Dr. Max Stamper and Associates International Public Affairs

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past...

Ian Williams’ first book The Alms Trade was published in 1989 and his second, The UN For Beginners, was published in 1995. The Deserter:Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past is published by Nation Books and is scheduled for release in July 2004.

In 2004, he will have chapters in George Orwell into the 21st Century - T Cushman ed, Paradigm Publishing, Why Kosovo Matters: The Debate on the Left Revisited - Danny Postel, ed. (Cybereditions, 2004) Irving Howe, Ed. John Rodden “Irving Howe’s hero-worship of Trotsky: Where the NeoCons came from,” and in 2005, The Iraq War Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch (eds), 2005 “The UN and Iraq.”

He has also contributed to several collections on international affairs.

He is a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com, and has written for other on-line media such as Salon, Alternet, Fox and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, has also been a columnist for the New York Observer and is correspondent for the Nation, Middle East International, and is regular columnist for George Orwell’s old newspaper, Tribune.

From 1994-1999 he was US Editor of Balkan War Report. Since 1995 he has been US contributing editor and columnist for Investor Relations magazine for which he writes a monthly column, The Speculator which takes an offbeat look at the world of business and economics.

As editor and contributor for IWPR’s WarReport and Transitions he covered the political, economic, and social problems of transition countries and worked with many local contributors.

Internationally, he has contributed to media across the world, from Punch to the Jordan Times to the South China Morning Post, Asia Times, and the Australian.

Before moving to New York in 1989, and since, he was a regular contributor in Britain to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the European, The Observer, and The Independent for which he was one of the founding contributors.

He was twice President and twice Vice President of the United Nations Correspondents Association. He has produced several booklets for UN agencies, including one on Portugal and aid to Africa , another on ASEAN, and has edited reports for agencies such as UNCTAD.

He speaks on the UN and other aspects of international affairs and American foreign policy at venues such as the UN University in Tokyo , Yale, Columbia , NYU, Freedom Forum, and Rutgers , Al Maty Kazakh University, Fukuoka University Japan.

Born in Liverpool in 1949, he graduated from Liverpool University, despite several years suspension for protests against its investments in South Africa.

Consequently, he had a variegated career path, which included a drinking competition with Chinese Premier Chou En Lai and an argument on English Literature with Chiang Ching, a.k.a. Mme Mao.

Chinese Premier Chou En Lai (l.) on his way to a drinking competition with Ian Williams (r., rear) on New Years Eve, 1970.

He worked on the buses and trains, and eventually became a full time labor union official until the early eighties, when he moved into full time writing after winning a Nuffield Fellowship to study Indian unions in 1984.

In 1987 he was a speech-writer for UK Labour party leader Neil Kinnock during the elections. (Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions were derailed when it was revealed that he had plagiarized a Kinnock speech).

In addition to writing, he has worked in various capacities for many TV and radio outlets, ABC, CBC, CNN, BBC, ITN, CNBC, etc.

On target. Williams in shooting competition with a governor in Yemen.

He has appeared on Good Morning America , the O’Reilly Factor, Hardball, Wolf Blitzer, etc.

In 1995 a CBC programme investigating CIA influence on UN contracts, for which he was associate producer, won prizes at both the New York and Columbus festivals.

email: uswarreport@igc.org
website: www.ianwilliams.info

Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations 23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546 16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World? 9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC 2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? 20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot 12 May 2004

UNITED NATIONS -- 20 May 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / On Monday, Taiwan made another try at joining the World Health Organization with observer status that would put it on the same level as the Vatican, the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the Knights of Malta.

With the threat of SARS, avian flu and other exotic Asian infections, it would make eminent sense. So far, with Taiwan, reality has intruded on some international agencies.

The island is a “fishing entity” for international conservation treaties, a ‘customs entity” for the WTO, and so one.

The possibility of a worldwide plague is as nothing compared to that of putting a frown on the faces of those men in Beijing – the ones who initially hushed up the spread of SARS until it was cropping up across the world..

The U.N. in Geneva where the meeting was held originally refused accreditation to all Taiwanese journalists, until New York reversed that after perspicacious officials there realized that this was not the best way to follow up on World Press Freedom Day.

However, local diehards in Geneva still refused entry to anyone who had a Taiwanese passport.

The later explanation was that they would not accept documents issued by the Taiwanese government as proof of identity.

There are over a million Taiwanese passport holders working in mainland and Mainland Chinese immigration officials seem to have no difficulty stamping them, but then U.N. bureaucrats in Geneva probably pride themselves in maintaining higher standards than China.

There are many anomalies in modern politics, but there are few so outrageous as the refusal of most of the world to acknowledge the legal existence of Taiwan, one of the world’s most prosperous states.

If I ever write my memoirs, I would call them “I Was a Teenage Maoist.” In 1970, I was in Beijing, as a student revolutionary, meeting Chou En Lai, Mao’s wife Chiang Ching and the Gang of Four.

In retrospect, the fact that they were seeking the opinions of myself and my colleagues on world affairs suggests a certain naivety.

I got into an argument with Mao’s wife, the redoubtable Chiang Ching who maintained that the only two English proletarian novels were Dicken’s Hard Times, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The tale of the governess who married her boss struck even naïve me as a little too close to the bone to argue with the Shanghai actress who had married Mao, so I let that one be.

However, I could not resist pointing out that the hero of Dicken’s novel was a strikebreaker, a scab, as we unaffectionately termed it in those days.

I could see tell-tale signs of apprehension among her colleagues as they waited for lightening to strike.

“You have long hair” she riposted killingly, which was somewhat kinder, and every bit as logical as the arguments she used against her opponents in the culture field in China.

So why is an ex-quasi-Red Guard supporting Taiwan’s right to independence? Well in part for the same reasons that I was in Beijing then, when I supported the right of peoples like the Vietnamese, or Angolans, to free themselves from imperial rule.

In the days when Chiang Kai Shek’s authoritarian rule over the island was as repressive as the mainland’s and when his regime claimed the island to be the launching pad for a “liberation” of the whole of China, it was difficult to feel much sympathy.

Since the death of Chiang Kai-Shek, however, the Taiwanese have built what is closest to a European Social-Democratic state in Asia.

There is a robust democracy, there is free health care and education, and there are independent trade unions.

In fact, Taiwan is, that European sense, more developed than the USA, and more socialist than the mainland, where the only thing left of the Communist Party’s program since it dissolved the iron rice bowl and admitted millionaires to membership is a limpet-like attachment to power and a nationalist agenda that demands obeisance from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Taiwan has been under mainland control for just a couple of years in the last century, and it was not a happy occasion.

Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist army massacred thousands of the locals to show who was in charge, and brought large numbers of mainlanders over to run a government in exile.

Until the last decade, the government in Taipei included elderly deputies from Mongolia, whose independence the Nationalists didn’t accept either, so it is not just the PRC that has an Alice in Wonderland view of history.

It really would take Lewis Carroll to do justice the present position where Beijing prefers a Nationalist Party in Taiwan that officially claims to be the government in exile of all China, to a local Taiwanese Party that is prepared to “grant” independence to the mainland, as long as it is reciprocated!

In fact, China’s claim to Taiwan is somewhat less substantial than the British claim on Ireland.

The British went to Ireland some nine hundred years ago and only left recently. Han Chinese only began to migrate to Taiwan in the 17^th Century and mingled with the aboriginal peoples, who like the Irish in the far west, still have their own languages.

China’s claim in fact usurps the U.N. guaranteed right to self-determination that Taiwan’s people have, both in their own right and as a former Japanese colony.

They could vote to join the PRC – but they have not so far, and show every indication that if Beijing stopped threatening to blow up their hearts and minds with persuasive missile batteries, they would be very happy to go their separate way.

It could be objected that since they are Chinese they have no option but to join the mainland.

It would be an interesting argument for Singapore – or Vancouver for that matter.

Instead of trying to woo the Taiwanese it threatens them with “crushing” this week.

It promises one nation two systems in Hong Kong, and after a few short years shows that it was really only kidding with its interference in civil rights and democratic progress there.

There are few more potent methods of fostering a move to independence than threatening people with heavy and indiscriminate weaponry.

People who have tasted democracy cannot, as a rule, be crushed and missiled into loyalty.

Beijing could look with advantage at how gracefully other empires gave up their claims.

The Russians, as heir to the Tsars have every bit as much claim to most of the former Soviet Union as China does to Taiwan.

The British could claim back Australia, New Zealand, Canada – and even the USA on the same historical, and indeed linguistic basis.

Even now, if the majority of the people in Scotland were to vote for independence, it is not really conceivable that even Bomber Blair would be able to keep them in the United Kingdom against their will.

It is just not politically feasible in the modern civilized world. Indeed, even Blair would recognize that the worst thing to do would be to threaten or attack secessionists since it would play straight into their hands.

Beijing should tell the Taiwanese “We accept your right to choose, and in any circumstances, we will be close friends, but we ask you hold off on exercising your choice for a while we work on the relationship.

To begin with, we will fulfill the spirit and letter of our agreements in Hong Kong, and let the people there have the democracy they want.

We will agree a mutual non-aggression pact so that we do not have armed forces facing each other across the Taiwan straits, and we will stop acting like a spoilt child whose ball has been taken away anytime someone recognizes Taiwan.”

In the end, they may have a solution that Taiwanese citizens like – and other countries may be prepared to take Chinese Foreign Policy more seriously if it abandons its obsession with Taiwan and stops bullying others about it.