Libya Crisis Thrusts China in Spotlight

Launcelot Gobbo told his elderly father in a poignant moment in William Shakespeare's play Merchant of Venice, "Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long." But the tragedy of life is often that by the time "truth is out", Gobbo would have become sand-blind and would no more be able to see his son.

For the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who perished since 2003, it is no consolation that the "truth is out" - that the war was a phony one bred by greed and imperial arrogance. Which is why it becomes important that the United States' proposed intervention in Libya shouldn't turn out to be another sojourn in yet another unknown land of killings.