NEO - CONS - INCLUDING WOLFOWITZ - PRESSED FOR CONFRONTATION WITH
CHINA AS WELL AS IRAQ
JEFF STEIN, CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY - The same top Bush administration
neoconservatives who leap - frogged Washington's foreign policy
establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup
in U.S. - China relations-creating the potential of a nuclear war 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 in little - noted remarks early
last month that "neocons" in the top rungs of the administration quietly
encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of
independence from mainland China - an act that the communist regime has
repeatedly warned 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 hotly disputed by key former defense
officials. . .
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.
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.
While Bush publicly continued the one - China policy of his five White
House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon "neocons" took a
different tack, 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, "essentially to tell Chen
Shui - bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence
movement, that independence was a good thing."
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