By William Buckley
Published May 12, 1999
The big mistake was to apologize.
It's OK to regret killing three
Chinese in the embassy in Belgrade, but
what is one apologizing for? It is as
nonsensical as the words one hears on an
airline. "We apologize for the late arrival."
That gives off the sound of the pilot having
come in late, or getting lost. You do not
"apologize" if fog or dispatch instructions
made you late, and you do not apologize if a
bomber unintentionally bombed a foreign
embassy.
But then there was obviously something
more afoot than the death of three Chinese.
The Chinese government, it quickly
transpired, was if not directly behind the
anti-U.S. riot, (a) tolerant of it, and (b)
pleased by it. We are talking about hundreds
of thousands of people whose parents lived
through the Cultural Revolution and may
have been among those many thousands
who told marauding Red Guards that the
neighbor over there had been seen listening
to a foreign broadcast, leading to public
execution. The idea that the wretched
Chinese, 35 million of whose progenitors
paid for China's love affair with Maoism, are
shocked by the accidental death of three
journalists causes one to wonder.
During the 1930s, Henry Wallace, as
secretary of agriculture, ordered the
slaughtering of pigs, in an effort to maintain
the price of pork. There was a great uproar.
Wallace countered with the only witticism
ever attributed to him. "You'd think," he said
about his critics, "they were all related."
We couldn't, one supposes, really expect the
president of the United States or even the
secretary of state to say it, but someone
"close to the White House" might usefully
have been quoted: "Under strict
understanding of anonymity, the source said
that the unofficial government line is: What is
Peking complaining about? If the Chinese
are against random killing, they should be
exercised about what Milosevic is doing. A
second White House source said it would be
helpful to the cause of human freedom if
Peking organized a volunteer force to go to
Kosovo to fight the aggressor. 'They could
call it the Belgrade Memorial Expeditionary
Force,' he said."
We learn that the Chinese government is in
fact continuing what the Cultural Revolution
types did routinely. It was to picture the
United States as an imperialist power
insensitive to the rights of other people and
prisoner to the capitalist/imperialist
imperative to commit aggression. The Wall
Street Journal reports that the identical thing
is going on in Russia, with readers and
viewers enjoined by state media to believe
that NATO, led by the United States, is
engaged in crude imperialism. Counter facts,
of course, have not the faintest possibility of
prevailing against the official line.
Here is a true challenge to U.S. diplomacy.
We have been courting the Chinese
throughout the tenure of Mr. Clinton. If it
were youth acting on their own impulses, we
could ignore the event -- youth were born to
be ignored, when they give way to political
impulses. But this is not what is going on. We
have not heard Official Peking raise its
authoritative hand and say, "Stop!
Comrades, the United States government
has expressed its regret and will pay
damages to the aggrieved families." We have
to deduce that the Peking government thinks
it productive to antagonize the United States.
Which requires us to answer the question:
Why?
The protest might have been generated by
some kind of nationalist scorn for defective
Western intelligence. The CIA was using old
maps, and should have been using
up-to-date maps that marked with a big X the
Chinese embassy. But then one thinks back
on the line used by National Review 40 years
ago: "The attempted assassination of
Sukarno had all the appearances of a CIA
operation. Everyone in the room was killed
but Sukarno."
In fact, any attempt at such finely calibrated
bombing as to guarantee immunity is
surrealistic. Wars inevitably swoop down on
people who are not engaged in them, and
while true regret can be expressed at
incidental casualties, it is unreal to expect
either that there will be none such in the
future, or that a heavy obligation in
conscience rests with the offender. The
NATO alliance, led by Mr. Clinton, has a
great deal to be achingly remorseful about,
but none of it has to do with the object of
concern of rioting young Chinese.
Write to William Buckley at Universal
Press Syndicate: 4520 Main St., Kansas
City, Mo. 64111.