China readies for future U.S. fight

CNN ^ | 3/25/03 | Willy Wo-Lap Lam

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

To dismiss Lam as an idiot is to abandon one's credibility regarding China, at any rate.

[Poohbah]

Well, Lam may have an insight into what China's leaders *want* to do.

The problem is that China is a long ways away from actually being able to do it, and their economy looks suspiciously like Enron's balance sheet writ out on a nation-state scale.

As we said when I was a (much younger than I am now :o) jarhead, "want into one hand, s**t into the other, and tell me which one fills up first."

[El Gato]

china isn't capable of attacking the us in the forseeable future.

All depends on what is in those millions of shipping containers besides consumer electronics. Those ships too could be used to transport other "containers". Just as the Brits used container ships to transport all sorts of stuff to the Falklands, including operating radar sets, Harrier jets and other war like stores. They even used one ship as a make do aircraft carrier. (For the Harriers).

Of course container ships are also big and slow targets for all sorts of things that go boom!

[JimRed]

In short, please give us a coherent theory of victory for the Chinese in the scenario you describe.

Victory? I don't think so. But an opportunity to hurt a nation they perceive as an enemy, with plausible deniability (how do we prove that it wasn't Islamofascist terrorists) would be appealing to them.

Kind of like the street punk who vandalizes vehicles because he resents the "rich" owners. If he's not caught, he's "won", but he's won nothing.

[Poohbah]

Victory? I don't think so. But an opportunity to hurt a nation they perceive as an enemy, with plausible deniability (how do we prove that it wasn't Islamofascist terrorists) would be appealing to them.

A large-scale device, exploding in a COSCO hull, with fallout showing that the nuclear material came from China is pretty much a case of the ChiComs shouting "WE DID IT, PLEASE VAPORIZE US!"

There's a reason the USSR never tried any of this stuff during the Cold War--it's a lot easier to ID the source of the bomb than most laymen think.