Arm Thine Enemy

What is truly amazing is how the media play down how China is getting its military capabilities. The congressional commission’s report identifies the American, European, Japanese and, most ironically, Taiwanese, chip-making firms that are providing China with “state-of-the-art” semiconductor fabrication technologies. The Commerce and State departments are approving the export of new wafer fabs with technology levels equal to the industry standard in the U.S. without any coherent export control policy. As American businesses increase their investments in China, the commission sees a danger of America’s defense industrial base becoming ever more dependent on Chinese-controlled companies.

Retired Taiwanese officers are defecting to China because they receive offers of higher rank, better pay and housing for families. The plan named “using Taiwan to conquer Taiwan” is designed to obtain valuable Taiwanese military operators as well as inflict psychological damage on morale. They are teaching tactics on how to invade the island in China’s military academies. China has been practicing an attack on Taiwan that is aimed at killing or capturing the island’s leaders in a “decapitation” action modeled on the U.S. action in Iraq to capture Saddam Hussein. Computer simulation games in military academies in China, Taiwan and the U.S. all show how Taiwan can be captured in a few days.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the number of mainland projects with Taiwanese investment topped 50,000, with the value of contracted investment at $60 billion. In 2001, indirect cross-strait trade totaled $32 billion. In 2002, indirect two-way trade, mainly via Hong Kong, reached $240 billion. Taiwan is now the mainland’s fifth-largest trading partner. The mainland is Taiwan’s largest export destination and the greatest source of Taiwan’s trade surplus.

If Taiwanese military personnel are joining the island’s capitalists and business people in building China’s military and economic capability, shouldn’t the U.S. political establishment be doing the same rather than provoking and again siding with the loser? U.S. business icons like Motorola, Intel, Kodak, General Motors, Nike and countless others are invested in China to the tune of $40 billion to $50 billion. China has also amassed more than $471 billion in foreign reserves, much of which it has invested in U.S. treasuries. Classifying Taiwan as “a major non-NATO ally,” which allows it to enjoy the same treatment as Japan, New Zealand and Australia, is suicidal. As George Strait says, you can’t put it all on the line unless you’ve got an ace in the hole. Under current U.S. policy, what is America’s ace when it is in the hole?

Lin Chong-pin, Taiwan’s deputy defense minister, said: “The PLA may start to surpass what we have in 2005 or between 2005 and 2008” militarily. The years “2010 to 2015 [will be] when the PLA will have such a supremacy in both qualitative and quantitative comparison of forces that it may feel confident to move,” Lin added. So what is the point of America continuing to waste political capital on arming Taiwan and going to its defense? “Failure to support Taiwan could call into question U.S. global commitments,” David O’Rear interjected as another fierce debate on the wisdom of U.S. support of Taiwan got into full swing at the FCC Main Bar. As usual, nobody changed anybody’s mind.

America is poorly served by a fragmented, inconsistent and superficial China policy, wielded in compulsive secrecy and plagued by dismal crisis management, a bipartisan congressional commission warned. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its first annual report that U.S.-China relations, often testy and tainted by mutual suspicion, suffered from an uncoordinated approach among the branches of the U.S. government: Richard D’Amato, chairman of the commission set up by Congress, said: “U.S. policy toward China has been and is fragmented, lacking consistency and depth. It has often been driven solely by commercial interests, or by specific human rights issues, or by a particular military crisis – rather than by a comprehensive examination of all the issues which impact this relationship.” Is this any way for the U.S. government to be doing business with China?

Retired U.S. Colonel Al Wilhelm was among the first uniformed officers sent to the mainland at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s to provide both advice and weaponry to the People’s Liberation Army. Wilhelm is still on a mission of peace. “China is going to become a superpower. What the hawks say about China having the potential to threaten America is true. The key is how we find a way to coexist.

“Unless we develop mutual trust and friendship, it’s likely my eight grandchildren will be fighting in a war against China,” Wilhelm said in an interview in Hong Kong. I concur. In my case my grandchildren will be fighting each other.

The two-China policy the U.S. is trying to straddle is doomed to fail. China is determined to become a major power again, and will. The U.S. cannot stop this geopolitical reality. America’s Taiwan policy is only fueling, expediting and facilitating China’s military machine. America must embrace the one-China policy and work with China as a partner and welcome it as its Pacific partner like it has done on the Atlantic front with Europe.

Why can’t America withdraw its support of Taiwan in exchange for China withdrawing support to North Korea to help bring about nuclear disarmament and stability to the region? Why should China encourage North Korea to disarm without U.S. reciprocity?

America has shown that when it acts decisively and brings its full military capabilities to bear others will listen and follow. However, let’s not get overconfident and too cocky for our own good when it comes to China in the 21st century. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” Sun Tzu, the Chinese military strategist wrote in 400 B.C.

One China

The political-saber rattling over China’s adoption of the Anti-Secession Law in 2005 is much ado about nothing. The law changed nothing. It merely re-affirmed China’s long-standing policy and the Taiwan constitution. The new legislation says that its purpose is to oppose and check “Taiwan’s secession from China.” It also says that “both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China”, a phrase first used by Taiwan’s own Kuomintang government and repeated by both governments over the years. This was a phrase I heard uttered on numerous occasions by Taiwan government officials on my visits to Taiwan with U.S. trade delegations led by U.S. elected officials.

China’s President Hu Jintao, in his speeches supporting the adoption of the law, pointed out that “the existing regulations and documents in Taiwan” also support a “one China” principle. For example, even the additional articles in the Taiwan constitution adopted in 1991 assume that Taiwan will eventually be reunited with China. They also say that the territory of the Republic of China includes both the mainland and Taiwan. Ironically, Taiwan’s own laws do not allow secession. The National Security Law promulgated in 1987, says the public “must not violate the constitution, advocate communism or the division of the national territory”.

With more than $41 billion invested in China between 1993 and 2004 by the more than one million Taiwanese doing business there, and with $83 billion in annual China-Taiwan trade, it should not have been a surprise when Taiwanese tycoons and senior advisors to Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian, Mr. Shi Wen-long and Stan Shih, announced their public support of China’s Anti-Secession Law as Mr. Chen joined thousands to march and denounce the law. Yet the nation and its leaders were shocked.

Mr. Shi said: “We should all feel more relieved.” He said Taiwan could not do without the mainland and any independence movement would only lead to war. Mr. Shi went further. He said: “Taiwan cannot develop its economy without the mainland”. Both resigned as advisors to President Chen. If Abraham Lincoln could go to war in 1861 to prevent secession why can’t China?

The Anti-Secession Law is a catalyst for diplomacy and peace. This was confirmed two days after President Chen led protestors to denounce the law, when the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party sent a delegation to visit the memorial for martyrs of the failed 1911 uprising in the Huanghua Gang Commemoration Park, Guangzhou, China. The uprising was led by KMT founder Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China. The 34-strong member delegation – the first to visit the mainland since the nationalists fled Taiwan in 1949 – was a giant first step towards peaceful reunification. The invitation extended by China to “all parties in Taiwan” to come to China for talks on reunification was the second step. The acceptance of the invitation by KMT chairman Lien Chan was a home run. James Soong Chu-yu, the chairman of the People First Party – Taiwan’s other opposition party – is likely to also visit the mainland. “Political development promoted by economic ties” has always been the long-term, de facto strategy for Beijing to assimilate Taiwan.

What is constantly overlooked is that China’s Communist Party and Taiwan’s KMT were once allies in the struggle to build a united China. In 1923, Sun Yat-sen, the KMT’s founding president, embraced the then much smaller communist party. Mikhail Borodin, Moscow’s emissary to China advised both parties on organizational and propaganda matters which accounts for the striking similarity in their structure. And in the same year Chiang Kai-shek, America’s darling who was to assume the mantle of KMT leadership, was shipped off to Moscow for training.

Taiwan Folly

The U.S sends the 7th Fleet carrier taskforce to the Taiwan Straits when China was about to begin large-scale military exercises in 2000. President Bush said America would do “whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.” Why send U.S. naval ships while China is testing missiles prior to the Taiwan elections or conducting military exercises? That Taiwan is considering a referendum on independence is reason enough for China to threaten military action to preserve its national unity. It’s a domestic issue. For Therese Shaheen, former chairwoman of the American Institute in Taiwan, America’s de facto embassy in Taipei, to declare that the Bush administration had never said it “opposes Taiwan independence” is diplomatically and politically counterproductive. It reminds me of another U.S. diplomat’s famous message to Saddam Hussein that declared as official U.S. policy: “We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” A few weeks later Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait.

How would America like it if China started selling arms to Native Americans? After all, their reservations are sovereign territories. How would the U.S. like it if the Chinese sent a naval fleet to North America to resolve regional disputes, let alone a domestic dispute? Imagine a Chinese naval fleet cruising into San Francisco Bay to contribute to the resolution of a Native American dispute over Alcatraz. How would the U.S. react if China said it never said it “opposed Native-American independence?” It’s ludicrous.

Why isn’t America abiding by President Reagan’s 1982 agreement to reduce and eventually end arms sales to Taiwan? When America agreed to sell submarines to Taiwan, no U.S. shipbuilder was building them in America. When asked by America, the Germans refused to build the eight diesel submarines America promised to sell Taiwan so America has to now either reactivate long dormant shipyards or find another builder to honor its military commitment to Taiwan. Is Taiwan really worth becoming America’s 21st century Vietnam?

The fact that former Senator Jesse Helms and the Republicans seriously considered passing the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act in 2001, which would have enhanced military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and Taiwan and create a de facto military alliance between Washington and Taipei -- in violation of the Taiwan Relations Act -- is worrisome. Sen. James Jefford’s defection from the Republican Party gave the Democrats a majority in the Senate and allowed them to replace Jesse Helms as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee with Senator Joe Biden and reversed America’s perilous military pursuit. Is this delicate personal partisan political balance something We The Apathetic People can afford to perpetuate in the New World Order? Does it make sense for one person with the casting vote committed to financial supporters in Taiwan to have America go to war and We the People be damned? Especially when we risk a nuclear war. News leaked of a Pentagon review that envisaged the use of nuclear weapons against China in the event of a war in the Taiwan Straits. Isn’t this perilous risk something We the Maids must sweep out in the 21st century?

What is even more absurd and dangerous is the law signed by Bush that identified Taiwan as one of America’s “allies,” an illogical position since officially Washington does not even recognize the government of Taiwan. The legislation bars U.S. troops from being sent to countries that cooperate with the International Criminal Court, exempts members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, and other U.S. allies, including Taiwan.

After the nationalist Kuomintang fled the mainland in 1949 for Taiwan, many officers crossed the border from Yunnan province to Burma. There they got into the heroin trade to fund their early military purchases from America. Their heroin factories in the Golden Triangle were conveniently overlooked by the U.S. government even though their output was killing Americans in every city and suburb.

Burma provided sanctuary for many KMT officers and their troops after China’s civil war. Until his death in the 1980s, Gen. Tuan Shi-wen, the late KMT Fifth Army commander, claimed that opium trading was needed to finance the war against the Communists.

U.S. naval ships are finally making port calls again at Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay after the Russians pulled out in 2002. America couldn’t keep its ships in the port it built in Vietnam, or U.S. troops in the country. Yet U.S. military planners think they will be able to sustain a Navy in the Taiwan Strait in a war with China over Taiwan.

Sino-America War

The Cold War between communism and democracy has burned out both the East and West. Democracy won, but paid a tremendous price financially, emotionally, socially and politically. The West’s victory in the Cold War has produced not triumph but exhaustion. As the West’s primacy erodes, much of its power will simply evaporate and the rest will be diffused on a regional basis among the several major civilizations and their core states. The most significant increases in power are accruing to Asian civilizations, with China gradually emerging as the society most likely to challenge America for global influence. This is a reality America has to deal with sensibly and in a timely manner.

The U.S. doesn't want to repeat the mistakes it made in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq with China over the geopolitics of the Pacific, especially Taiwan. The U.S. must not interfere in an internal civil war. If it does, it should expect the same result as its post-World War II military excursions in Asia.

The same can be said about unnecessary, repeated reconnaissance missions by unarmed planes or ships. The U.S. flies more than 400 such missions a year directed at China. Surely there are less intrusive ways to collect information? America’s satellite, land-based and submarine surveillance capabilities give it the necessary access to the Chinese communications information it is trying to collect.

The U.S. National Security Agency also has a signals intelligence facility on Yangmingshan Mountain in suburban Taipei, Taiwan. It was established in the mid-1980s and is able to intercept radio communications within 500 kilometers. One really can't blame the Chinese for not accepting America’s claim of a “right of espionage” and for taking offense to U.S. spy planes regularly flying 19 kilometers off their coast listening in on their military mobile phone, fax and Internet communications to “project the U.S. sphere of influence”.

If the situation was reversed and China flew a spy plane off the coast of California to project its sphere of influence, the U.S. would bring it down. “We seem to be conducting something we cannot control very well. If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores, we would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer, whether through error or not,” said President Eisenhower in 1956. He was speaking after the Chinese shot down a U.S. spy plane over the East China Sea, killing all 16 crewmen. The Chinese don’t provoke the U.S. by sending spy planes from Cuba over U.S. shores. In fact the U.S. enforces the 200-mile territorial rule. Why should the U.S. be the only military power that does? What if China did the same? Why create and then provoke a stronger, unnecessary enemy in the 21st century?

In 2003, when China shipped weapons and explosives to Cuba as the two countries increased their cooperation, the U.S. was outraged and threatened to impose sanctions. Why is it OK for the U.S. to sell weapons to Taiwan and not for China to do the same with Cuba? How would America feel if China imposed sanctions on the U.S. for selling weapons to Taiwan and dumped billions of dollars worth of U.S. debt instruments it holds on the world financial markets? Why run the risk of another accident – military or financial? After all, it was a U.S. government surveillance plane that ordered a Peruvian jet to shoot down a single-engine Cessna 185 over Peru in 2001 killing Veronica “Roni” Bowers, an American missionary, and her 7-month-old daughter Charity. It was also faulty U.S. radar information that resulted in the downing of an Iranian passenger jet killing all 298 people on board in 1988 over the Persian Gulf. Repeated accidental bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq have become the norm. Does America need to further risk an accident in the Pacific or the Taiwan Strait?

Although China supported the U.S.-led war to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and capture or kill Osama bin Laden, respected conservative columnists and politicians in America, including George F. Will and Rep. Henry Hyde, were still arguing that China was a future military threat to America.

Beijing and Tokyo have reached an agreement concerning permitted naval activity in exclusive economic zones, which reach 220 nautical miles from shore. Shouldn’t Washington and Beijing be doing the same?

President Eisenhower apologized for the flight of captured American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers over Russia and ended the U-2 flights over that country. Why couldn’t President Bush do the same when the U.S. reconnaissance plane crash-landed on Hainan Island? Why couldn’t he just pick up the phone and discuss matters amicably with Jiang Zemin? Why was the first American spokesman Admiral Dennis Blair, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific? Why did the U.S Ambassador in Beijing, Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, handle the negotiations? Why was the U.S. defense attaché to Beijing, Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, wearing his military uniform at his first press conference? Was this diplomacy or a constant subtle military reminder and threat?

When a Russian pilot defected with his MiG-25 in 1976 to Japan, American experts spent nine weeks stripping the plane and examining every part. The Russians eventually got the plane back in boxes. Why was the U.S. surprised then that the Chinese examined the U.S. spy plane? Isn't that part of the risk in the espionage game? Besides, if all the hardware and software was destroyed per the “checklist” by the American crew before the Chinese got access to the plane, what is the big deal? It is face. Symbolic value. It is just as important to the U.S. as it is to China.

Why is it that the U.S. insists on pursuing its bullying global power trip? Is it in denial about its reluctant withdrawal from the wars in Korea and Vietnam or is it deluding itself about its “victories” in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia? After all, who really won? Based on what happened in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, does America really think it can pursue gunboat diplomacy with China over Taiwan?

A Peaceful Democratic Iraq

The British created the artificial state of Iraq after World War I by drawing a border to enjoin three diverse ethnic groups with a long history of enmity: the Shiites in the south, Kurds in the north and the Sunnis in the center.

This is a contemporary geographic and geopolitical reality that has to be addressed sooner than later. The Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis never have and never will get along as one. The current truce between the Sunnis and Shiites while they collaborate to get rid of the U.S.-led occupation will end the minute foreign troops leave Iraq. The bloodshed that will follow will make the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the civil war in Lebanon look like walks in the park.

The Shiites, especially Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers – the Sadriyyin – see themselves in the footsteps of their forefathers who led the Great Rebellion after World War I that expelled the British in 1925 and created modern Iraq. They fought the British and Sunnis, who threw in their lot with the British, who repaid the favor and made them masters of the new artificial country. The repeated brutal tactics used by the Sunni minority to suppress the Shiite majority were best exemplified by the rule of Saddam Hussein. In 1991, when former President George H.W. Bush encouraged Shiites to overthrow Saddam, thousands were slaughtered as America stood by in what was a terrible foreign policy disaster.

Ultimately, the deep, vindictive ethnic and religious factions will fracture the government and country. Nationalism, as manifested by Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab, is no different than the nationalism expressed by the Serbs, Croats and Macedonians in Yugoslavia, or the Czechs and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. The World War I remnants of the Austria-Hungary Empire are no different than Iraq, itself an Ottoman remnant.

The artificial national boundaries created by colonial overlords to facilitate their domination and control of natural resources can only be enforced by ruthless and oppressive authoritarian regimes. The colonial borders disappear under democracies and tribal borders are redrawn as former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia remind us. Likewise Iraq will have to be divided into three separate countries to accommodate the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. To keep them together in a democratic state under the dated “divide and conquer” political theory ignores the religious and ethnic historical differences and grudges that have been temporarily put aside as they try to rid their collective tribal lands of the occupying infidels.

Iraqi politics is steeped in violence. Iraq’s last monarch, King Faisall, was assassinated in 1958. His successor was assassinated five years later. Three more coups preceded Saddam’s rise to power in 1979. Nevertheless, Iraq could become one of the first Arab democracies because of the large number of Iraqis involved in the democratic opposition parties that have developed and are active in exile, courtesy of Saddam’s repressive policies at home. The exiled Iraqis have not been embraced as openly by their fellow citizens as they are by Americans. Iraqis who suffered under Hussein’s iron rule do not trust the returning exiles. And for good reason as the U.S. found out the expensive, hard way.

The exiled Iraqi opposition had only one interest -- the liberation of Iraq for their personal benefit. They used managed perception to the max -- with a bonus – oil. Saddam believed his Russo-Franco oil partners would convince the Bushites that the exiles were lying and that the weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist. However, the exiled bazaar salesmen outsmarted Saddam and America’s faith-based political and military establishment. Another Bush foreign policy disaster.

A democratic Kurdistan and democratic Sunni and Shiite states will do to Iran and the Middle East what glasnost did to Russia and now democratic Eastern Europe. Iran’s mullahs and the royals in Saudi Arabia will go the way of the ruling elites in Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia. America has to make sure it finishes what it started in Iraq and not repeat its failures of 1991 after the Gulf War. It has to install democratic regimes and make sure they survive. “Americans are experts at destruction but not construction. Look at what happened in Afghanistan. There is no law and order at all,” Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based daily Al Quds al-Arabi, said.

Like the Afghans, Iraqis eagerly await the removal of their shackles and opening of their society to the world. U.N. Resolution 678, which authorized the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait, called for America and its allies to restore peace and security in the region. It also allows a change of regime to achieve this objective. It is up to America to install the right democratic regimes and not repeat the mistakes of its British predecessors. It is important to avoid another U.S. foreign policy disaster in Iraq because it would be a colossal catastrophe. America must deliver on its promises, to the Iraqi people, the world and America. Do it right and get out. America cannot afford to fail in Iraq. If it does, it will be relegated to a 21st-century debt- burdened bankrupt – financially and politically.