Hyperlink: http://www.yowusa.com/Archive/September2001/WW3_002/ww3_002.html

Our War on Terror Will Pit the USA Against China

YOWUSA.COM, September 18, 2001 by Marshall Masters

The communist leadership of the People's Republic of China has the propaganda spin cycle turned up to full confusion and cover up, to deflect attention away from their long-standing relationship with the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and the fact an incredible numbers of Chinese joined with Palestinians in celebrating the deaths of thousands of Americans last week. We saw this kind of rhetoric after a foolhardy Chinese fighter pilot killed himself with a reckless flyby of an American EP-3 surveillance airplane. His wingman forced the airplane to land, which instigated an emotionally charged incident in the early days of the Bush administration. If we begin to equivocate now about taking action against international terrorism and lose our resolve to be unrelentingly firm, we will appease our way into a nuclear exchange with China sooner than we care to think.

Beijing Cranks Up The Spin Machine

Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, the American media reported that China had concluded a significant trade pact with Taliban militia in Afghanistan.

AP, September 17, 2001 China Official Cautions on Terrorism BEIJING -- A top Chinese police official cautioned Monday against fighting terrorism with armed attacks that infringe on any country's sovereignty, saying such operations could ultimately make matters worse. “We are opposed to the disregard of principles of international law in launching armed operations or violence under the pretext of `anti-terrorism' which infringe on the state sovereignty of others,” said Xue Dongzheng of China's Public Security Ministry. “This could only aggravate terrorism and violence," Xue said, according to an official translation of his speech. "We also maintain that the fight against international terrorism should be based on international law as globally recognized.” The United Nations does not have a enviable record, if any at all, when it comes to reducing or eliminating international terrorism. However, if China is successful in forcing this whole issue before the U.N., terrorists will kill thousands more Americans before the U.N. leadership can work up a mutually agreeable speaking schedule that will not offend anybody's sensibilities. While China smiles at us they will turn on the American media and the Bush administration, using the same vicious hate-mongering effectiveness they've used to crush the peaceful Falun Gong movement. We will not see it, but the rest of the world will. Then, this will create tensions as America works to build a cohesive coalition of states committed to ending international terrorism.

The Times Of India, September 18, 2001 China denies links with Taliban BEIJING: China has termed as "false" US media reports alleging that Beijing has had business and technical links with the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan, which is sheltering terrorist mastermind, Osama bin Laden. "Reports in some US newspapers of connections between China and the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan are false," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Zhu Bangzao as saying on Saturday. Zhu was clarifying reports in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal which claimed that China has very close ties with the Taliban. Further, he was clarifying statements by the same source, which alleged that Beijing sent its diplomats to Kabul on a regular basis and offered consultation service on matters such as dam construction. Seeking to distance itself from the Taliban, Zhu said the reports were "at serious variance with the facts." He pointed out that due to safety considerations, China shut down its embassy to Afghanistan in February 1993 after civil war broke out in Afghanistan. "China has never sent resident personnel there since then," Zhu said, describing the report of the regular dispatch of diplomats as "groundless." He also described the reports on China's involvement in the construction of dam and telephone network, as well as the memorandum signed with the Taliban as "absurd."

The Palestinians did their level best to hijack the UN conference in Durban, South Africa. Had America remained at the conference instead of walking out, it would have given Arafat a perfect media propaganda opportunity. At that time, the basic Western position about events in Israel was that as long as Israelis were the only ones dying, the problem was contained. However, the attack on the World Trade Center proved that fallacious aspects of that reasoning. Now, American doves want to slow down the entire discussion about international terrorism and what we'll do about it. Their feeling is that war is bad and that we can reason our way out of it. In the process, letting a few more lies slide by is acceptable. Is it? The bottom line here is that lies are just that - lies! Additionally, if let these lies keep slipping past us we surely will not have as much luck when the same people who are hurling lies at us begin to hurl weapons of mass destruction as well. We cannot afford dovish naïveté now. The lies and the consequences are too great!

The Big Chinese Lie

According to Zhu, the Chinese shut down their embassy in 1993 after civil war broke out in Afghanistan, but by 1999 they were back in business. Business was never so good!

Rediff, February 12, 1999 Taliban-China deal puzzles diplomats The diplomatic community in South Asia is puzzled by a military co-operation agreement signed between the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and the People's Republic of China. Diplomatic sources said the agreement was signed on December 10 and that the agreement was not signed between the two governments but between the Taliban military commanders and representatives of China's People's Liberation Army. According to the agreement, the PLA has agreed to: i) Repair and maintain equipment captured by the Taliban militia from adversaries. ii) The PLA would assist in raising and training the Taliban armed forces. Initially, 25,000 troops are to be trained. iii) The PLA would provide training facilities for the Taliban's air force pilots. iv) The PLA would provide from its own funds about 10 million US dollars to improve infrastructure for the Taliban armed forces. v) Initial training and maintenance of equipment are to done at Taxila in Pakistan. In return, the Taliban has given an undertaking that it will not provide any training to Chinese Muslims in China's Xinjiang province and that it will assist the Chinese authorities maintain places of worship and madrasas as in China.

When this agreement between the PLA and the Taliban was inked in 1999, it left many observers scratching their heads. It took a year for the real truth to unfold. China wants to secure its own borders from terrorism by making an agreement with the Taliban in 1999. They also want to edge Russia out of the area as a political force to appease their own expansionist aims in the region.

STRATFOR.COM, July 28, 2000 The Taliban reaches out to China Global Intelligence Update The Taliban has promised to extradite criminals back to Pakistan and to protect Chinese territory from attack. This diplomatic offensive is borne out of a desire to work with China to end the Afghan civil war, rather than face a Russian solution. A peace deal would do two things - hurt relations between China and Russia, and dislocate Afghanistan's terrorist community.

Analysis: Afghanistan's ruling Taliban government has become uncharacteristically conciliatory over the last week. It promised on July 26 to hand over Pakistani nationals wanted by Islamabad. The same day, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan guaranteed a Chinese delegation that no groups would be allowed to operate against China from Afghanistan. The Taliban's diplomatic offensive is the clearest signal to date that at least some elements of the Taliban's leadership are willing to work out a Chinese-sponsored peace deal in Afghanistan. Such an arrangement would have two immediate effects - a diplomatic squall between China and Russia and a number of homeless terrorists. Taliban diplomatic officials sought out a Chinese delegation in Islamabad, Pakistan, on July 25. The fact that the Taliban went to the Chinese, instead of the Russians, indicates how badly some factions of the Taliban want China to take the lead in ending the Afghan civil war. Russia has an interest in keeping Central Asia unstable, ensuring that its former republics continue in their dependence upon Russian military support. China is concerned about Afghan support for Islamic militants in the western province of Xinjiang, but that is a much less pressing problem than Chechnya. Instead, the Chinese government is working with Pakistan and Iran to bring a negotiated settlement. Besides ending the war, China wants to cement its relationship with Iran. Beyond the dispute over methodology, Moscow and Beijing disagree about regional primacy - who will call the shots in Central Asia. If Russia controls the Afghan situation, it sets the agenda for the region - fighting Islamic militants. Steady fighting will hamstring economic development for the region, but Russia would remain in the driver's seat. China's plans are based on economic links between Central Asia and Iran, Pakistan and China. Much of the Taliban leadership would rather make a deal with the Chinese than get bombed by the Russians, which explains this week's entreaties. A final agreement would likely leave a portion of Afghanistan under the control of the opposition Northern Alliance. Peace in Afghanistan boils down to a contest of wills between Asia's two great powers, and the ball is in Russia's court. One bombing run can undo any hope of an agreement and will sink relations between Beijing and Moscow. Ultimately, Russia can't afford to let China gain an economic hold on Central Asia, and it will take the necessary steps to stop that from happening.

This Is About Chinese Expansionist Aims

To paraphrase Adolf Hitler, China needs chopstick room. It is depleting its natural resources at an alarming rate. New sources of arable land and fresh water are at the top of the Beijing leadership's minds, as well as those of a good proportion of the population, itself. In terms of America, it has expressed itself as outright glee at the death of thousands of innocent civilians in the September 11, 2001 attack. In terms of China's long-term objectives, this anti-American sentiment is politically embarrassing, as it was for the PLO. In the West Bank, international reporters were physically restrained by the PLO from videotaping the hundreds of Palestinians who flock to the streets to openly celebrate the attack.

Washington Post, September 15, 2001 China Censors Anti-U.S. Reaction BEIJING, Sept. 14 -- China's censors have moved to stem anti-American statements and expressions of support for terrorism against the United States that have been posted on government-monitored Internet sites here since Tuesday's attacks in New York and Washington, Chinese sources said today. Chinese scholars who had expressed dismay at what they termed the callous reaction of some Chinese to the tragedy unfolding in the United States said some of the most offensive statements had been removed from the Internet. "It's improved a lot," said Shi Yinhong, head of the international relations department at People's University. "The debate on those sites has become pretty civilized again." A Pakistani newspaper, the Frontier Post, and a state-run newspaper in Afghanistan reported Tuesday that an agreement had been signed between China and the Taliban minister of mines. Diplomats and analysts said the agreement was significant because it underscored attempts by China to strengthen ties to the Taliban. We have only two choices: We can accept the reality that China and the Taliban are as thick as thieves, or we can reason ourselves into self-delusional appeasement. The first option might sound like the only good option, but do not give up on self-delusional appeasement. We've been doing it for decades, and we've worked the love of peace down to a science.

We Must Quit Now or Hit Hard and Keep Hitting Hard

Those who know China best are becoming increasingly worried.They know that after a decade of downsizing and being overextended by peacekeeping missions around the world, the America military is simply no longer capable of fighting a two-front war.

AFP, September 16, 2001 Taiwan fears weakening of US support after attacks TAIPEI -- Taiwan fears critical support from the United States may weaken as Washington seeks rival Beijing's backing to eradicate global terrorism in the wake of last week's attacks, analysts say. Following the killer attacks last Tuesday, the US administration may prioritize fighting terrorism over containing China, which is determined to reunite with Taiwan, by force if necessary, they added. China's President Jiang Zemin lost no time in voicing his condolences to the United States after the terror strikes in New York and Washington in which an estimated 5,000 people are believed to have been killed. China's Vice Premier Qian Qichen also told US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a telephone call that the fight against terrorism "needs the cooperation of the international community." Analysts in Taiwan said the Chinese leaders were sending a veiled signal to Washington that President George W. Bush needed to adjust his country's China policy -- including the thorny Taiwan issue -- if he hoped to get Beijing's cooperation to fight terrorism. "After the attacks, the Bush administration will have to adjust its diplomacy," said Chang Lin-cheng, professor of political science at National Taiwan University. "And Bush will have to obtain the cooperation of major countries, including China, if he hopes to ensure the imminent crackdowns on terrorists be successful," she said.

One thing the September 11, 2001 attack showed America is that we've deluded ourselves for some time about our own military and intelligence prowess. Yes, we're strong but not as strong as we think. The problem is that our enemies know our weaknesses better than we do right now, and China is an enemy, no matter what they say to the media. This is because China is the only major power in the last few years to openly state an expectation of a nuclear exchange with the United States and to threaten it with the same.

On a broad scale this is not so much about terrorism as it is about a clash of cultures, as former U.N. Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick pointed out on a Fox News program last week. As a matter of fact it is really not even about religion. It is about one way of life coming into conflict with another.

America, we now have three basic choices:

DOVE PATH OF PEACE: If we want to follow admonishments of our own doves we will face the same plight as those in Israel who were certain that Barak and the Labor party could reason with Arafat through unimaginable concessions. The concessions were offered and summarily rejected.This being the first path is untenable, unproved and flat out unhealthy. The bottom line here, is that if America follows the example set by Barak, Peres and the Labor party in Israel, we will find ourselves in the exact same predicament - and burying our dead will become commonplace. FEEL - GOOD U.N. EQUIVOCATION: If we allow China to shift our response to the U.N. and away from our enemies it will serve our enemies as well as the expansionist aims of the Chinese. The problem is that the Chinese cannot and mostly likely would not do anything to halt international terrorism, as it would not be in their present interests. Of course, their rhetoric and spin will assuredly be diametrically opposed to their actions. HIT HARD AND KEEP HITTING HARD: The best way to build a consensus is to take action through showing determination and leadership. America is facing a very real enemy and we are no longer dogged by the nuclear nightmare of a Cold War world. We are no longer internationally constrained into putting our children on the front line of a yet another disheartening police action.

At its height, Islam led the world in terms of what humans could hope to accomplish with their minds and they gave us so much. At that time, the Western World was a stubborn and mean as the Taliban fighters of today. It is so odd now, that Islam and the Western World have changed roles in this present time, and that the Taliban fighters of today have become the modern day equivalent of the Knights of Holy Crusade.

It was with a terrible loss of life that Islam was able to crush the last of the invading armies from Europe.They did, and they sent the Crusaders packing. If you asked anyone in Islam what would have happened to them had their forefathers laid down their arms and let the invading Crusaders have their way unopposed, they would tell you that it would have been certain end of them. And this, is the sum total of our present predicament.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), October 09, 2001

Answers

I never did trust China, and think, long-term, they will certainly be our number one adversary.

-- Loner (loner@bigfoot.com), October 09, 2001.

If China were to, somehow, ally themselves with the terrorists, Heaven help us.

-- Uncle Fred (dogboy45@bigfoot.com), October 09, 2001.

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place! These two articles, taken together, state that there is, at best, only one way of getting out of this without triggering World War III.

Hyperlink: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/html/news.html ("Opinion: Don't think of widening this war" sublink)

Don't think of widening this war

by William Dalrymple.

Ten years ago, when I was living in Delhi at the height of the Gulf War, I met a man who had made an overnight fortune printing pictures of Saddam Hussein. Syed Farid Khan - small, shabbily dressed, with printer's ink all over his hands - was never expected to be one of India's great financial success stories; but a visit to the Iraqi Embassy on the first day of the US assault on Iraq changed all that. The embassy gave Mr Khan the Saddam Variety Pack: Saddam the Soldier firing a machine gun at the infidel hordes against a background of billowing fire and smoke; Saddam the Arab, in full flowing jellaba and keffiyeh, sprouting mysteriously from a lotus; even Saddam the Tyrant from Tyrol, bare-kneed in his best lederhosen.

It was a sensation. The first print run, of 1,500 copies, sold out within hours. The next, of 10,000 copies, went just as quickly. A week into the US strikes, with CNN being watched 24 hours a day in every bazaar in South Asia, Mr Khan found to his astonishment that he had sold more than half a million copies. Before the American strikes, no one in Delhi had shown any interest in Iraq, still less in its president. But thanks to the bombing, as Mr Khan put it, "people here are crazy for Saddam".

Nothing does more to unite the normally fractious and divided Islamic world than a massive US attack on one or other prostrate Muslim state. During the Gulf War, "Death to America" riots spread from the Maghreb to Indonesia. This time it may be much worse. Already the likely reaction can be gauged from what is happening in Pakistan: a bazaar and a cinema burned down in Quetta, serious rioting in Karachi, a car bomb in Rawalpindi, while Peshawar has dissolved into an anarchy of tear gas and police shooting. Afghanistan sits bang in the middle of the three of the world's most volatile regions: Central Asia and Chechnya to the northwest; the nuclear-powered enemies India and Pakistan to the southeast; and Israel-Palestine to the southwest. On its own, the current action against the Taliban has the makings of what Jack Straw has called "the most frightening situation since the Cuban crisis in the 1960s". But the Republican hawks of Washington are now making it increasingly clear that whatever Colin Powell thinks, they see this as just the beginning.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Under-Secretary of Defence, has proposed simply "ending states which support terrorism", while the Republican media have been urging a much wider war against much of the Islamic world. Here is AM Rosenthal arguing in the Washington Times, a paper influential in Bush circles, that all Middle Eastern states should simply be given an ultimatum to hand over alleged terrorists: "The ultimatum should go to the governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan and any other devoted to the elimination of the United States."

In the three days the terrorists would be given to consider the American ultimatum, the residents of the countries would be urged 24 hours a day by the US to flee the capital and the major cities, because they would be bombed to the ground on the fourth day. Nor is this sort of dangerous nonsense restricted to the US media. In an astonishingly bigoted piece in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, Sir John Keegan rattled his rusting sabre in favour of what he unattractively described as a "conflict between settled, creative, productive Westerners and predatory, destructive Orientals". More worrying still, in yesterday's Daily Mirror, Lord Owen claimed that intelligence sources have now "proved" a link between the Trade Center's bombers and Iraqi intelligence and urged the "broadening of the campaign to all state sponsors of terrorism, starting with Iraq".

If such a policy were to be applied rigorously, it would mean declaring war on the entire Middle East. Yet the truth is that even a limited war against a single enemy like Iraq would be much more likely to give birth to a whole new crop of fundamentalist regimes across the region than achieve its intended aims. Most groups regarded as "terrorist" in Washington are looked on in the Middle East as legitimate resistance movements: Hezbollah, for example, was founded to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of a quarter of Lebanon, and is seen in Beirut, Cairo and Damascus in much the same heroic light as we look on the French Resistance.

In the long term, terrorism is only going to be brought under control with the full cooperation of Arab regimes. And only one thing is going to bring that about. In the month since 11 September, a large number of instant "experts" on Islam have popped up offering bizarre reasons for Arab anger at the US, among them existential angst at Western prosperity, a hatred of democracy, and a dislike of unveiled Western women, particularly Hillary Clinton. But anyone who has spent any time in the Middle East knows that it has always been the running sore of the dispossession and enslavement of the Palestinians by Israel that lies at the heart of the problem. This view was confirmed by Bin Laden himself in his recent broadcast.

Palestine is no pretext; nor is it, thank God, insoluble. It is a myth that Arafat rejected "generous" Israeli proposals last year, or that the Palestinians are somehow "not interested in peace". Arafat accepted the Taba Offer as a basis for negotiation; it was Barak that walked away when the Palestinians came up with counter-proposals. If there is to be peace, pressure has to be applied by Britain as well as America to make it clear to the Israelis that continued occupation and settlement building is as immoral as it is illegal, that it enrages the entire Islamic world, and that it badly endangers all our security.

After the Gulf War, it was enough for Bush Snr to threaten withdrawing the loan guarantees that financed Yitzak Shamir's illegal settlement programme to bring that former terrorist to the negotiating table. Now, for the safety of the West, we need America to be just as resolute in imposing a strategy of peace and justice on its old ally, Israel, as it has been in waging war on its new enemy, the Taliban. The Taba proposals must be put back on the table as a basis for negotiation, and Israel resolutely protected within its legal 1967 borders. If it is combined with a new, just US policy on Palestine, most Muslim states will support a surgical assault on the al Qaeda network and the Taliban high command; but without it, a prolonged ground war in Afghanistan - or Iraq - could bring utter disaster. If we are to avoid destabilising the entire region, we must proceed with the greatest caution.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), October 09, 2001.

"The communist leadership of the People's Republic of China has the propaganda spin cycle turned up to full confusion and cover up, to deflect attention away from their long-standing..."

Substitute "United States" for China, and finish with "policy of supporting international violence against civilians," and you pretty much sum up the propaganda picture here in the U.S.A.

-- neil r (nmruggles@earthlink.net), October 10, 2001.