding for green projects administered by the EU instead), and Stern was only bullying the smaller, vulnerable nations--the same nations the US is trying to wedge off China. 

Per Global Times:

Xie Zhenhua, head of the Chinese  delegation in the talks and deputy director of China's National Development and Reform Commission, stressed that BASIC countries would always stand with the G77 group of developing countries.

Xie, who met with delegates from other BASIC nations, also broached the recent WikiLeaks revelations on how the US and European governments used monetary incentives, threats and even espionage to advance their "climate" agenda at last year's Copenhagen summit.

"Countries and people involved in the information that Wikileaks released should reflect upon their deeds, if the information is true," Xie said.

Gutting Kyoto has turned into a multi-stage process that involves

• wedging off China and India from the G77 by highlighting their unwillingness to commit to Kyoto-style legally binding emissions 
• a remarkably crude effort to hold China, instead of the West, responsible for holding back climate aid by linking release of the aid to China's acceptance of onerous "MRV" (monitoring, reporting, and verification) procedures 
• bribing some of the smaller countries with bilateral aid to support the US position 
• proposing capped (and suspiciously unfunded) climate aid to vulnerable countries to clear the West’s 150 year overdrawn carbon account as an alternative to open-ended Kyoto obligations 
• using mighty diplomatic pressure to make sure that the refractory ALBA bloc of left-leaning South American governments is unable to seize the podium and make trouble.

The trend, at least for the United States and a majority of Kyoto Annex I signatories and a certain number of vulnerable states that, for whatever reason, choose to cleave to the US position seems to be: scrap Kyoto, get the small nations out of the room, and let the grownups (at least those with money) manage the climate change inconvenience through the mechanism of the G20 or its climate change affiliate, the MEF (Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate).

One might think that putting this matter in hands of the nations responsible for the problem, able to cope with the local effects of the problem with relative ease, willing to bribe vulnerable countries for peace, quiet, profit, and advantage, and fundamentally averse to sacrificing their economies in order to solve the problem they caused is not going to yield an outcome that the smaller nations will find satisfactory.

But that's where we are.

US on PR Defensive

From a public relations standpoint, things did not quite go the US way at Cancun.

The climate is headed for a trainwreck.  Based on the current scenario--lack of significant emissions action but plenty of self-congratulatory greenspeak--global warming is going to be well north of what is considered to be very bad but maybe manageable--2 degrees--and might be as high as 5 degrees.

The fact that the United States is trying to cripple Kyoto, the only binding treaty dealing with this situation, and replace it with a multilateral rich-nations circlejerk is beginning to attract some attention.

The US came in for a lot of adverse comment from climate change NGOers at Cancun, and it even filtered into the New York Times.

Nevertheless, the US is committed to demonstrating the dysfunctionality of the Kyoto process.  If the inability of the world's nations to forge a meaningful and binding concensus is due in part to American obdurancy, well so be it.

China--which gained a lot of kudos for its relatively aggressive greenhouse gas policies--can happily watch the United States under Obama once again take the majority heat, as it did under Bush, for roasting the planet.

The other big Wikileaks noise related to climate change was a breathless piece in Der Spiegel entitled The US and China Joined Forces Against Europe (in an interesting example of the synergies--a.k.a. big media tail wagging Julian Assange dog--between Wikileaks and its media partners, as far as I can tell, Wikileaks has not yet released the cable Der Spiegel is reporting).

The article, by Gerald Traufetter, seized upon an embassy account of a visit by John Kerry to Beijing in summer 2009 to assert:

The dispatches reveal that the US and China, the world's top two polluters, joined forces to stymie every attempt by European nations to reach agreement.

...

During his visit to China, Senator Kerry, a former presidential candidate for the Democrats, told the Beijing leadership that the Europeans were determined to push through their goal for agreement on concrete cuts in emissions for the US and other industrialized countries. However, nothing would change for China. Together with the other "developing countries" the Chinese would merely have to say they would "work hard to reduce emissions."

The quid pro quo for the joint US-China collusion against Europe was allegedly trade in green goods like US nuclear reactors.

This article is a bookend to a much more interesting article in Der Spiegel from May 2010 based on a leaked recording of a heated Copenhagen discussion between world leaders that also pushes the Everybody's Stabbing Deutschland in the Back theme: How China and India Sabotaged the UN Climate Summit.  President Obama was identified as a co-conspirator in the body of that article, if not the title.

The Der Spiegel Wikileaks article is pretty weak beer.  The US position in summer 2009 was a matter of public record long before Wikileaks

On May 28, 2009, the Guardian reported on Kerry's trip:

In their formal positions, the two sides remain far apart. China wants developed nations to make a 40% cut in emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels, far above the goal set by President Obama's administration.

The United States wants China to set voluntary but verifiable goals to reduce its energy use and, in the longer term, to join richer nations in cutting overall emissions.

But Kerry said senior Chinese politicians had shown a willingness to compromise, particularly over the 40% target that he described as politically impossible in the US at present.

By sharing know-how and conducting joint research into renewable and energy-saving technology, he said China would realise that it can go beyond its current target of a 20% cut in energy intensity of its economy - the amount of carbon released per dollar of GDP.

It is rather clear that China and the US, though both fundamentally uninterested in accepting legally binding cuts, were at each others throats in Copenhagen, not colluding.

What happened between Kerry's trip and Copenhagen was the bruising US fight over health care, and the realization that President Obama could carry no genuine commitments on US emissions cuts to Copenhagen that could somehow finesse a consensus approach to Kyoto.

China pretty much has put its eggs in the EU basket--the Clean Development Mechanism funnels a lot of money into China--and wants to keep some kind of Kyoto arrangement going.

The United States has apparently decided that it won't be able do anything on climate change until it drives a stake through the heart of Kyoto and starts over with the Annex II countries compelled to adhere to the same regime as the EU, Japan, Russia, Canada, and the US.

But nobody believes that, once Kyoto is thrown under the bus, the United States will possess sufficient political will to legislate genuine domestic emissions reductions, let alone bankroll a massive global transition to a low carbon economy.

The inability of the US to lead on climate change, coupled with its desire to control and drive global climate change policy notwithstanding, is the source of a lot of the US-China acrimony that obscures the general developed-world paralysis on the climate change problem.

Something You'll Be Hearing More About:  Adaptation

Adaptation is the climate change measure that dares not speak its name.  Adaptation means dealing with the consequences of global warming.

Nowadays, it is still much more politically correct to talk about Mitigation--the noble crusade to reduce greenhouse gases in order to prevent the intensification of global warming.

The window for mitigation, however, is rapidly closing.

So expect to hear a lot more about adaptation aid, investment...and business.

Take it away, Katie Fehrenbacher via Reuters!

The Hot New Sector in Greentech: Adaptation

The modest agreement that came out of the Cancun climate talks this weekend points tells me one thing: It’s time to start talking a lot more about adaptation to climate change. ..

Adaptation technology has long been a slightly taboo subject, with the idea that technology should be used to stop global warming, not help humans deal with it. But more and more scientists, companies and pundits are taking the subject seriously in recent weeks, including an excellent article in The Economist last month. As The Economist article points out, the world will warm by 3.5 degrees C by 2100, and that’s if countries hit the emissions reductions targets put forth in the Copenhagen Accord.  The much-discussed 2-degree safe temperature rise is now a joke we can’t realistically hit.

So, in the face of us all crying into our pillows every night, here are 10 technologies we’ll need to help the world adapt to climate change over the next century. In Cancun, governments agreed to supply $100 billion via a Green Climate Fund for climate change adaption by 2020. Many of these technologies will be used by the world’s poorest, by farmers, and by country’s that already are facing droughts or extreme weather conditions:

1. Innovations around infectious diseases. ..

2. Flood safeguards. ...

3. Weather forecasting technologies...

4. Insurance tools. ..

5. More resilient crops. ..

6. Supercomputing. ..

7. Water Purification. ..

8. Water Recycling. ..

9. Efficient Irrigation Systems. ..

10. Sensors. ..

Yeah, stop crying in your pillows, bitches!

The "Green" in "Greentech" means money!

The Maldives are perhaps not the best Global Warming Poster Child

Finally, the Maldives.

In the ecospirit of recycling, here’s something I posted in November but didn’t circulate at the time:


The textbook image of the threat from global warming and rising sea levels is the precarious city/island of Male, capital of the Maldives island nation in the Indian Ocean.



Despite the dazzling images of its tourist resorts, the Maldives is not an unspoiled Eden with underwater cabinet meetings.

As a  fascinating photoessay by Francesco Zizola on the Maldives revealed to me, the Malidives is in many ways an artificial human construct.  The capital city, Male, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

In a quest for lebensraum, the island was expanded by filling in the surrounding sea floor to the encircling coral atoll and beyond.  A 3.5 meter high, six kilometer sea wall was constructed with Japanese aid to protect the island (mostly 1 meter above sea level).  Another atoll a few miles away, Hulhumale, was filled in to a height of 2 meters above sea level to serve as a new home if Male becomes unviable.

The least edifying piece of geoengineering in the Maldives is Thilafushi Island.  Zizola writes:

Thilafushi island, also known as a rubbish island, was originally a vast lagoon. It was reclaimed in 1992 using waste as the filling material to solve Male's unmanageable refuse problem. Few Bengali immigrants work at the waste disposal centre in Thilafushi. Their job basically consists of indicating to the numerous dump trucks where to unload the waste. They then incinerate part of the waste or bury the majority of it in landfill sites. No recycling is carried out and hazardous wastes are not sorted from common rubbish.

Maldives Live reports that 330 tons of rubbish make it to Thilafushi each day, some generated by the thousands of tourists visiting the Maldives, the rest coming from Male.

There are many good reasons for a concerted global effort to mitigate global warming.  However, enabling the Maldives to continue its high population density/atoll-filling/trash-dumping/tourism-based lifestyle one meter above sea level is perhaps not one of them.

Wikileaks is Bullsh*t

 Note: This post as e-mailed contains no Wikileaks excerpts.  In order to spare readers who work at universities, companies, and other organizations the potential heartache of having undeclassified Wikileaks material in their e-mail archives, I will remove direct quotes from Wikileaks cables from e-mails I send out from now on.  Material on the China Matters website will be full text.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Wikileaks, more specifically the national security handwringing and pantswetting that has accompanied “Cablegate”, is bullsh*t.

As I followed the Wikileaks archive as it was chivvied across the Internet, I gained the distinct impression that its daily post of cables was not fresh produce in its original packaging.

All that stuff had already been pawed over, repackaged and spun by Wikileaks international media partners—the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and through the Guardian, the New York Times.

As the AP reported a few days ago:

The diplomatic records exposed on the WikiLeaks website this week reveal not only secret government communications, but also an extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization.

Unlike earlier disclosures by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of secret government military records, the group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material.

"They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters.

WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified U.S. State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports.

They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said.

"The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian's website Friday. "The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working."

Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and "I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes," El Pais Editor in Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office.

As stories are published, WikiLeaks uses its website to release the related cables..

‘Nuff said.

To take the story a step further, the United States government declined to cooperate with Wikileaks directly to vet and redact the material.

That’s understandable.  The US government doesn’t want to give theft of its confidential communications the USG stamp of approval.

So Uncle Sam outsourced the censorship job to “some of the world’s most respected media outlets”.

It makes you wonder if the Guardian really brought in the New York Times so that juicy bits could be brought to public notice without worrying about the UK’s stricter libel laws.

Or maybe the US government passed the word that the NYT would be a more convenient, eager, and reliable censor than the Guardian.

Anyway, it appears Assange is playing along.

Even as politicians call for his head, he’s still slowly dribbling out the cables to meet the journalistic needs of his media partners.

The other shoe that apparently has yet to drop in punditland is the burning question:

If Assange is a high-tech terrorist, what does that make the NYT, Guardian, et al.?  Why isn’t the US government going to court to shut down their reporting and publication activities?

The answer, I think, is this:

Any case against the papers is hopelessly tainted by the fact that the US government consulted on the redactions before publication.  In other words, the US took a pass on shutting down Wikileaks and decided to manage and contain it instead.

In court, you could argue that’s a de facto declassification.

Also, if the US government goes up against the papers—not just the NYT in US jurisdiction, but the other papers in Europe—the papers might decide to choose martyrdom and wrap themselves in the First Amendment or whatever they have over there.

In that case, the US would be facing the release in an antagonistic environment, with the papers much less cooperative about protecting Uncle Sam from embarrassment or worse.

Even as the US State Department and the world press collude to massage the Wikileaks problem, a scapegoat is needed to terrorize other prospective leakers.

That scapegoat is, of course, Mr. Assange.

I wonder how serious the campaign is.  He has proved remarkably elusive to arrest, rendition, or whatever other rough justice national security patriots demand, even though security services in England apparently know of his whereabouts.

Assange, in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, has left a Doomsday device: an encrypted archive of all of the quarter million cables with the promise of distributing encryption keys to the world if anything happened to him.

Maybe the plan is just to cover him with self-righteous spittle while a vigorously argued and vetted subset of the cables make their way into public view in parallel with US and foreign damage control.

Then, after the papers have made enough hay, the story disappears.

More from the AP article:

Although WikiLeaks has said it will ultimately post its trove online, The Times said it intends to publish only about 100 or so of the records. And the other news organizations that have the material said they likely will release only a fraction.

"We are releasing only what is interesting," Le Monde's Kauffmann said. "I couldn't tell you the proportion, but the vast majority of these documents are of no journalistic interest."

She said there was "no written contract" among the organizations and WikiLeaks on the use of the material.

"The conditions were that we could ourselves — that's to say our journalists and those at the other newspapers — do our own selection, our own triage," and select which documents to withhold from public view, Kauffmann said.

The media outlets agreed to work together, with about 120 journalists in total working on the project, at times debating which names of people cited in the documents could be published.

"With this, I really think we have taken all the possible precautions," Kauffmann said. "At times, it comes up that we'll discuss it between us, with the other papers, on some points. One of us struck too much out and another said 'Come on, it's about a high official, we can leave his/her name in. There won't be any reprisals.'"

Le Monde and El Pais came into the media partnership late, about a month ago. The Times, Guardian and Spiegel had already done quite a bit of work on the documents and shared it, El Pais' Moreno said.

I wonder if and when the full Wikileaks trove will appear on-line.

I suppose it will have to do with the outcome of the bizarre rape case (I guess you could call it Condom-gate) that Assange is fighting in Sweden, the continued US efforts to villanize him, the invulnerability of his encrypted archive and whether the US, as Alexander Cockburn speculates, decides to end the Wikileaks kabuki by pitching Assange out of a window.

As an interesting sidebar, somebody in the Middle East is apparently capitalizing on the Wikileaks furor to insert some other illicitly acquired diplomatic cables into the public eye.

The leak doesn’t fit in with Assange’s media strategy.  I suppose some freeloader decided, Assange is getting enough heat already, a little more won’t matter.

The leaks were obtained by a pro-Hezbollah newspaper in Lebanon, Al Akhbar.

Apparently, they show America’s favorite Cedar Revolutionaries in a less-than-flattering light.  So it doesn’t appear to likely that the leak is the work of the Middle East’s pre-eminent black ops outfit, Israel.

Here’s a link to Al Akhbar’s Wikileaks page, which forces the reader to demonstrate his or her knowledge of Middle Eastern national flags in order to pick out the relevant subset of cables.

Here’s also a link to the blog of a sympathizer of the Cedar Revolution who is aggrieved by the leak.  The comments provide the usual contentious back-and-forth chewing, and also shed some light on the cables and their impact.

In passing, it is interesting to note that US diplomatic cables are popping up all over the place.  One can speculate that a lot of foreign intelligence services are able to get their hands on material of this sort.

Now, thanks to Wikileaks, the environment and political cover exists to release them into the wild.