Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (32 page)

But that was not the end of the discussion. Talks continued between the three sides throughout the fall of 2000, and on December 23, with less than a month left in his presidency, Clinton offered a new set of proposals that would give the Palestinians more land, a right of refugee return to a possible new Palestinian state (though not to Israel), and a stronger position in Jerusalem. Arafat remained cautious but told Clinton, when they met on January 2, 2001, that the president could tell Barak that ‘I accept your parameters and have some views I must express. At the same time, we know Israelis have views we must respect.’

At this point, Barak appears to have developed reservations of his own, which he communicated privately to Clinton. Three weeks later Clinton was off the stage, but the Israelis and Palestinians continued direct talks at Taba. These ended not because either side rejected a deal but because the Israeli elections came before the talks could be concluded. Barak, who had campaigned for a mandate to continue the talks, authorized a joint statement with the Palestinians saying: ‘The two sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following Israeli elections.’
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Ariel Sharon, the new Prime Minister, immediately declared Taba dead and announced his opposition to any further peace discussions. Barak had lost, in part, because since the end of September violence had escalated rapidly, undermining the credibility of his peace initiative. The second part of the orthodoxy of blaming Arafat is the charge that he had planned this violence and unleashed it in the wake of the failure to reach agreement at Camp David, in order to put more pressure for concessions on the Israelis. But a careful look at the circumstances again suggests a more complex picture.

In late September, it became known that Sharon was planning a walk on the Temple Mount⁄Haram al-Sharif. Arafat made his visit to Barak’s home to plead with him to stop the walk, but Barak, according to Arafat, said he could do nothing. In subsequent statements, Barak has said that it was an internal Israeli political matter, that it was coordinated with Palestinian security officials, and that it had nothing to do with the outbreak of violence that ensued. This was not the view of knowledgeable observers at the time. Dennis Ross said of Sharon’s walk, ‘I can think of a lot of bad ideas, but I can’t think of a worse one.’ Given his anti-peace, anti-Palestinian reputation and the prevailing unrest, it was clear the event would be provocative, and it seemed calculatedly so at a moment when provocation might pay Sharon electoral dividends. On September 28, Sharon took his little stroll accompanied by one thousand Israeli police officers. The next day, demonstrations resulted in violence that was to explode over the next few months. According to the report submitted by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, as head of a commission established to determine the cause of the violence, the conflict began when a large number of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators were confronted by a large Israeli police contingent. ‘The Palestinians threw stones in the vicinity of the Western Wall. Police used live ammunition to disperse the demonstrators, killing 4 persons and injuring 200.’ Fourteen Israeli police were also injured. Over the next three months the number of Palestinian deaths rose rapidly. According to the Mitchell report, ‘most incidents did not involve Palestinian use of firearms and explosives.’
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By the end of the first week, more than sixty Palestinians had been killed along with five Israelis, and several international groups complained of excessive use of force by the Israeli army. Many Palestinians, as well as some Israelis with whom I spoke, believe that the army, increasingly dominated by right wingers and devoted to Sharon, purposely used excessive force in order to provoke an intifada that would justify ending peace talks and moving back massively into the occupied territories.

Regardless of the truth of that speculation, my point is not to whitewash the Palestinians or absolve them from blame for either the failure of Camp David or the violence that has devastated the region for the past two years. I believe, and a number of Palestinians agree, that Arafat made a huge mistake not to respond more positively and creatively at Camp David. But the failure and the violence were not solely due to Arafat and were certainly not a manifestation of an unremitting dedication to the destruction of Israel.

This brings us to the real problem: Although the orthodoxy is wrong, U.S. policy is based on it. As a result, our actions are accelerating the global alienation from America at just the moment when we need a few friends. Here is how a top official in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv explained the situation to me: ‘Israeli governments are always coalitions, a fact that gives extremist parties disproportional power and that effectively makes Israel a hostage of the settlers and the Big Israel crowd. They also want a Jewish state, and the desire for the land coupled with the desire for a Jewish state inevitably implies either some kind of ethnic cleansing or a South African-style apartheid. The only practical solution is an imposed settlement of some kind by the United States, perhaps in conjunction with NATO. But because the U.S. Israeli-Christian lobby is 2000 percent behind Israel and controls the U.S. Congress, that won’t happen.’ I can only add that unless the lobbies and the Congress and the White House wake up, the prospect is for the United States to pour more billions of dollars into expansion of Israeli settlements. This policy will catalyze violence and lead to brutal reprisal that will bring more global disdain for the United States. And the peace all sides desperately want will only recede.

TAIWAN

G
iven that it involves the world’s most populous and rapidly developing country and its richest and most powerful one, Americas relationship with China is probably the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Ever since the ‘Opening to China’ in 1972, U.S. China policy has been aimed at normalizing relations and weaning China away from central planning economics and communist politics. By any measure, this policy has had substantial success. China has become the location of choice for global manufacturers, and U.S. companies alone have invested almost $40 billion.
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It has also become a member of the World Trade Organization with full U.S. backing and a significant investor in the United States. In addition to adopting capitalism, China has also dramatically opened its social and political system. While it is by no means a democracy, the rights and freedoms of everyday people have greatly increased.

On the face of it there should be few problems between the United States and China. Only one thing could negate this progress, and that is U.S. intervention in Taiwan-China relations.

For the Chinese, the status of Taiwan is a fundamental matter of national sovereignty and of throwing off the last vestiges of quasi-colonial rule. It is also a matter of finishing the Chinese civil war, which ended on the mainland in 1949. The Chinese see any foreign intervention regarding Taiwan as unacceptable interference in their internal affairs. While it’s a bit of a stretch, an analogy may be helpful here. My daughter has a home on the island of Maui overlooking the Maui channel and the uninhabited island of Kahoolawe. In recent years a Hawaiian independence movement has arisen among some of the descendants of the original Polynesian inhabitants of the Islands. Imagine that the Hawaiian inde-pendentistas should occupy Kahoolawe and declare a new independent Monarchy of Hawaii. No doubt the U.S. Coast Guard or Navy would be sent to quell the uprising. Now suppose the Chinese were to dispatch their navy to patrol the Maui channel in order to protect the new Hawaiian state from harm. I know it’s unlikely, but if it happened you can imagine the outrage that would grip every American.

It was precisely that outrage I met when I made a swing through China in the spring of 2002. No meeting could begin or end except on the issue of U.S. interference in Taiwan and why the United States wanted to risk war over a matter that was wholly the concern of the Chinese. Why indeed? Before we get to that, let’s turn to what caused this uproar.

On April 24, 2001, the United States announced a massive sale of weaponry to Taiwan. The $4 billion package was to include four destroyers, a dozen antisubmarine airplanes, and up to eight submarines capable of launching not only torpedoes but cruise missiles. This was the first time a U.S. administration had sold unambiguously offensive weapons to Taiwan, and the sale was coupled with an unprecedented agreement to expand U.S. training of Taiwan forces in using advanced weapons systems. The announcement came only hours after China’s ambassador to the United States had told a luncheon audience that ‘China-U.S. relations are at a crossroads; continued U.S. sales of advanced weapons to Taiwan threatens Chinas national security, violates its sovereignty, and emboldens the separatist forces on that Chinese island.’
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The sale was seen as a big victory for Taiwan (especially for the Taiwanese pushing independence) and its U.S. lobbyists (including Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, where the ships would be built, and a couple of major U.S. think tanks that get large grants from Taiwan), who had been frustrated by Clinton’s deferral of their proposals while he pursued engagement with China.

Even more surprising were the president’s comments the following day: Bush said the United States would do ‘whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself’ even if that required the full force of American military power.
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Although China called this an ‘open provocation,’ it was followed in succeeding months by unprecedented visits of top Taiwanese military officials to meet ‘unofficially’ with top U.S. defense authorities and by expansion of U.S training of and coordination with Taiwan’s military forces.

The problem with all this, and the reason it infuriated Beijing, was that it was a complete violation of the spirit and probably the letter of the Joint Communique of August 17, 1982, one of the three key documents that govern U.S.-China relations. In that document, the United States reiterated ‘that it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’’ The United States also said that ‘it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution.’

This was not the first time the United States had appeared to breach this agreement. In the heat of the 1992 presidential election campaign, the first President Bush had announced the sale of 150 F-16 fighters to Taiwan (planes far superior to anything in the mainland Chinese inventory) in an apparent effort to solidify his political base in Texas, where the planes are made, and also to curry favor with anti-China right-wing Republicans often known as the China or, more recently, the Taiwan lobby. To understand what’s going on here you need to know a bit of history.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, China was the destination of choice for American Protestant missionaries. ‘Saving’ China was the missionary equivalent of the commercial goal of providing the oil to light the lamps of China. I can remember from my boyhood the occasional visits of the missionaries in China being supported by my own church. Among the missionaries were the parents of Henry B. Luce, the founder and editor of
Time
magazine, whom Theodore White described as the most powerful opinion-maker in America. White also noted that ‘in Luce’s mind, the purpose of Christ, and the purpose of America joined in a most simple, uncomplicated fashion, and the purpose of both embraced the Chinese people.’
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Among the Chinese it embraced were Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who were named ‘Man and Wife of the Year’ by
Time
in 1937. Chiang, the leader of the Kuom-intang or Nationalist Party of China, had managed to gain loose dominance over Chinas warlords and was moving to unite the country, with some success except for the stubborn resistance of his erstwhile allies, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong. Madame, or Mei Ling, was the daughter of T.V. Soong, one of China’s richest men, who had made his fortune from publishing Bibles. Madame, a graduate of Wellesley College and a Methodist, had persuaded Chiang to convert to Christianity. It was these two who led China as the World War II threatened, and to whom Luce and the missionaries rallied. Said the
Missionary Review of the World
, ‘China has now the most enlightened, patriotic, and able rulers in her history.’
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That was not the view that evolved in the mind of General Joseph Stilwell after he dealt with Chiang and Madame as Commanding General of U.S. Forces in the China-Burma-India theater and as chief of staff to Chiang. A fluent Chinese speaker, Stilwell was known as ‘Vinegar Joe’ for his blunt opinions. After years of frustration with Chiang, who seemed more interested in husbanding his resources for an eventual showdown with Mao’s communists than in fighting the Japanese, Stilwell pithily described the problem: ‘The trouble in China is simple: We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.’
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While Stilwell found the communists disciplined, tough, and eager to fight the Japanese, he found Chiang’s soldiers unfed and unpaid because the generals stole the money, and deployed more against the communists than against the Japanese. While Stilwell fought valiantly to reform Chiang’s graft-ridden dictatorship and for a degree of control that would allow him to field a real Chinese army in harness with the communists against the Japanese, Madame used her charm, contacts, and Luce’s doting press to have Stilwell removed. White’s conclusion says it best: ‘I was beginning to believe the Chinese government was totally incapable of governing. He [Chiang] was not only useless to us but useless to his own people, which was more important. If Stilwell had had his way, the Communists might not have won China or if they had, would have won as our allies or at least not regarded us as enemies.’