Do you think the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia on purpose?

Handle, this is a bad survey, because the question attempts to lead the respondents to a particular conclusion.

There's a false assumption that US intelligence services are all-knowing and US military equipment is all-powerful, so notable failures are assumed to be plots of some sort, especially in the days of _X-Files_. People forget that the majority of the plots that have come to light (such as Watergate) are much more banal.

I don't know if they did on purpose or not, but judging from the explanation under your survey question, I will have to say that bombing France and bombing China are two very different things. China and the West have always historically had trouble with mutual understanding, and will probably remain very suspicious of each other.

All I know personally is that China and the U.S. both have nuclear missiles pointed at each other. I would not want to be caught in the middle if both decide to start pushing buttons.

NATO bombed the Chinese embassy.

bleh

Relations with the Chinese have been very strange for several years. I suspect we just couldn't pass up the opportunity to hit them with (almost) total deniability.

the description confused me because it asked a second question...which one am I supposed to answer?

mandy.. this has nothing to do with the survey.. but I thought you might be interested in this:

http://members.tripod.com/~SerialKillr/forensiclinks.html

Yeah, the U.S. Government wants a war with a billion screaming Chinese.

No wonder the Chinese are pissed. Killing Chinese people is their gig.

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With a guy who gets excited when bombing can begin in charge, and several high profile errors you really begin to wonder...

Yeah right, imagine Clinton thinking to himself :

" Right, let's have some fun here. If we want to incite a new World War, why not bomb the Chinese Embassy. Hey, we could kill a few extra people, become even more unpopular and bingo, we have a war "

Come on, anyone who believes they did this on purpose probably believes pigs can fly.

Fans?

Besides, if Clinton wanted to do this on purpose, he would have waited until he had some sort of personal/moral crisis. ;)

It would have been so amazingly stupid to bomb the embassy on purpose I can't imagine it. China isn't causing us trouble in Yugoslavia, and relations are already strained, so there is nothing to gain.

Badly phrased question. Depending on how you read the comment, "No" could mean "no, they didn't bomb the embassy on purpose," or "no, not just an accident." That pretty much makes this survey broken.

Conspiracy theories belong on forklift. Sod off.

This would have been a much better question if you had left out the commentary and just asked the question. The commentary tries to present a case- a survey tries to determine what opinion people already have.

As I looked at the question again I realized that I neglected to reference the commentary on the question. It is actually a verbatim quote from the column "In The Loop" by Al Kamen from The Washington Post dated May, 17 1999. When I read the column it suggested the question to me, I thought it would be equally thought provoking if I were to include it with the question. I did not intend to steer responses with the quote, I merely thought that it would be impossible to give an informed answer to the question if that particular nugget of information was unknown to the survey answerer. Mea culpa.

I don't know much about the politics between China and the U.S., but I have a hard time believing even our government would be THAT stupid.

I heard that our excuse for bombing them was that we used an old map, yet actually before the Chinese Embassy was erected, that plot of land never *had* a building on it. Who would want to bomb what they thought was an empty lot?

Well perhaps they thought a war factory was later built on it or something. But "we were using an old map" seems like a very lame excuse. It seems to me that either they're doing some bad things and making up lame excuses, or they're just plain incompetent - and either option is fairly scary.

I think that the biggest problem is that we are so accustomed to bombings hitting only military targets that we simply can't handle collateral damage. It is a war, people die. It seems that everyone is forgetting that NATO could be carpet bombing Belgrade right now with no concern for civilians. Everyone should be happy that there are so few civilian deaths, not be horrified by them. I hate to contemplate the public reaction if NATO were to be in a win-or-die war, where tank battles would happen in major cities.

jjg: I think that's the problem, if we were talking "we had no choice, we had to bomb the crap out of them" I think the public reaction would be more like "that sucks, but they had no choice". Because a lot of the public feels they did have a choice any civilian casualties are looked upon harshly.

OK, I'm not going to get into intentions, or anything, but here's the story as laid out in TIME:

Early in the target-identifying process, the wrong street address got attached to the building that is the Chinese Embassy, which looks very similar from the air to the munitions-supply depot across the the street. That was not an old-map problem, it was a human error. So they passed down the line the GPS coordinates for the Chinese Embassy attached to the street address for the actual target. Then, the folks who are responsible for figuring out nearby sensitive sites (hospitals, schools, convents, embassies, etc.) were using a 1996 map, made when the Chinese Embassy was still across the river in Old Belgrade. So the people responsible for the GPS coordinates got them wrong (and it's their job to get them right, so there's no re-check), no sensitive sites showed up in the check, and apparently we don't have any spies in place for an eyeball check (this is the part I find unbelievable, actually).

Not just human error, but missiles don't always go where they're aimed. Plus/minus factor.

What an interesting job, a spy who walks around potential bomb sites making sure the bombing coordinates are right. I wonder if the spy would ask for directions.
Spy: "Excuse me sir, is that the munitions dump or the Chinese Embassy?"

It is difficult to imagine anyone being stupid enough to think that bombing their embassy would give us a political advantage in dealing with the Chinese. On the other hand, we are talking about people in public office in Washington, which improves the odds considerably...

It wasn't about political advantage, it was more on the level of "and eye for an eye", or more simply bullying tactics...

I was 6 years old when this happened. I wouldn't have even been aware that this happened, let alone thought that this may have been intentional. I knew nothing about world events at age 6.