Risking nuclear war, neocons tried to reverse China policy

"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 US-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 US 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 US diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson's account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials. 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." Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy "right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they'd been told by the Defense Department." "This went on," he said of the pro-independence efforts, "until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China."