Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Rare historical account of Bush Admin's China policies

This is an absolutely exceptional historical testimony on the Bush administration's conduct towards China which, I think, is disclosed for the very first time.

The man interviewed is is Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Bush's Secretary of State.

He described how during the Bush administration, there was a major internal fight between hawks (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) who wanted to provoke China into a war with respect to Taiwan and those who wanted to keep the peace (Colin Powell and Richard Hass, assisted by Bush himself).

For instance he describes how "when Chen Shui-bian was threatening to hold an independence referendum in Taiwan" he together with Powell and Haas were telling Wang Yi "don't listen to Chen Shui-bian because he is not going to be allowed to do that, we will prevent him from doing that." Meanwhile "Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were sending an emissary to Taipei, almost weekly, to tell Chen Shui-bian to keep on, to keep doing it. They wanted to cross that red line which they knew was a red line China would honor..." This situation was ultimately resolved when Bush got informed and decided to publicly rebuke Chen Shui-bian.

He said the situation was such that "we had to fight to the nail against the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense from developing a new cold war with China. That's what they wanted, they wanted a new cold war with China. They both saw that cold wars were very advantageous for the U.S., the defense complex and everything else, from where Cheney came... Powell spent his entire four years - the principal purpose - was keeping us out of war with China, because of what the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense did."

His conclusion: "That was how crazy that administration was. They're trying to do all these things [in the Middle-East] and at the same time they're baiting China. It's insanity, I don't know a better word for it, it's insanity. The hubris of power produced an incredible amount of insanity."

The obvious two lessons here are:
1) Taiwan absolutely is a pawn the U.S. uses to provoke China, I don't think there can be any doubt when you listen this testimony... At the end of the day, they'll do - especially the DPP (Chen Shui-bian's party and that of today's president Tsai Ing-wen) - whatever the prevailing mood in the U.S. is.

2) Thankfully the more rational spirits prevailed here but it was obviously a close call, we can easily imagine a similarly insane U.S. administration without anyone to keep the insanity in check. And this would result in a war that'd have enormous ramifications for every single human being on the planet.

h/t

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand

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