Mr And Mrs Nut

by digby


A number of people have blogged about this fascinating little James Fallows anecdote at the Atlantic blog and it's a really good one.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting -- discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China's back!)

Lee Hamilton, who had also been on the commission, was sitting at the same lunch table and backed up Hart's story. Another chapter in the annals of missed opportunities in recent years.


Like most people who follow politics, I was aware of the neocons for years before Bush came to office, but it wasn't until 9/11 that I delved deeply into their more modern incarnations like the PNAC. And what I, and many others, found there was a very startling and dangerous movement for American empire that envisioned some pretty starkly mad scenarios. War with China being among their top priorities.

I never knew that Lynn Cheney was on the Hart-Rudman Commission, but it doesn't surprise me that she carried the PNAC Party line, nor that she quit when they insisted on focusing on terrorism. One of the things that has always distinguished these wingnut intellectuals is that they are always wrong about everything. They never gave the threat of Islamic terrorism much more than a passing thought until 9/11, despite the fact that they have spent every day since then shrieking like fishwives about "appeasement" and "WWIV" and the "gravest threat the world has ever known."

Just as a reminder of how cuckoo-bananas these demented robots people Cheney placed all over the government really are, here's an article from 2003, which Bush was still being hailed as "this extremely popular president" like he'd been anointed by God. They were still working the China angle:


Neoconservative hawks have scored a new victory in the administration of President George W. Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security adviser and director of policy planning on Cheney's high-powered foreign policy staff headed by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the administration. Libby also served as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, a House Select Committee that issued a report in 1999 accusing China of large-scale espionage to advance its nuclear weapons program and was soundly criticized by many China scholars for its factual errors, unsupported allegations, and shoddy analysis.

Both Friedberg and Libby, as well as Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and 21 other prominent right-wingers, signed the 1997 founding charter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which called for the adoption of a "'Reaganite' policy of military strength and moral clarity." Friedberg also signed another PNAC letter to Bush on September 20, 2001, which called for the "war on terrorism" to be directed against Iraq and other anti-Israel forces in the Middle East, in addition to al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And the professor wrote a chapter on the threat posed by China in Present Dangers, a 2000 book edited by PNAC cofounders William Kristol and Robert Kagan that also included chapters by other leading neoconservative hawks, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey.


That book "Present Dangers" was edited by Robert Kagan ---the great seer and author of "the surge" among other nutzoid schemes --- cited these six "mounting threats" in the year 2000:



Notice anything missing?

Just as an aside, you have to love this conclusion to the above linked article:

Friedberg's assumptions were even questioned by Zalmay Khalilzad, a senior Bush strategist who has handled relations with Afghanistan and Iraq but has supported a policy of both engagement and containment--or "congagement"--toward China. In a published reply to Friedberg's Commentary article, Khalilzad criticized his assumption "that the current Chinese regime and/or its likely successor will pursue regional hegemony. This is by no means inevitable," Khalilzad said, arguing that it was also possible that the relationship would evolve into "mutual accommodation and partnership," particularly if Beijing made democratic reforms.

But Friedberg thinks this unlikely. "Regimes in transition from strict authoritarianism to greater political openness," he replied, "have historically been prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism."

He may be right, but it's also pretty obvious that when regimes of historically great political openness are led by believers in strict authoritarianism those regimes also tend to be prone to bouts of aggressive nationalism. See: Rome; United States.


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