From Volume 2, Issue Number 32 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Aug. 12, 2003

Chickenhawks Beat The Drums On "China Threat"
by William Jones

Aug. 5 (EIRNS)—Just as the Bush Administration is learning the value of the U.S.-China relationship, at the point when Chinese diplomatic efforts appear to have succeeded in getting the North Koreans to agree to sit down with the U.S. in a multilateral forum acceptable to both parties, the neo-cons have resumed their drumbeat about a Chinese military "threat" to the United States.

The occasion was the publication July 28 of the annual Pentagon report, "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China." An annual report was mandated in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, and was a response by the Congressional "chickenhawks" to Clinton's success in getting Congress to accord China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status. Every year, the debate on Normal Trade Relations (formerly Most-Favored Nation Trade status), gave the opportunity for any and all to jump on the China-bashing bandwagon before another year's NTR status was awarded to China (as it almost always was). But the assignment of Permanent status to China took away the China-bashers hobbyhorse, and they wanted something in its place.

Thus the substitute for the MFN debate: the mandating of an annual Pentagon report on China's military power. The other measure was the establishment of a Congressional U.S.-China Security Review Commission, which holds hearings on topics related to China.

Undoubtedly when the Congress comes back in September, the Commission will also use the report as a pretext for more hearings on the Chinese military "danger." - Designed To Foment Fear -

While the 52-page report had little to say that would have been new to knowledgeable observers, it was packaged so as to foment new concerns about the goals of Chinese military modernization. The day the report was released, it became grist for the mills of the most notorious Chickenhawk scribblers. The Washington Times published the incorrigible Bill Gertz's rendition of the report under the headline, "Pentagon Says China Refitting Missiles To Hit Okinawa." This undoubtedly got the attention of Japanese readers, which was precisely the intention. (The report does mention in one sentence that China is developing solid-fuel rockets, that is, upgrading the 1950s V2-style liquid-fuel rockets they have been relying on; solid-fuel rockets and satellite guidance systems, which they also plan to develop, could reach Okinawa. This would be roughly equivalent to the United States developing missiles which could reach Jamaica!)

The report underlines the fact that China is now purchasing most of its most up-to-date equipment from Russia, trying to paint a picture of a looming Russia-China alliance. Until the United States slapped sanctions on China after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989, the primary provider of military equipment to China was this country. Can one complain that they would look elsewhere, when the U.S. shut the door by imposing sanctions on just about anything of importance going to China?

What the neo-cons don't seem to realize is that much of China's increased purchase of modern military equipment is motivated by U.S. policy. Over the course of the last two years, China has seen the United States move militarily into Central Asia, where the U.S. apparently intends to stay; invade the sovereign nation of Iraq, in defiance of UN opposition, on the pretext of "weapons of mass destruction" (which have yet to be found); and issue a doctrine that the U.S. will conduct preemptive strikes against any nation by which the U.S. "feels" threatened.

In addition, the Bush Administration has sent decidedly mixed signals to China as to whether it is a friend of the United States or a "competitor." Any government that didn't begin to reconsider its defense policy in light of these factors would be guilty of treason to the nation.

The neo-cons fail to understand that their arrogant posturing toward the world community has set off alarm bells in many directions, and for a nation like China, brutally suppressed by foreign invaders for hundreds of years, the bells have a much shriller sound. The type of imperial mentality so lauded by the new military analysts at the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, and more quietly harbored by the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds, can in fact create enemies where previously they didn't exist.

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