The United States charged Friday that a Chinese war plane made a “dangerous intercept” of a US Navy aircraft over international waters this week in the South China Sea.
The US has registered “strong concerns” with the Chinese government about “unsafe and unprofessional” conduct by its air force that put the safety of the US crew at risk, said Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman.
The incident happened Tuesday, within 220 kilometres east of China’s Hainan Island, Kirby said.
The Chinese war plane made several passes around the US Navy’s Poseidon 8 plane, coming at one point within 9 metres of the P8’s wing.
The Chinese plane passed the nose of the P8 at a 90-degree angel, showing its belly and most likely its weapons load, Kirby said, and conducted a barrel roll over the top of the P8 at 15 metres.
“This kind of behaviour is not only unprofessional. It’s unsafe,” Kirby said. “It undermines efforts to continue developing military to military relations with the Chinese military.” Kirby said he was not aware of any radio communications from the Chinese plane before the intercept.
“The message we are sending back to China is that it is unacceptable,” Kirby said.
Deputy White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes said the move was a “deeply concerning provocation”.
“We have communicated directly to the Chinese government our objection to this type of action,” Mr Rhodes said.
The hopeful story President Barack Obama wants to tell about Africa is represented in the first stop of his weeklong trip to re-engage the continent, in a country where democracy recently overcame an impending electoral crisis.
During his visit to Senegal on Thursday, Obama also will reflect on the ties many African-Americans share with the continent as he takes a tour of Goree Island, Africa’s westernmost point. By some accounts, millions of Africans were shipped off into slavery across the Atlantic Ocean through the island’s “Door of No Return.”
It’s the first of two island visits Obama planned to highlight racial atrocities of the past. The second was scheduled for Sunday at South Africa’s Robben Island, where anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years.
But Mandela’s condition could affect Obama’s plans. The former South African president is gravely ill, and Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes said it would be left to the Mandela family to decide whether he is up for a visit from Obama this weekend.
Mandela’s legacy hangs over the entire trip, with Senegal among many African countries that have benefited from his example of a peaceful transition to power. “So much of the democratic progress that we see across the continent I think can be tied in some way to the inspiration that Nelson Mandela set,” Rhodes said.
Obama’s focus in Senegal will be on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence. He planned to meet with Senegalese President Macky Sall, who ousted an incumbent president who attempted to change the constitution to make it easier for him to be re-elected and pave the way for his son to succeed him. The power grab sparked protests, fueled by hip-hop music and social media, that led to Sall’s election.
But such people-powered democratic transitions are not always the story of the African experience. Fighting and human rights abuses limited Obama’s options for stops in his first major tour of sub-Saharan Africa since he took office more than four years ago. Obama is avoiding his father’s homeland, Kenya, whose president has been charged with war crimes, and Nigeria, the country with the continent’s most dominant economy. Nigeria is enveloped in an Islamist insurgency and military crackdown.
Obama’s itinerary in Senegal was designed to send a message, purposefully delivered in a French-speaking, Muslim-majority nation, to other Africans in countries that have not made the strides toward democracy that Senegal has. Obama plans to meet with civil society leaders at the Goree Institute and visit the Supreme Court to speak about the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law in Africa’s development.
“It’s not enough to have elections, it’s not enough to have democratically elected leaders,” Rhodes said. “You need to have independent judiciaries. You need to have confidence in the rule of law. You need to have efforts to combat corruption. Because, frankly, not only is that good for democracy and respect for human rights, but it’s critical to Africa’s economic growth, because where you have clear rules of the road and efforts to combat corruption, businesses will invest, and jobs will be created and growth will take off. And that’s what we want to see.” – AP
Everyone is wondering who Mr. Rhodes is. Ben Rhodes, a 30-something who ascended from literally nowhere to be what seems a main driving force behind Obama’s foreign policy. He is credited with convincing the president to embrace the Arab Spring, convincing the president to bomb Libya, and, now, convincing the president to start yet another war, this time against Syria.
[To South Africans his name sounds a lot like that of Cecil John Rhodes (5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902), a ruthless imperialist, therefore not a friendly name.]
Who is he? How did a 24-year old aspiring fiction-writer in 2002 suddenly become one of the drafters of not only the 9/11 Commission report but also the Iraq Study Group Report? Then move on to Obama’s presidential campaign as a speechwriter and then to Deputy National Security Advisor, from which he announced the beginning of a US war on Syria while the president met with supporters in the East Room of the White House? Those familiar with Washington know that such miraculous ascents rarely happen on their own and are equally rarely the result of pure, raw talent.
There might be some clues to his brother David’s also improbable rise — from a lowly production assistant at Fox News at the end of the 1990s to covering presidential elections for Fox News (including the one where his brother was writing Obama’s speeches) to the lofty position of president of CBS news by 2011!
The excellent Russ Baker was wondering about all this way back in March, when he noticed a typical New York Times gloss-over article on Rhodes.
Aside from his quite unbelievable rise, we do know that he was catastrophically wrong on Libya, where a Time Magazine article pointed out at the time that he was the strong counter-weight to those who argued for more caution on the use of force.
Here is how Time put it back in 2011, when the interventionists were on the verge of their triumph:
Obama and his aides know they are taking a big risk. “It’s a huge gamble,” says the senior administration official. The administration knows, for example, that al Qaeda, which has active cells in Libya, will try to exploit the power vacuum that will come with a weak or ousted Gaddafi. They also know that the U.S. will have to rely on other countries for the crucial task of rebuilding Libya and that the region may in fact be further destabilized by intervention. Outweighing that, the National Security Council’s Ben Rhodes says, are the long-term benefits of saving lives, protecting the possibility of democratic change elsewhere in the region and—tellingly—ensuring “the ability of collective action to be a tool in circumstances like this.”
Rhodes carried the day on Libya and he was completely incorrect in his assessment, his analysis, his prediction, and his prescription. Anyone who bothers to look at Libya today, which is run by gangs of roving extremist death squads would see what a fool Ben Rhodes is for his promise of “democratic change” in Libya — and how much more foolish is the president for following the advice of such a person.
Rhodes is named as the source of the White House-altered CIA talking points on Benghazi, where references to the Islamist extremist role in the attack on US Ambassador Chris Stevens were erased. It is understandable why the fiction writer Rhodes would want to toss that reference in the circular file: that particular sub-plot did not fit in with the main theme he had already painstakingly written, namely that the US attack on Libya would end the killing, stabilize the country, and bring about a democratic revolution that would continue to spread through the region. Fiction writers understand that a sub-plot could take your readers too far off the main narrative of the story and cause serious structural problems. That is why there are so many rounds of re-writes. The killing of Stevens and the rise of murderous extremists did not fit the plot, so it had to be deleted.
Being wrong on war when you are on the sending end of death and destruction is less obvious to your countrymen than when you are on the receiving end. But anyone living in Libya after Rhodes’ “life-saving” mission knows full well the kind of liberation that comes at the tip of a US missile. And neighboring countries know as well what happens when a nation armed to the teeth with weapons, including chemical weapons, completely implodes after its infrastructure is destroyed by foreign attack.
In Washington, though, being catastrophically wrong on Libya eminently qualifies Ben Rhodes to take the lead on US Syria policy. – Lew Rockwell Blog
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