Kind of looks like whats happening today- they don't know if they're coming or going-- the left hand don't know what the right hand is doing, and many times they're headed in opposite directions :roll: :shock:
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Neocons Pressed for Confrontation With China
NewsMax
The Bush administration neoconservatives who urged the overthrow of Saddam Hussein also pushed for a policy that could have led to a nuclear showdown between China and the U.S. 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 that "neocons" in the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China, Jeff Stein reports in Congressional Quarterly.
China has repeatedly warned that such a move 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 strenuously disputed by former defense officials.
Back in 1971, in an agreement between President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong, the U.S. agreed that there is only "one China" — with its capital in Beijing.
But a number of conservative Republicans continued to voice support for Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion long after their own party leaders and U.S. businesses embraced the communist regime, Stein observes.
"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," he writes.
"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."
Wilkerson asserted that while Bush publicly continued the one-China policy, the Pentagon neocons were 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 with the U.S., "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 to tell Taiwanese national security officials to ignore 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."
Those relations had been suspended in early 2001 after China forced a U.S. reconnaissance plane down off Vietnam.
Feith is among the former officials who dispute Wilkerson's allegations, saying they "are not even close to being accurate."
And Rumsfeld's former spokesman Lawrence DiRita told Stein that Wilkerson's claims were "completely ridiculous" and "just crazy."
But diplomat Paal told Stein:
"In the early years of the Bush administration, there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington."