A palace for Sudan

According to Washington Post Op-ed columnist Sebastian Mallaby (The Washington Post: A Palace for Sudan), while visiting Sudan, Chinese president Hu Jintao “demonstrated his contempt for the Western understanding of the world, while 'everybody' was hoping he would “back the West's Sudan policy”.

Mallaby goes on to rambble: “the United States and its allies have flown in food and medicines, provided logistical help and money [...] because tossing babies into bonfires is a crime against humanity.” Nice! Who's is doing the tossing in Iraq? And who is preparing to paint a mushroom cloud in the nighttime skies above Tehran?

Hu called on nations to “respect the sovereignty of Sudan”, Mallaby laments. What's wrong with that? The U.S. certainly didn't respect the “sovereignty of Iraq”. “If a nation slaughters its civilians, harbors terrorists or refuses to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, it forfeits its right to sovereignty.” Isn't that a nice description of the U.S.? Sending its men and women (with or without uniform) to die in Iraq, harboring the world's most famous terrorists Bush and Cheney, and refusing to let U.N. weapons inspectors force it to dismantle its nuclear arsenal?

What exactly is president's Hu's crime while visiting Sudan? “Hu used his trip to cancel $80 million of Sudanese debt, to announce a plan to build a railway line and to visit an oil refinery that China partly owns”. Wow, that's a real Vista.

Mallaby even manages to add that “Hu's visit was a statement that [...] brushed aside the memory of the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.” And “Hu was implicitly saying that economic development comes first and that political development is unimportant”. Mallaby is sinking ever more deeper in the swamp of hypocrisy. Wasn't it the West that put economic plunder before anything else? And if Hu would preach a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Proletarian Revolution to let politics play its prime role, wouldn't Mallaby be the first to castigate it?

“This Chinese understanding of development threatens to undermine the Western one”, Mallaby concludes. Let's hope it does.