The wind beneath the Wangs

Not an experience I’m used to, being struck dumb. And on Sam Smyth’s garrulous Sunday Supplement, too.

The question which winded me was: did chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and the governments of Russia and France believe, prior to the invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction?
No, wait. This could be slightly interesting.
I’d suggested that the war on Iraq had been launched on a lie, that Bush ’n’ Blair had had no evidence for repeated assertions that they knew for a fact that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD. Christopher Hitchens, David Quinn and Max McGuinness, who’d been butting heads on other issues, coalesced to disagree. Blix, Russia and France had all been convinced that Saddam was up to his oxters in illicit weaponry, they chorused. Bush ’n’ Blair could scarcely be blamed for believing likewise. They had gone to war in good faith.
For a moment, I faltered in the face of their vehement unanimity. The swirl of mendacity still occluding the circumstances in which the invasion had been undertaken didn’t make for simple certainty. I found myself pondering the possibility that I’d gotten it wrong, and resolved to button my lip until I managed a sure fix on the facts. Which I have.
Blix delivered his last report prior to the invasion at the UN General Assembly in New York on March 7 2003, 13 days before the “shock and awe” assault on Baghdad. He provided a detailed account of the UN inspection team travelling around Iraq and checking the claims of the western intelligence agencies. “No evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found,” he informed delegates.
He assured the assembly that, if they wanted, he’d keep looking. “It would not take years, nor weeks, but months,” to complete the task.
Some will recall that the plea to “give the weapons inspectors more time” became something of a mantra for moderate elements within the anti-war movement. This was the position, too, of Russia and France.
In a survey of pre-war analyses of the various parties, published on June 9 2003, the Institute for Science and International Security recorded: “Putin said, ‘Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’... French intelligence services did not come up with the same alarming assessment of Iraq and WMD as did the Britain and the United States. According to secret agents at the [French intelligence service] DGSE, Saddam’s Iraq does not represent any kind of [WMD] threat at this time.” (The ISIS report can be accessed at: www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/usallieswmd.html)
That’s that, then.
It is wearisome that an argument as hoary as this has to be rehearsed at such a remove. But it does. The burden is imposed by the last-ditch defenders of the invasion. Forced by the facts to abandon the positions they’d advanced at the onset of war, they have retreated to a stockade fashioned from fragments of falsehood, from which they sortie forth to rubbish truth and continue to proclaim that the war on Iraq which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent dead and inflamed hatreds across the globe should still be accounted a most excellent adventure.
It can now be said with simple certainty that they’re wrong. Perhaps Christopher or David or Max will take the honourable course, get in contact, concede the case? Or perhaps not.

The bawdy ballad ‘Wang Dang Sweet Poontang’ and the unsubtly suggestive ‘Wang-go Tango’ by the Nuge are the only two instances I know of the name Wang precipitating controversy. Until now.
Last month, the Chinese Government put the wind beneath the Wangs by demanding that as many as possible be erased from society. It’s determined to eliminate zillions of Zhangs and lashings of Lis as well.
It isn’t that President Hu Jintau and the gangster capitalists who have inherited Mao’s monstrous legacy have simply and suddenly developed a Confucian scunner for particular names. It’s just, they say, that there are far too many Wangs, Lis and Zhangs to keep up with. By which, going on their past record, I reckon they mean for the cops to keep up with.
China currently has a population of, in round figures, 1.3 billion. The vast majority share only around 100 names. And the vast majority of this vast majority are called Wang (93 million), or Li (92 million), or Zhang (88 million), or Chen or Zhou (20 million each), or one of five other names with 10 million-plus apiece.
There are more Wangs in China than there are people in Germany, Britain or France. Which makes you think. Although what, I’m not sure.
Incidentally, Chin is not in the top ten, thus undermining the ancient joke about there being more Chins in the Beijing telephone directory than on Pat Rabbitte’s face. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
The preponderance of a small number of names can, it’s true, lead to confusion. China’s two-woman team of speed skaters at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano comprised Yang Yang and Yang Yang. In the event, so to speak, Yang Yang proved the speedier skater. Parents of both young women may have spent perplexed, anxious hours on the morning after the final perusing newspaper headlines announcing, “Yang Yang slips up as Yang Yang glides to gold.”
Much of the problem which this illustrates arises from the rigid Chinese practice, enshrined in law, of children taking their fathers’ names. This is to change. Under a new draft regulation, parents will now be permitted to give their babies surnames combining the names of both father and mother.
Thus, if the father’s surname is Zhou and the mother’s is Zhu, their baby’s surname could become Zhouzhu (or, I suppose, Zhuzhou), giving the child whatever advantage in life comes from having apparently been named after the very wonderful punk princess, Zhouzhu.
The proposed new regulation (that’s Zhouzhu of Zhouzhu and the Banshees. Do try to keep up) has been drafted by the Ministry of Public Security, which doesn’t sound to me like the most cuddly of institutions, and distributed to police departments across China.
Many possessors of the “old hundred names” are up in arms, interpreting the new edict as an insult and a threat to their identity. “What happens if a couple has a child with both names and then they break up?” asks Beijing resident Chen Peng, very reasonably. “Is the child, in the middle of all that turmoil, going to have to choose whether to be known by its father’s or mother’s name?”
A fraught and fascinating dilemma, readers will agree. One solution might be for the Chinese authorities to send a qualified research team to discover how Donegal deals with the Gallagher problem.

Hitchens and myself did agree about God. Which provoked the man behind the bar at Beckett’s to observe: “You and that Englishman, ye don’t recognise mysteries.”
But I do recognise mysteries.
Like, what is the point of the short corner?
Why isn’t Marc Carroll a megastar?
What’s John Waters on about?
And there’ll be more mysteries soon. For reasons nobody understands. Which David Quinn would say proves there must be a God.