-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 2, 2007 10:41:31 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The Neocons' Prayer: "Nuclear War with SOMEONE, ANYONE,
Please!"
Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide
June 1, 2007 – 5:48 p.m.
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002523531.html
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 [with Red China] 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.
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 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.
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 superpowers in history, with
no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major
escalation.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2007 Congressional Quarterly Inc.
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