White House Called Friends of Bush Sr. for Advice:
Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, Source Says
NEW YORK, April 8 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bush team ignored Secretary of State
Colin Powell's advice to express "regret" early on in the standoff with China
over the spy plane incident and tapped old family sources instead, Newsweek
reports in the April 16 issue. In a phone call last Tuesday with National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Powell had raised the idea of formally
expressing "regret" for the incident, but his suggestion got nowhere. By
Wednesday, dissatisfied with the advice his team was giving him, President
George W. Bush began reaching out to his father's old friends instead, report
Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and Beijing Bureau Chief Melinda Liu in
a special report on the standoff (on newsstands Monday, April 9).
(Photo: newscom.com )
An informed source says the White House made calls to former President
Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, his secretary of state,
James A. Baker, and also consulted with former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, who launched the first opening to China in the 1970s. Bush may not
have made the calls directly, preferring to use go-betweens, but one top aide
says that Bush has at times picked up the phone himself. Newsweek reports
that the president almost certainly spoke to his father, an old China hand,
but at his explicit direction, White House aides refused to touch the subject.
It was not until the next day that Powell made an official statement of
"regret" and Powell's top aide and close friend, Richard Armitage, began
talking to Chinese officials about a letter that might unlock the impasse.
That afternoon, Newsweek reports, Armitage delivered a secret letter to the
Chinese, exploring ways to back down from the crisis, including reviving an
obscure U.S.-China commission, established two years ago to look into ways to
minimize tensions and avoid maritime accidents, to investigate the incident.
And according to a high Administration official, the Bushites are also using
private back channels to communicate with Beijing.
Thomas and Liu report that when President Bush learned of the incident
last Saturday evening, he was at Camp David hosting a dinner with the First
Lady. Neither he nor Rice, also present, seemed anxious about the situation
deteriorating into a hostage crisis, says a source who was present. While
there was some talk of using the White House "hotline" to call Beijing
directly, Bush and his aides felt such a call would be premature.
In Beijing, officials worried that anti-American sentiment would get out
of hand and extra police were sent out to quash minor protest efforts. On the
Chinese Internet, government Web masters keep a tight lid on any Web chat that
might provoke angry demonstrations. In one chat room, a posting falsely
declaring that 100,000 students from 10 universities were marching on the
American Embassy kept popping up -- and kept getting deleted by vigilant Web
masters.
As Lui reports from Beijing on the internal political struggle in China,
the incident has forced President Jiang Zemin to talk tough and prevent the
hard-liners from hijacking policy. His long-range objectives for the year
remain bonding with Bush's new administration, thwarting advanced U.S. arms
sales to Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organization, and bidding to host the
Olympic Games in 2008. Liu writes that Jiang didn't want to alienate the West
irreversibly or allow tensions to get out of hand, so he and other moderates
tried to contain or suppress public protests against America.
At the outset of the incident, both sides "forcefully asserted their
interests using muscular language," writes Newsweek International Editor
Fareed Zakaria in his weekly column, and "for a moment it seemed as if we were
back in the Cold War." While we are not, he adds, and China is not the Soviet
Union, China is a third world country, and the danger it poses to the United
States is "not one of its booming strength, but rather of weakness of the
country and of its regime" and that won't make it any easier in trying to
maintain peace in East Asia. |
