Re: Taiwan Declares Peace on China
- From: presidentbyamendment <rick_hohensee@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:50:24 -0700 (PDT)
On Jul 10, 1:43 pm, "Gandalf Grey" <valino...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Taiwan Declares Peace on China
By Robert Scheer
Created Jul 10 2008 - 10:23am
- from Truthdig [1]
You can't trust the Chinese. I don't care if you're talking about those
communists on the mainland or the other guys on Taiwan; they just won't
follow the war-games script that our weapons hawks had counted on. Their
mutual passion runs not to matters of tired politics but rather on the lust
of venture capitalists. To the Chinese, irrespective of past allegiances,
the prospect of war has come to be viewed as counterproductive, and they now
have the confidence to show it.
No longer pretending to be enemies, a condition in which they engaged in
angry rhetoric while doing much business together on the side, a public love
affair now has broken out across the Strait of Formosa. On Friday, there
were scheduled direct flights between the mainland and its breakaway island
for the first time in 60 years, and the invasion of tourists clicking their
cameras was on.
Not that it was much noticed by the media or presidential candidates, but
this long chapter of Cold War conflict has been closed and a new era of
peace proclaimed by once strident foes. Taiwanese businessmen already are
major investors in the mainland, and the new Taiwan government has
recognized that reality by quickly pushing for full normalization of trade
and other accommodations.
For years now, the Chinese on both sides of the strait have been acting as
if they are members of one nation, with the descendants of those who fled
the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek building mansions in their old villages
and increasingly preferring that their offspring study in China rather than
at American schools. Thus, it was not surprising when the leader of the old
nationalist Kuomintang Party, which won the recent Taiwan election, quickly
went to the mainland to pledge the dawn of a new era. Gone is the prime
excuse for a major U.S. military presence in the Pacific, now that the
Taiwanese have made their separate peace. What good are our fancy military
weapons to people preoccupied with a consumer revolution? The concern over
mainland missiles landing on Taiwan has been replaced with a fear that some
country cousins from the mainland might be given to spitting on the
sidewalks. Those fears were assuaged when tourists from both sides over the
weekend conducted themselves with proper comportment while shopping till
they dropped.
That peace has broken out is a nightmare scenario for America's military
hawks in desperate need of an excuse for soaking up more than half of the
U.S. government's discretionary budget. There was real panic when Mikhail
Gorbachev formally ended the Cold War and George H.W. Bush announced a 30
percent cut in military spending in 1992. Then came the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the wildest peacetime spending spree in history. No one in power
noticed that the expensive weapons were designed to defeat an enemy that no
longer existed. That's because we were traumatized by something called
terrorism, and few questioned the decision to build weapons such as the two
new Virginia-class submarines, at a cost of $5 billion, to catch Osama bin
Laden, probably holed up in a cave in a landlocked nation. But submarines
obviously have nothing to do with fighting terrorists, forcing Sen. Joe
Lieberman, an independent who represents Connecticut, where the subs are
built, to play the China card: "If we do not move to produce two submarines
a year as soon as possible, we are in serious danger of falling behind
China."
Fomenting fear of China is essential to making the case for the whole range
of high-tech war toys that no longer have a legitimate military purpose. But
it's a sick joke. We are paying the Chinese the interest on the money we
borrow from them to build very expensive weapons to counter weapons the
Chinese have no intention of building. The latest word from the Pentagon is
that "[t]he Intelligence Community estimates China will take until the end
of this decade or later to produce a modern force capable of defeating a
moderate-size adversary."
The only adversary that interested China, according to the Pentagon report,
was Taiwan, and as recent events have indicated, that game is over. But
don't shed tears just yet for the denizens of the military-industrial
complex. Why should they doubt our continued willingness to throw money at
weapons that have no targets, when few in Congress or the media ever bother
to notice?
It took Gorbachev on Tuesday, in scathing criticism of President Bush and
presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, to note that in the
United States, "The subject of military spending has literally been shrouded
in the curtain of silence. This taboo must be lifted."
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
Note that after I put in my Presidential platform that Taiwan was
entitled to
independance as "Taiwan" and China was entitled to the name "China",
Taiwan applied to the UN for membership as "Taiwan".
Peace. War loses.
www.myspace.com/presidentbyamendment
RH
.
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