Risking nuclear war, neocons tried to reverse China policy.

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/02/risking-nuclear-war-neocons-tried-to-reverse-china-policy/

Risking nuclear war, neocons tried to reverse China policy.

“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. <…>

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 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 told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”

[Rydz777]

1. Where have all the neo-cons gone.? They seem to have

disappeared. Fukuyama, for example, now says, "Who me? Not me!" Jonah Goldberg says he wishes the term "neo-con" would not be used anymore (at least in polite company.) Have they become an endangered species? Should we try to protect them?

[dave_p]

2. They too must be stuffed

... so America remembers. Each can have its own display case listing its most memorable policy recommendations as part of a national Museum of Stupid. This Administration would doubtless occupy a large building of its own, but there'd be a few years to start building the next.

[Echotrail]

3. They're just trying to get out of paying the $3 B a day we are borrowing

mainly from the Chinese.

Yes, that's 3 BILLION a day.