Chinese Embassy bombing:A politically rational conspiracy theory

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by Shekhar Krishnan 
with comment and addition by
[the!] Chalmers Johnson

Shekhar Krishnan
School of Oriental & African Studies
University of London
Centre of South Asian Studies
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
U.K.

writes:

To take a purely cynical view of the situation, my initial hunch, which
many of my friends in the U.S. deem a crackpot hypothesis, was that the
Embassy was intentionally targeted in order to make impossible the passage
of the Bonn Agreement in the Security Council. Whether this occurs or not
is yet to be seen, but seen effectively, it could indeed be the case. The
bombing has pushed Russia back to the outsider's position it had been
relegated to by NATO until about a week before the bombing, when the
Germans attempted to bring them in for fear that Joshka Fischer and the
Greens might pull out of the Government, which would be disastrous for the
coherence of European policy towards Kosovo. I don't think that the US and
Britain would have sought Russian consultation otherwise; indeed it has
been the trend since the enlargement of NATO to specifically exclude
Russia.

It will be very difficult to get Russia and China to now agree to any kind
of negotiated settlement brokered between Russia, the US, and the rest of
NATO. Russian and Chinese neo-nationalist opinion, provoked by this
incident, will scoff at any concessions to Britain, France and the US in
the Security Council now. Neither Moscow nor Beijing will dare encounter
the domestic fury of agreeing to the under-negotiation Bonn Agreement.
Thus the war will continue outside of the purview of the United Nations
and the Security Council, which is precisely in the interests of
Anglo-American policy. To open this conflict to greater debate and 
international scrutiny through the UN would make it even more unpopular
and bring up thorny issues of international law and the UN Charter, 
when everyone knows that this war is illegal according to all laws of 
all the aggressor states and international bodies. We were inching towards
an acknowledgement of this during the negotiations that preceded the
bombing of the Embassy.

---------
Chalmers Johnson adds: 

        Mr. Shekhar Krishnan of the School of Oriental & African Studies,
University of London, raises by far the most plausible explanation of the
U.S. attack on China's Embassy in Belgrade. I believe that in addition to
wanting to sabotage a U.N.-mediated peace in Europe, 'rogue' officials of
the CIA and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency combined with right-wing
members of the Republican Party want to ruin relations with China and
stimulate a new Cold War in East Asia. Their purpose is to give the
American military-industrial-educational complex a new lease on life, sell
arms to Japan and Taiwan even though they know they are worthless (e.g.,
the Theatre Missile Defense, a new version of Star Wars), and elect George
Bush Jr. as president (note that the CIA buildings in Langley, Virginia,
have just been renamed in honor of Governor Bush's father, former
president George Bush).

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[a related conspiracy ?] addendum by Chalmers Johnson

        By far the most important case of this sort of provocation via
low-ranking intelligence officials and Republican Congressmen at the
present time is that of Wen-ho Lee, a computer scientist at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, whom the New York Times (actually journalist Jeff
Gerth, who was the Times's lead correspondent on the Clinton Whitewater
matter) daily denounces as a spy even though the FBI, the Justice
Department, and the Department of Energy cannot find that he did anything
more than give a lecture at a scientisifc conferenece in Beijing in 1988
that the LANL explicity approved. The innuendoes of treason against Lee
have an eery similarity to the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France
exactly a century ago. In that most serious case of anti-Semitic bigotry
in Europe before World War II, French military officers falsely accused
Dreyfus of being a spy for Germany while he was serving on the French
Army's General Staff. He was sentenced to solitary confinement on Devil's
Island until the head of French military intelligence revealed that he had
been framed because he was Jewish in order to protect the real spy, Major
Ferdinand Esterhazy. In 1898 Emile Zola wrote J'accuse to denounce the
plot.
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                   ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
250 Kensington Ave - Apt 608     Tel: 1-514-933 2539    
Westmount/Montreal PQ/QC         Fax: 1-514-933 6445 
Canada H3Z 2G8              e-mail:agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca 

My Personal/Professional Home Page> http://www.whc.neu.edu/gunder.html
My NATO/Kosovo Page> http://csf.colorado.edu/archive/agfrank/nato_kosovo/       
My professional/personal conclusion is the same as Pogo's - 
            We have met the enemy, and it is US 
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