Disclaimer: I’m a huge “Free Tibet” skeptic.
A commenter on Bwog beat me to the punch on this one, but the mistake in Christina Liu’s op-ed in the Spec yesterday was too big to be overlooked. Liu, a junior in the College, writes:

Yet while the Dalai Lamas have received much praise over the years, the history of the title is far from pristine. One Dalai Lama has admitted to having sex with a hundred men and women, knowing all the while that he had AIDS.

I would be really interested in seeing where Liu got this obviously false piece of information. Which Dalai Lama is she talking about? I’m fairly certain it isn’t Tenzin Gyatso, our esteemed current dalai lama, who has held the position since he was two years old in 1937. Yet the AIDS epidemic did not happen until the early 1980s. With her false (fabricated?) piece of information, Liu handily undermines her own argument: that you should know what you are talking about before you take sides on an issue.

And a similarly convoluted case against Tibetan independence.

Now, the moral arguments against Tibetan independence are pretty well known at this point: Tibet was a feudal theocracy pre-1950, the Dalai Lama has more in common with Yasser Arafat than with Nelson Mandela, China’s been the best thing that’s ever happened for Tibetan literacy and public health…etc., etc., etc. I won’t tell you where I stand in the “let them screw up on their own” versus “let [insert country here] screw them up in the name of the common good” debate–suffice it to say, this logic has gotten the U.S. into a good deal of trouble (by the way, pleeeasse click on that link. If you learn one thing from this post, let it be the fact that the Iraq War has an official website), although nationalistically-tinged missionary imperialism seems to be going strong on the Tibetan plateau.

Of course this is an imperfect comparison, since China’s Tibet policy reflects an almost hyper-provincial sense of manifest destiny (or irredentism, if you’re familiar with that concept) rather than Dick Cheney-style utopianism. In fact, Tibet and Iraq have almost nothing in common–which is why the last few paragraphs of Liu’s piece are wildly incoherent:

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