Playing Big Brother

Despite fervent denials, the United States shows every sign of emerging again as the worlds policeman. In one week alone, Bill Clinton and his aides laid down the law for places as far apart as Cuba and Hong Kong, Iraq and Myanmar.

It would be unrealistic to advance any intrinsic objection to this assumption. Wealth and power generate responsibility. Inevitably, the end of the Cold War means the age of Pax Americana. Until the dawn of that distant day when the global community can police itself, possibly through some mechanism controlled by the United Nations, it is to the US that we must look to hold the peace in far-flung places. The Americans alone can afford to mount rescue operations in Somalia or Bosnia, and temper realpolitik with a measure of human concern in Hong Kong where their investments are valued at $40 billion. With 40,000 American citizens there, the US may also have a genuine reason for taking an interest in the civil liberties of some six million Hongkongers as they await merger with China.

 

Problems arise when lesser men claim to implement, but for petty personal reasons, Woodrow Wilsons lofty ideal of not confining the mission to make men free only in America. Ronald Reagan called it Americas exceptional destiny; George Bush modestly referred to it as a new world order. The dream dies hard. It can lead to convolutions that come dangerously close to destroying American credibility and the capacity to give a constructive lead in world affairs.

Earlier this week, Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, accused Myanmars military junta of turning a blind eye to drugs operations. By sheer coincidence, the same day the US justice department criticised the Federal Bureau of Investigation for not being diligent enough in unmasking Aldrich Ames, the Central Intelligence Agency officer who had been spying for Moscow since 1985.

Who would have thought of a connection between the two? But connected they are.

Project Paper, one of the CIAs most important covert operations in the fifties, is largely responsible for Myanmars plight today. As it happened, Amess father, Carleton, disguised as a Fulbright Fellow in Yangon, was involved in the operation to arm, train and finance an army under a Nationalist Chinese general, Li Mi, who had fled to Myanmar. Failing to make any headway against China, Li turned to opium cultivation, thus laying the foundations of todays Golden Triangle, and the war to overthrow Myanmars then civilian rulers.

The latter wanted the UN to condemn the operation. Thwarted by the US, they terminated all American aid which had been the cover for clandestine help for Li. Myanmar is still suffering from the consequences of the CIA-Li conspiracy.

The CIAs record in Iraq, which has just been treated to another peremptory Clinton ultimatum, is just as grim. Some 300 Iraqis paid with their lives last year for the abortive CIA plot to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Who is to know whether the agency is not up to some other mischief when the US threatens to attack if Iraq sends helicopters to rescue Haj pilgrims stranded on the Saudi Arabian border?

Of course, coordination between the White House and CIA headquarters at Langley has never been perfect. The fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba revealed as much. But the world will not bother about such niceties as it watches with mounting concern the current trial of a Spanish businessman who exported tinned food, diapers and sanitary napkins from Miami to Cuba. Arrested, he is being held in a federal detention centre. A federal grand jury has indicted him for violating the US Trading With The Enemy Act.

Will the long arm of American justice now reach out to Paris and indict Jacques Chirac, whose government has just signed an investment protection agreement with Cuba? France, along with Germany, Italy and Spain, also resisted US pressure to condemn China at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The arms embargo imposed in 1989 still remains, but will probably be lifted as soon as Beijing commits itself clearly to buying French weaponry.

Closer inspection of many moral positions adopted by western governments reveals a similar element of calculation. The US is the biggest offender, not necessarily because it is given to more political hyperbole but because of its internal political dynamics, and because it has weightier worldwide interests to defend.

While everyone is puzzled over the scope of the consequences with which Clinton threatened China if Hong Kongs civil liberties are eroded, the consequences of the warning itself extend beyond diplomatic semantics. Enforcement would precipitate an international crisis. Retreat would expose American rhetoric as mere bluster.

Perhaps Clinton has been forced to this cruel pass by Congressional pressure and the need to allay any suspicion that his Democratic Party is obligated to China because of illegal campaign donations. But that only strengthens the fear that altruism alone does not inspire his knight-errantry.

In principle, no one is better equipped to be the custodian of a code of global morality than the chief executive of the worlds only superpower. But the man who would aspire to that exacting role must, like Caesars wife, himself be above suspicion.

While everyone is puzzled over the scope of the consequences with which Clinton threatened China if Hong Kongs civil liberties are eroded, the warning itself extends beyond diplomatic semantics.