Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

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.

Under the deliberately fuzzy diplomatic formula hammered out between former President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong in 1971, the United States agreed that there is only “one China” —with its capital in Beijing.

But right-wing Republicans in particular continued to embrace Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion 125 miles off the Chinese coast, long after their own party leaders and U.S. big business embraced the communist regime.

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.”

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.”

Routine military ties had been suspended in early 2001 after China forced a U.S. reconnaissance plane down on Hainan Island off Vietnam.

Strong Denials

Feith, now teaching and working on a book at Georgetown University, responded that Wilkerson’s “remarks are not even close to being accurate. They are phrased so vaguely and sweepingly that it is impossible to deny them with precision, but they are not right.”

Rumsfeld’s former spokesman Lawrence DiRita called Wilkerson’s allegations “completely ridiculous—clear and simple . . . absurd.”

“The idea that there was some kind of DoD attempt to favor some faction in Taiwan, as described by Wilkerson ... is just crazy,” DiRita said in a brief telephone interview.

Wilkerson told a similar story in a recent critical biography of Rumsfeld by Washington-based British journalist Andrew Cockburn.

He elaborated on the episode during a May 7 panel, organized to discuss the controversy over Iraq intelligence at the University of the District of Colombia, as well as in subsequent conversations last week.

“It was a constant refrain of they said one thing, we said another thing for months on end,” Wilkerson said by e-mail. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, you are our allies and we will defend you—regardless.’ We said, ‘Do worry—if you declare independence, we may not be there; so be quiet and let sleeping dogs lie. . . .’ ”

Rewriting Bush

Another key character in the minidrama was Therese Shaheen, the outspoken chief of the U.S. office of the American Institute in Taiwan, which took on the functions of the American embassy after the formal 1979 diplomatic switch.

Shaheen, who happens to be DiRita’s wife, openly championed Chen and the independence movement, at one point even publicly reinterpreting Bush’s reiteration of the “one China” policy, saying that the administration “had never said it ‘opposed’ Taiwan independence,” according to a 2004 account in the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review.

“Therese Shaheen . . . said don’t sweat it, the president didn’t really mean what he said,” Wilkerson said.

Coming from the wife of Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Shaheen’s remarks sent off angry alarms in Beijing.

Powell asked for her resignation.

Douglas Paal was then head of the American Institute in Taiwan, effectively making him the U.S. ambassador there. He backed up Wilkerson’s account.

“In the early years of the Bush administration,” Paal said by e-mail last week, “there was a problem with mixed signals to Taiwan from Washington. This was most notably captured in the statements and actions of Ms. Therese Shaheen, the former AIT chair, which ultimately led to her departure.”

Now retired, Paal said he, too, “received many first- and second-hand reports of messages conveyed to Taiwan by DoD civilians and perhaps a uniformed officer or two during that time that were out of sync with President Bush’s position.”

DiRita defended his wife, saying “she understood U.S. policy and executed it to the very best of her abilities and wasn’t trying to play games with” Taiwanese independence forces.

“That was always kind of a mythology of what happened over there,” he said.

Mushroom Clouds

“They are dangerous men who will lie about almost anyone or anything,” Wilkerson angrily responded by e-mail, singling out Feith, DiRita, Cheney and Rumsfeld for scorn.

He called back-stage encouragement of the Taiwanese “even more serious” than the alleged manipulation of Iraq intelligence, because it could provoke China to attack the island, triggering a U.S. response and the world’s first nuclear shooting war.

The independence issue, agrees China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon, is Beijing’s third rail—touch it and you die.

“Even if the odds are fairly low of miscalculation leading to war, and war then bringing in the United States, this scenario is scary,” they recently wrote in The Washington Times.

A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

First posted June 1, 2007 5:48 p.m.

鼓動台獨 布希政府曾爆內訌

〔駐美特派員曹郁芬／華府二日報導〕前美國國務卿鮑威爾的幕僚長威克森（Lawrence B. Wilkerson）在最新出版的君子雜誌中表示，雖然布希總統奉行一個中國政策，但是以前國防部長倫斯斐為首的一些新保守主義官員卻常常派人到台灣，鼓勵陳水扁政府走向公開獨立，逼得鮑威爾不得不再派自己的信使到台灣澄清美國政府的立場。

倫斯斐等被爆料

曾經接受君子雜誌專訪公開鮑威爾與倫斯斐不和的威克森，又在六月一日出刊的君子雜誌中大爆內幕，指控由新保守主義官員掌握的美國國防部曾經企圖改變美國的政策，鼓勵台灣正式宣布台獨，差點導致美中爆發核子大戰。

威克森指出，這批鼓動台獨的美國官員與發動伊拉克戰爭的是同一批人，其中包括倫斯斐、副國防部長沃佛維茲、國防部主管政策的次長費斯、倫斯斐的情報首長坎波爾、美國駐聯合國大使波頓，還有前美國在台協會理事主席夏馨。

威克森說，這些人暗中鼓勵傾向台獨的陳水扁總統，國防部幾乎每週派人到台灣，告訴台灣領導人，美台在一九七○年代前的盟邦關係又回復了。而且告訴靠著台獨運動掌握政權的陳水扁，「台獨是個好東西」。

威克森表示，鮑威爾每次都得在美國國防部派人到台灣影響國安佈局後，再派自己人去台灣。直到布希總統親自介入要倫斯斐停止鼓勵台獨，並且多次要求他恢復美中軍事交流。

前相關官員否認

君子雜誌並報導說，目前在喬治城大學任教的費斯反駁威克森的說法不是事實，倫斯斐的前國防部發言人迪瑞塔則以「荒謬」回應，迪瑞塔說，威克森指出國防部倒向台灣某派系的說法，根本就是瘋狂。

迪瑞塔的妻子就是夏馨，報導說，夏馨甚至曾在接受遠東經濟評論採訪時公開詮釋布希的一個中國政策，表示美國政府從未反對台獨。威克森表示，夏馨甚至說，布希的一個中國是言不由衷，讓北京火大，使鮑威爾決定要她走路。

迪瑞塔為夏馨辯護，表示她完全了解美國政策並忠心執行，並沒有玩遊戲。

不過向來與夏馨不和的前美國在台協會理事主席包道格則支持威克森的說法，表示華府曾有一陣子向台灣傳遞混淆的訊息，夏馨是一個主要來源，有時從國防部也有一手或二手的不同訊息。

US neocons `lobbied' for independence

REVELATION? : An ex-chief of staff to Colin Powell was quoted in `Esquire' magazine as saying that hawkish US officials encouraged Chen Shui-bian to declare independence
By Nadia Tsao
STAFF REPORTER IN WASHINGTON, WITH STAFF WRITER
Monday, Jun 04, 2007, Page 1