Neocons Gewilde Confrontatie met China evenals Irak
Zelfde hoogste het beleidsneoconservatives van Bush die het buitenlandse beleidsonderneming van Washington inhaalden om Saddam Hussein omver te werpen dat bijna van een gelijkaardige staatsgreep in de V.S. wordt getrokken - China relatie-cre�ërt het potentieel van een kernoorlog over Taiwan, een hoogste assistent aan vroegere Staatssecretaris Colin Powell zegt.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, de V.S. Kolonel van het leger die de leider van Powell van personeel door twee overheidsdiensten was, vroeg vorige maand bovengenoemd in weinig-nota genomen van opmerkingen die „neocons“ in de hoogste sporten van het beleid stil Taiwanese politici aan beweging naar een verklaring van onafhankelijkheid van vasteland China - een handeling aanmoedigde die het communistische regime herhaaldelijk heeft gewaarschuwd zou een militaire staking veroorzaken.
De hoogste V.S. de diplomaat in Taiwan tegelijkertijd, Douglas Paal, steunt de rekening van Wilkerson, die heet door zeer belangrijke vroegere defensieambtenaren wordt betwist.
Onder de doelbewust verwarde diplomatieke formule die tussen vroegere President Richard Nixon en Voorzitter Mao Zedong in 1971 wordt uitgehamerd, waren de Verenigde Staten het ermee eens dat er slechts „één China“ - met zijn kapitaal in Peking is.
Maar de rechtse Republikeinen bleven in het bijzonder Taiwan als anti-communistische bastion 125 mijlen van de Chinese kust omhelzen, lang na hun eigen partijleiders en V.S. de grote zaken omhelsten het communistische regime.
Met de verkiezing van George W. Bush in 2000, wat werd van ferventste bondgenoten van Taiwan de geveegd terug in macht in Washington, in het bijzonder bij het Pentagoon, om te beginnen met Secretaresse van Defensie Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Zij omvatten dergelijke zeer belangrijke architecten van de Oorlog van Irak zoals Paul Wolfowitz, de secretaresse van de afgevaardigdedefensie, Douglas Feith, de ondersecretaris voor beleid, en Steven Cambone, nieuwe de intelligentieleider van Rumsfeld, bovengenoemde Wilkerson. Was de controversiële gezant van President Bush's aan de Verenigde Naties, John Bolton, een andere.
Terwijl Bush openbaar het beleid één-China van zijn vijf voorgangers van het Witte Huis voortzette, bovengenoemde nam Wilkerson, het Pentagoon „neocons“ een verschillende kopspijker, stil aanmoedigend de pro-onafhankelijkheidsvoorzitter van Taiwan, shui-Bian Chen.
De „afdeling van de Defensie, met Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [en] Rumsfeld, verzond een persoon aan Taiwan elke week, hoofdzakelijk om de Taiwanees te vertellen dat de alliantie,“ bovengenoemde Wilkerson, naar pre-jaren '70 terug militaire en diplomatieke relaties doorverwees, „hoofdzakelijk om shui-Bian Chen te vertellen, de waarvan volledige macht in Taiwan op de onafhankelijkheidsbeweging rustte, dat de onafhankelijkheid een goede zaak.“ was
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.
Strong Denials
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. . . .’ ”
Rewriting Bush
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 retired, 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.
Mushroom Clouds
“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.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
See More:IraqHave Your Say: Neocons Wanted Confrontation With China As Well As Iraq
Please note, only selected comments will be published.
Or discuss this report in our our new forums
This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 12:44 am and is filed under War & Terrorism News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Free Newsletter
Loading ...Related News
- Cheney accused of war crimes
- China tells Bush to Sling his Hook
- Nepal police detain 100 Tibetan protestors
- China is world’s largest Internet-using population
- US and UK rank poorly as global privacy is being eroded
Email This Page To A Friend
Latest Headlines
- The Pentagon vs. America
- Data fear haunts ID card scheme
- Pentagon Targeted Iran for Regime Change after 9/11
- Gov set to defy its own experts and upgrade cannabis
- Nuns are turned away from Indiana polls
- FBI agents raid office protecting whistleblowers
- ‘Torture memo’ author, former attorney general, to testify
- The Surveillance Society Does Not Work
- Government can’t be trusted with our personal information
- ID-cards are ‘theft’ of our civil liberties
More Breaking News
Archive