Posted on 06/02/2007 2:04:38 PM PDT by Dr. Marten
The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations—creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.
The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials.
Under the deliberately fuzzy diplomatic formula hammered out between former President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1971, the United States agreed that there is only “one China” —with its capital in Beijing.
But right-wing Republicans in particular continued to embrace Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion 125 miles off the Chinese coast, long after their own party leaders and U.S. big business embraced the communist regime.
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, some of Taiwan’s most fervent allies were swept back into power in Washington, particularly at the Pentagon, starting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
They included such key architects of the Iraq War as Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, and Steven Cambone, Rumsfeld’s new intelligence chief, Wilkerson said. President Bush’s controversial envoy to the United Nations, John Bolton, was another.
While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon “neocons” took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan’s pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian.
“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”
Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”
“This went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”
Routine military ties had been suspended in early 2001 after China forced a U.S. reconnaissance plane down on Hainan Island off Vietnam.
Feith, now teaching and working on a book at Georgetown University, responded that Wilkerson’s “remarks are not even close to being accurate. They are phrased so vaguely and sweepingly that it is impossible to deny them with precision, but they are not right.”
Rumsfeld’s former spokesman Lawrence DiRita called Wilkerson’s allegations “completely ridiculous—clear and simple . . . absurd.”
“The idea that there was some kind of DoD attempt to favor some faction in Taiwan, as described by Wilkerson ... is just crazy,” DiRita said in a brief telephone interview.
Wilkerson told a similar story in a recent critical biography of Rumsfeld by Washington-based British journalist Andrew Cockburn.
He elaborated on the episode during a May 7 panel, organized to discuss the controversy over Iraq intelligence at the University of the District of Colombia, as well as in subsequent conversations last week.
“It was a constant refrain of they said one thing, we said another thing for months on end,” Wilkerson said by e-mail. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, you are our allies and we will defend you—regardless.’ We said, ‘Do worry—if you declare independence, we may not be there; so be quiet and let sleeping dogs lie. . . .’ ”
Another key character in the minidrama was Therese Shaheen, the outspoken chief of the U.S. office of the American Institute in Taiwan, which took on the functions of the American embassy after the formal 1979 diplomatic switch.
Shaheen, who happens to be DiRita’s wife, openly championed Chen and the independence movement, at one point even publicly reinterpreting Bush’s reiteration of the “one China” policy, saying that the administration “had never said it ‘opposed’ Taiwan independence,” according to a 2004 account in the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review.
“Therese Shaheen . . . said don’t sweat it, the president didn’t really mean what he said,” Wilkerson said.
Coming from the wife of Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Shaheen’s remarks sent off angry alarms in Beijing.
Powell asked for her resignation.
Douglas Paal was then head of the American Institute in Taiwan, effectively making him the U.S. ambassador there. He backed up Wilkerson’s account.
“In the early years of the Bush administration,” Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the statements and actions of Ms. Therese Shaheen, the former AIT chair, which ultimately led to her departure.”
Now assigned to State Department headquarters, Paal said he, too, “received many first- and second-hand reports of messages conveyed to Taiwan by DoD civilians and perhaps a uniformed officer or two during that time that were out of sync with President Bush’s position.”
DiRita defended his wife, saying “she understood U.S. policy and executed it to the very best of her abilities and wasn’t trying to play games with” Taiwanese independence forces.
“That was always kind of a mythology of what happened over there,” he said.
“They are dangerous men who will lie about almost anyone or anything,” Wilkerson angrily responded by e-mail, singling out Feith, DiRita, Cheney and Rumsfeld for scorn.
He called back-stage encouragement of the Taiwanese “even more serious” than the alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence, because it could provoke China to attack the island, triggering a U.S. response and the world’s first nuclear shooting war.
The independence issue, agrees China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon, is Beijing’s third rail—touch it and you die.
“Even if the odds are fairly low of miscalculation leading to war, and war then bringing in the United States, this scenario is scary,” they recently wrote in The Washington Times.
A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”
Ping.
We should also arm them and stand behind them so they can stay that way.
Call it what they want...the ROC is already an independent and free nation. The rest is simply semantics to coddle and appease one of the most brutal regimes in history, that of the Red Chinese.
They are still communists, they still supress individual and political freedom, despite their economic growth. They have simply found a way to avoid the failed economic policies of the Stalinists and Maoists and are using an almost fascist economic model couple with their communist politics to continue to fuel their rise...and we are helping fund it.
Ultimately, there will be a tipping or breaking point, either for us or for them. I personallky believe that if we treated the PRC much more like Reagan treated the Soviets we would have a much better chance of ensuring that it is them, and their Communist regime that breaks and not us.
It wasn’t the Chinese who did that, it was a few greedy Chinese businessmen.
I guess you missed this article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSPEK4362920070529
I’d say it’s comparable to Enron and several other instances of greedy businessmen here in the US.
Powell and his minions are worried that Bush and company were insufficiently servile.
Taiwan is an independent country. No amount of wordplay can disguise what is plain reality. To claim that there is only “one China” makes sense only if you mean it in the same way you might say that there is only “one anglosphere”. OK, fine, only one anglosphere, and if Canada threatens to withdraw from it, as they occasionally do, we will do, what? Invade them?
Sure, fine.
But China isn’t threatening to invade Taiwan “if” they cease to be ethnicly or culturally Chinese, they are threatening to invade them when the time is right. And they will. The question for us is only if we will be complicit in the destruction of an independent democracy, if we will stand by and study our shoes while they die, or if we will stand by them with all the risks that will mean.
Powell and company have already signed on to the other team.
I agree.
Yep. It would be painful...more painful than what happened to the Soviets because we have allowed ourselves to become so wed at the hip to them economically...but that would still be far cheaper and less painful than either seeing ourselves break, or fighting a major war with them on their terms and when they are feeling their oats after their rise. Better to address it now if we can.
As I said, they can call it what they want.
It is clear that any friend of freedom and liberty and people who have found it would support the ROC IMHO and not be in favor of tossing them to the "wolves" purely over "stars in the eyes" economic potential sold to us by a totalitarian regime. The term, "pig in a poke", ultimately comes to mind.
Fight them now or fight them later.
One day we will have to fight them.
Weeks later, when the PRC government relented, the factories were just empty shells, stripped of product and machinery.
“Fight them now or fight them later. One day we will have to fight them.”
I disagree, but since most of our government shares that mentality you’re probably right. There’s no reason why Sino-US relations can’t be managed in the same fashion as relations with the Soviet Union.
If you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it.
Face. They’ve pulled the same crap with SARS, Bird Flu and Streptococcus Sui.
Wilkerson is a Colin Powell wannabe. He is also a nut-case who has accused Bush and Cheney of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency he will likely be given a post commesurate with his limited ability, i.e., Secretary of State.
Good thing we didn’t fight the Chicoms. Many freepers need to look at what transpired in the current war in Iraq. We lost 3500 KIA and over half of the public want to get out of Iraq. During the war we ran out of ammo that we had to buy them from South Korea, Taiwan and Israel to make up for the shortfalls as National Guard units had to receive additional training prior to deployment. The steel needed for the armor kits on the HUMMVV, over 90 percent were produced in China. The military batteries needed to power the handheld electronics barely kept up in production and most of the rechargeable lithium ions used were made in China. The Iraqi optempo is a lot lower than a serious conventional war between China and US over Taiwan. We globalized our production base and applied digital age management philosophies that say we do not need to be self sufficient nor is it necessary to stockpile spares in accordance with lower cost commercial philosophy of just in time logistics. Result is if our armed forces do not win a war within six months, the lack of production base will start to reel its ugly head. If we are stretched tight against Iraq what will happen to us if we had to face a larger enemy 90 miles off her coastline? Rule number one in foreign policy - write your foreign policy doctrine around your military capability. If your armed forces is not ready, do not declare a policy that you cannot back up with force and use the time to ramp up the military, spares and production base. The neocons did neither. Reviewing on what has transpired on Iraq, I am glad we did not tangle with the Chinese. Just for comparison, during World War II we made enough shells and ammo for a 12 million man military plus spares to send to Britain, Canada, Australia/NZ, Soviet Union, China and etc. Today we barely kept up supporting a 240,000 men groundforce. Problem with modern management is they do not understand, war is still an industrial age mass production concept. Read what happened during the Iraq/Iran War. It began with modern mechanized forces, and it degenerated into World War I trench warfare.
Great insight, you must either be a good manager, a well-rounded citizen who loves personal research, an experienced and highly prized military leader, a disgruntled and unappreciated patriot at the Pentagon or a Washington insider who knows how things oughta be instead of how they are...or you are all of the above! Or maybe you are a Chinese who knows all of our weaknesses.................
This info is public in many industrial journals and publications that are rarely read by the general public except people involved in the business. The buying of ammo from South Korea and Taiwan were reported by the MSM and Asian newspapers. GOP Congressman Duncan Hunter on the Armed Forces Committee has been publicly addressing this production base issue before, during and after Gulf War. Conversely what happen in Iraq is similar to what happen to the US during the openning rounds of the Korean War. We downsized our WWII army, converted most of our war production to commercial usage, and sold off/scrapped most of our spares and supplies as we demobilized. There were ammo and spare shortages during the Korean War. The US learned from that war, and were logistically better prepared for the Cold War. These shortfalls did not happen during the Vietnam War, because our DoD was prepared to fight the Soviets, thus our depots and armories were flushed with supplies until Carter became President and demobilized our military. IMHO the biggest lesson from the Iraqi war is never demobilize your wartime military even when peace is achieved. Historical note - when Eisenhower reduced our Army after the Korean War, it had 18 active combat divisions; during Vietnam War the Army had close to 2 million (DoD - 4 million); Reagan build up, the US Army had 16 combat divisions; today we have about 10 full and 2 composite divisions. If you think this is bad, you do not want to see the historical data on domestic steel and ammo production of the similar time periods. Knowing our strengths as well as our weakness is not unpatriotic and disgruntle. To paraphrase Tzu “Know yourself, know your opponent, and you will never lose a battle”.
Thanks for the info, I knew you were a patriot all along! Let’s all join the good fight with Fred to make it all right!!
Larry Wilkerson ping.
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