Throughout history, emperors and queens, presidents and prime minis- ters in trouble with their people depend on foreign adventures to distract the attention of a hostile populace. Today’s pundits call this exercise a timely diversion to help break the seige.
In White House Years, Henry Kissinger gives the reader quite a detailed account (page 595-600) of the National Security Council (NSC) meetings on the “Iraqi threat” to King Hussein a staunch friend of the West, and the least hostile neighbour of Israel, America’s strategic ally. The likely reactions of the Soviet Union, a friend and often patron of the Arabs, are also closely studied.... All this 20 years ago.
Iraq has made many a headline these past weeks. So has Cuba and the Pope’s visit. President Kennedy has his Cuban missile crisis (Soviet missiles) which made American history too. Right now, President Bill Clinton, often compared to J.F.K. is in trouble ... on many fronts, foreign and domestic, though that word ‘domestic’ should be used with some tact in the present circumstances.
Are the scandal-mongers of a notoriously scandal-seeking mass media hounding poor President Bill Clinton in the last year of his second and final term? His wife, Hillary, seems to think so. Can a diversion, help to take the heat off? Pick a villain and go to war? What better choice of a dragon (villain) than Saddam Hussein who has already kicked out some U.N. inspectors, the Americans first of all.
The United Nations is not united on this crisis and how best to respond. China, an increasingly active player on all international crises, argued correctly that the U.N. team should be representative of “a wider range of countries”.
While mounting economic problems, a chaotic sharply divided Parliament and a weak administration led by an ailing President Yeltsin have denied Russia, successor to the Soviet Union, an active role in U.N. decision-making. Despite its permanent seat in the Security Council rarely does Yeltsin’s regime assert itself in the world body. The signs of Russian decline were already clear when President Mikhail Gorbachev visited the region, one of his few foreign policy initiatives. Of course, Russia had already pulled out of Cuba, the only challenge to America’s historical hegemonism. Today only His Holiness the Pope and the Vatican can defy Uncle Sam in his backyard. The situation, the balance of power in Aisa, is radically different in Asia, and the People’s Republic of China, insists on demonstrating this, quite frequently. China cannot of course be a countervailing force to the sole superpower in the Arab world. President Clinton however has realised that Washington’s strategic alliance with Israel the Jewish state, limits American power in the oil-rich Arab world. Thus, Madeleine Albright’s visit to Jerusalem. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayahu, despite a visible unstable ‘grand coalition’ resists every coldly calculated American effort to win over the Arab League, now that it has lost its traditional patron-protector, the Soviet Union.
In all this, China, armed with a longer view of history, and blessed with immense patience, recognises what American commentators would call a wider window of opportunity.
When Bill Richard-son, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, referred to the ‘biological-testing charges’ as horrendous, the Chinese argued for teams to be more balanced. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang, remarked that “the composition of this inspection team should be made up of people from more countries”.
Right now, the only question is not how but when. The timing will depend on whether Mr. Clinton considers his domestic problems (domestic in the sense of ‘national’) more urgent than President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear armoury/stockpile. It would depend on Monica Lewinsky too. Will she talk to the American press. And the U.S. press has its well-tested armoury, with dollars as the deadliest convention weapon.
Mr. Clinton and Ms. Albright have already failed to tame Prime Minister Netanyahu, though his “alliance” can only count on a one vote majority in the Knesset. Will Yelstin’s Russia, economically embattled, toe the American line, and both alienate the Arab League? Will China seize the opportunity to demonstrate that it is not as vulnerable to American pressure as the defunct superpower, Yeltsin’s Russia. We are moving towards a defining moment in a post-Cold War world on the threshold of a new century.
A New World Order... or disorder? After Iraq, revolutionary Islamic Iran?
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