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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (9085)	5/19/1999 9:19:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

I was not making a literal comparison of Clinton's spin team to the Gestapo. He's the first President who's devoted so much resources to image management. They're almost like college football boosters run amok. Never mind campaign finance, there's a lot more money out there funding these attack dogs on the left and right than probably found in the campaigns.

To: Neocon who wrote (9085)	5/19/1999 9:20:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Bush, McCain Offer Reagan-Like 'Third Way' China Policy By Morton M. Kondracke The "third way" concept is all the rage and the United States needs it in China policy -- something between President Clinton's notion that China is a "strategic partner" and some Republicans' conviction that China is a "strategic adversary" or even an "enemy." In fact, as Los Angeles Times writer James Mann describes in his new book, the United States did have such a policy during the Reagan administration. And there are indications that Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) want to bring it back. In an interview, Texas Gov. Bush told me, "I would look at China from a wary perspective. We ought to deal with China, but in a way that recognizes success and blows the whistle on activity that will destabilize the world." The Clinton word "engagement," Bush said, "has got this sense of embracing them. It's when you're about ready to head down to the altar. I'm not sure we're at the embracing stage." Bush, though he lacks experience in foreign policy, has as top advisers two of the people Mann credits with making and managing Ronald Reagan's China policy: then-Secretary of State George Shultz and then-Assistant Secretary (and later Undersecretary of Defense) Paul Wolfowitz. Mann's book, "About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton," is especially scathing in describing the "wild swing" that took place in Clinton policy. Clinton campaigned for president in 1992, of course, accusing his predecessor, President George Bush, of "coddling" the "dictators" and "butchers" in Beijing. Clinton began his presidency by issuing an executive order tying annual renewal of China's most-favored-nation trade status to progress in human rights. In 1994, however, after China had put Clinton under intense commercial and diplomatic pressure -- at one juncture, totally humiliating his secretary of State -- Clinton reversed himself on MFN and started trying to make China's leaders into "friends." Meantime, China has made no progress toward internal democracy, has expanded its military arsenal and presence in Southeast Asia and has menaced Taiwan with troop movements and ballistic missile shots. Twice, Clinton has briefly demonstrated that he knows how to respond to Chinese provocation. In 1995 and 1996, when China made threatening moves against Taiwan -- and told the United States there could be war if the U.S. intervened -- Clinton moved U.S. naval forces to the region. But, eager to satisfy U.S. businesses anxious to serve the Chinese market, Clinton overall has given China what it wanted, culminating in his 1998 "three no's" statement publicly ruling out U.S. support for democratic Taiwan's desire to be independent. Clinton calls China a "strategic partner" even though it manifestly is siding with dictator Slobodan Milosevic on Kosovo. Clinton appropriately apologized for the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, but by now has done so excessively and is in danger of being put on the defensive when China helps draft United Nations terms for an international troop presence in Kosovo. Chinese efforts to steal U.S. military secrets and influence U.S. elections have led former Reagan administration official Robert Kagan to declare that China is treating the United States as an "enemy," the implication being that the United States should treat China the same way. There is a third alternative, which Mann describes as the "pan-Asian" perspective of Wolfowitz and Shultz in the Reagan years. Their attitude was that China "needed the U.S. as much as the U.S. needed China" and was not necessarily the most important country in Asia. They favored strengthening U.S. relations with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as a counterweight to China. Also, Shultz was refreshingly resistant to pressure from U.S. business. Once, when U.S. businessmen in Beijing told him that U.S. policy was allowing Europe and Japan to get the upper hand in trade with China, Shultz retorted, "Why don't you move to Japan or Western Europe?" McCain, in a speech this March, said that Clinton's China reversals were evidence of "strategic incoherence ... a mystifying uncertainty about how to act in a world where we are the only superpower." "Virtually at the speed of light," McCain charged, "the President's view of China changed from 'bloody butchers of Beijing' to our 'strategic partners.' They are neither. "They are determined, ruthless defenders of their regime, who will do whatever is necessary, no matter how inhumane or offensive to us, to pursue their own interests. And they lead a nation of extraordinary potential that is ... becoming a great power." McCain added, "I agree that America must engage China" with open trade and diplomatic co-operation to curb weapons proliferation, but he said, "we must also prepare for the other contingency, that China emerges as the primary threat to American interests and values." The bottom line is that the next U.S. administration needs to be the manager in the U.S.-China relationship, not the managed.