Dress Rehearsal For A Mideast War?

By Patrick J. Buchanan,
June 15, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

"History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes," said Mark Twain.

Observing the uprising in Syria, the atrocities, the intervention by rival powers, it all calls to mind the Great Rehearsal for World War II, the Spanish Civil War.

The war began in 1936 with an uprising in Morocco of Spanish Nationalists against a Madrid regime seen as anti-Catholic, Marxist and Trotskyite. Vladimir Lenin had predicted that Spain would be the second Soviet republic in Europe.

The war would last three years, with Joseph Stalin providing aid to the regime, Benito Mussolini sending troops to fight on the side of Gen. Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler sending his Condor Legion. The bombing of Guernica by the Legion, commemorated in the famous Picasso painting of that name, would be regarded as the great war crime of the conflict.

Yet Guernica was child’s play compared with what was to come with the Blitz, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima. The Nuremberg Tribunal would wisely rule out terror bombing of cities as a war crime for which Nazis could be prosecuted and hanged.

As America has declined to intervene in Syria, FDR declared neutrality early in the Spanish Civil War, outlawing any sale of weapons to either side.

In 1936, as the Spanish war erupted, FDR spoke for his country:

"We shun commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars; we avoid connections with the political activities of the League of Nations. … We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war."

America emphatically agreed.

Today, it is the bitter fruit of Iraq and Afghanistan that explains our reluctance. Then, it was 116,000 American dead in places like the Argonne and Belleau Wood — which had produced a Carthaginian peace at Versailles and set the table for Hitler — that had left us with ashes in our mouths. Two battalions of American volunteers did go to Spain to fight on the side of the regime. In 1947, veterans of that "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" would be put on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.

In Spain, the struggle was ideological and religious — Nationalists and Catholics against socialists, communists and anarchists.

In Syria, too, it is religious — the Alawite Shia regime of Bashar Assad battling an uprising centered in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.

As Europe in 1936 contained democracies, dictatorships of the fascist and authoritarian right, and a Stalinist left, today’s Middle East contains democracies, monarchies and dictatorships.

As there were Catalans and Basques fighting for their own causes in Spain, in Syria today are Kurds, Druze and al-Qaeda with their own rival agendas.

As America and Britain stayed out of the Spanish Civil War, so today America and Britain have stayed aloof from Syria’s conflict.

As the Spanish Civil War exposed the impotence of the League of Nations, Syria’s conflict is exposing the paralysis of the United Nations, when permanent members of the Security Council like Russia refuse to authorize the kind of intervention they did in Libya.

As the Spanish republic received moral and material support from Moscow, today Moscow sends attack helicopters to Damascus, while Turkey provides sanctuary for the resistance, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar provide weapons.

Russia and Iran see Assad’s Syria as their last strong, reliable ally in the region. Syria’s ports on the Mediterranean are open to Vladimir Putin’s navy. And Putin’s military-industrial complex has long sold the Assad family the weapons to fight its wars and crush rebellions.

If Assad’s regime were to collapse and the Muslim Brotherhood come to power, Russia would be virtually out of the Middle East. Iran would be almost isolated. Had we not overthrown the Sunni regime of Saddam and brought the Shia majority to power in Baghdad, an Iran without Syria would be an Iran without a major ally across the region.

The first peril in the Syrian conflict is that it could become a civil war in which not just 10,000 die, but scores of thousands perish.

A second danger is that as Syria contains Sunni, Shia, Druze, Kurd, Arab, Christian — indeed, mirrors the Middle East — a Syrian civil war could become a proxy war for all in the region, beginning with Lebanon.

Third, as Syria is aligned with Iran in the conflict with Israel and with Russia on the world stage, greater powers may come to see themselves as having a vital stake in how this war ends, and intervene, each in its own way, to assure a favorable outcome.

The Spanish Civil War ended in Franco’s victory in 1939 and ended well for the Western democracies that had not intervened.

When Hitler, after occupying France in 1940, met with Franco to ask permission for the Wehrmacht to cross Spain to attack Gibraltar, Franco said no and put troops in the Pyrenees to enforce his decision.

Unlike Mussolini, Franco remained a nonbelligerent in the world war, returned U.S. pilots who came down in Spain and agreed to a postwar alliance with the United States.

Non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War worked out just fine.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Second Worst Thing To Happen To The Jewish People

By William Blum
June 11, 2010
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

The worst thing that ever happened to the Jewish people is the Holocaust. The second worst thing that ever happened to the Jewish people is the state of Israel.

Things internationally are so dispiriting there's nothing left to do but fantasize. I picture Turkey, as a member of NATO, demanding that the alliance come to its defense after being attacked by Israel. Under Article 5 of the NATO charter an armed attack on one member is deemed to constitute an armed attack on all members. That is the ostensible reason NATO is fighting in Afghanistan — the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001 is regarded as an attack on all NATO members (disregarding the awkward fact that Afghanistan as a country had nothing to do with the attack). The Israeli attack on a Turkish-flagged ship, operated by a Turkish humanitarian organization, killing nine Turkish nationals and wounding many more can certainly constitute an attack upon a NATO member.

So, after the United States, the UK, Germany, France and other leading NATO members offer their ridiculous non-sequitur excuses why they can't ... umm ... er ... invoke Article 5, and the international media swallows it all without any indigestion, Turkey demands that Israel should at least lose its formal association with NATO as a member of the Mediterranean Dialogue. This too is dismissed with scorn by the eminent NATO world powers on the grounds that it would constitute a victory for terrorism. And anti-Semitism of course.

Turkey then withdraws from NATO. Azerbaijan and five other Central Asian members of NATO's Partnership for Peace with Turkic constituencies do the same. NATO falls into a crisis. Remaining member countries begin to question the organization's policies as never before ... like please tell us again why our young men are killing and dying in Afghanistan, and why we send them to Kosovo and Iraq and other places the Americans deem essential to their endlessly-threatened national security.

When Vice President Biden tells the eminent conservative-in-liberal-clothing pseudo-intellectual Charlie Rose on TV that "We have put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can to allow them [Gaza] to get building materials in," ¹Rose for once rises to the occasion and acts like a real journalist, asking Biden: "Have you threatened Israel with ending all military and economic aid? ... Have you put the names of Israeli officials on your list of foreigners who can not enter the United States and whose bank accounts in the US are frozen, as you've done with numerous foreign officials who were not supporters of the empire? ... Since Israel has committed both crimes against the peace and crimes against humanity, and since these are crimes that have international jurisdiction, certain Israeli political and military personnel can be named in trials held in any country of the world. Will you be instructing the Attorney General to proceed with such an indictment? Or if some other country which is a member of the International Criminal Court calls upon the ICC to prosecute these individuals, will the United States try to block the move? ... Why hasn't the United States itself delivered building materials to Gaza?"

When Israel justifies its murders on the grounds of "self-defense", late-night TV comedians Jay Leno and David Letterman find great humor in this, pointing out that a new memoir by China's premier at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square violent suppression defends the military action by saying that soldiers acted in "self-defense" when they fired on the democracy activists. ²

When Israel labels as "terrorists" the ship passengers who offered some resistance to the Israeli invaders, the New York Times points out that the passengers who resisted the 9-11 highjackers on the plane which crashed in Pennsylvania are called "heroes". (As an aside, it's worth noting that the United States uses 9-11 as Israel uses the Holocaust — as excuse and justification for all manner of illegal and violent international behavior.)

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reminds its readers that in 2009 Israel attacked a boat on international waters carrying medical aid to Gaza with former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney aboard; and that in 1967 Israel attacked an American ship, the USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding about 173, and that President Johnson did then just what President Obama is doing now and would have done then — nothing.

And finally, Secretary of State Clinton declares that she's had a revelation. She realizes that what she recently said about North Korea when it was accused of having torpedoed a South Korean warship applies as well to Israel. Mrs. Clinton had demanded that Pyongyang "stop its provocative behavior, halt its policy of threats of belligerence towards its neighbors, and take irreversible steps to fulfill its denuclearization commitments and comply with international law." ³ She adds that the North Korean guilt is by no means conclusive, while Israel doesn't deny its attack on the ship at all; moreover, it's not known for sure if North Korea actually possesses nuclear weapons, whereas there's no uncertainty about Israel's large stockpile.

So there you have it. Hypocrisy reigns. Despite my best fantasizing. Is hypocrisy a moral failing or a failure of the intellect? When President Obama says, as he has often, "No one is above the law" and in his next breath makes it clear that his administration will not seek to indict Bush or Cheney for any crimes, does he think that no one will notice the contradiction, the hypocrisy? That's a callous disregard for public opinion and/or a dumbness worthy of his predecessor.

And when he declares: "The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground", ⁴does it not occur to him at all that he's predicting a bleak outlook for the United States? Or that his conscious, deliberate policy is to increase the size of America's army and its stockpile of missiles?

Comrades, can the hypocrisy and the lies reach such a magnitude that enough American true believers begin to question their cherished faith, so that their number reaches a critical mass and explodes? Well, it's already happened with countless Americans, but it's an awfully formidable task keeping pace with what is turned out by the mass media and education factories. They're awfully good at what they do. Too bad. But don't forsake the struggle. What better way is there to live this life? And remember, just because the world has been taken over by lying, hypocritical, mass-murdering madmen doesn't mean we can't have a good time.

Bad Guys and Good Guys

In Lahore, Pakistan, reported the Washington Post on May 29, "Militants staged coordinated attacks ... on two mosques of a minority Muslim sect, taking hostages and killing at least 80 people. ... At least seven men armed with grenades, high-powered rifles and suicide vests stormed the mosques as Friday prayers ended."

Nice, really nice, very civilized. It's no wonder that decent Americans think that this is what the United States is fighting against — Islamic fanatics, homicidal maniacs, who kill their own kind over some esoteric piece of religious dogma, who want to kill Americans over some other imagined holy sin, because we're "infidels". How can we reason with such people? Where is the common humanity the naive pacifists and anti-war activists would like us to honor?

And then we come to the very last paragraph of the story: "Elsewhere in Pakistan on Friday, a suspected U.S. drone-fired missile struck a Taliban compound in the South Waziristan tribal area, killing eight, according to two officials in the region." This, we are asked to believe by our leaders, is a higher level of humanity. The United States does this every other day, sending robotic death machines called Predators flying over Afghanistan and Pakistan, to send Hellfire missiles screaming into wedding parties, funerals, homes, not knowing who the victims are, not caring who the victims are, many hundreds of them by now, as long as Washington can claim each time — whether correctly or not — that amongst their number was a prominent infidel, call him Taliban, or al Qaeda, or insurgent, or militant. How can one reason with such people, the ones in the CIA who operate the drone flights? What is the difference between them and a suicide bomber? The suicide bomber becomes one of the victims himself and sees his victims up close before killing them. The CIA murderer bomber sits safely in a room in Nevada or California and pretends he's playing a video game, then goes out to dinner while his victims lay dying. The suicide bomber believes passionately in something called paradise. The murderer bomber believes passionately in something called flag and country.

The State Department's Legal Advisor justifies the Predator bombings as ... yes, "self-defense". ⁵ Try reasoning with that.

These American drone bombings are of course the height of aggression, the ultimate international crime. They were used over Iraq as well beginning in the 1990s. In December 2002, shortly before the US invasion in March, the Iraqis finally managed to shoot one down. This prompted a spokesman for the US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, to call it another sign of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's "campaign of military aggression." ⁶

This particular piece of hypocrisy may have actually been outdone by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's comment about the US flights and bombings over Iraq during that period: "It bothers the dickens out of me that US and British pilots are getting fired at day after day after day, with impunity." ⁷

Send me a stamped self-addressed envelope for a copy of the revised edition of "An arsonist's guide to the homes of Pentagon officials".

When Politicians Misbehave, By Speaking The Truth.

The German president, Horst Koehler, resigned last week because he said something government officials are not supposed to say. He said that Germany was fighting in Afghanistan for economic reasons. No reference to democracy. Nothing about freedom. Not a word about Good Guys fighting Bad Guys. The word "terrorism" was not mentioned at all. Neither was "God". On a trip to German troops in Afghanistan he had declared that a country such as Germany, dependent on exports and free trade, must be prepared to use military force. The country, he said, had to act "to protect our interests, for example, free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and earnings".

"Koehler has said something openly that has been obvious from the beginning," said the head of Germany's Left Party. "German soldiers are risking life and limb in Afghanistan to defend the export interests of big economic interests." ⁸

Other opposition politicians had called for Koehler to take back the remarks and accused him of damaging public acceptance of German military missions abroad. ⁹

As T.S. Eliot famously observed: "Humankind can not bear very much reality."

What is the opposite of being a conspiracy theorist?

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine and former Washington Post reporter, has a new book out, "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama". In the three pages Remnick devotes to Obama's 1983-4 employment at Business International Corporation in New York he makes no mention of the well-known ties between BIC and the CIA. In 1977, for example, the New York Times revealed that BIC had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries during earlier years of the Cold War; ¹⁰BIC also attempted to penetrate the radical left, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). ¹¹

Did Remnick not think it at all interesting and worthy of mention that the future president worked for more than a year with a company that was a CIA asset? Even if the company and the CIA made no attempt to recruit Obama, which in fact they may have done? It's this kind of obvious omission that helps feed the left's conspiracy thinking.

Because Remnick has impeccable establishment credentials the book has been widely reviewed. But none of the many reviewers has seen fit to mention this omission. And the way it works of course is that if it's not mentioned, it didn't happen. And if you mention such a thing, you're a pathetic conspiracy theorist. Like me, who discussed it in the January edition of this report. ¹²

Spam, myself and my readers

As some of you now know, someone hacked into my website and used my address book to send out emails to many of the readers of this report. The emails indicated that they had been sent by me and directed people to a website which sells handbags, shoes and watches. What bothers me the most about this incident is that several of my readers believed that it was actually me who had sent out the emails, that I was peddling handbags, shoes and watches. The only thing I sell are books. But I think these readers have now learned something about spam. And hopefully about me.

Oh, by the way, can I interest any of you in some nice T-shirts, hats, or sunglasses?

Notes

1. Charlie Rose Live, June 2, 2010 program ^↩
2. Associated Press, June 4, 2010 ^↩
3. State Department press conference, May 24, 2010 ^↩
4. Talk given in Moscow, July 7, 2009, text released by the White House ^↩
5. National Public Radio, March 26, 2010 ^↩
6. Washington Post, December 24, 2002 ^↩
7. Associated Press, September 30, 2002 ^↩
8. London Times Online, May 31, 2010 ^↩
9. Associated Press, May 31, 2010 ^↩
10. New York Times, December 27, 1977, p.40 ^↩
11. Carl Oglesby, "Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement" (2008), passim ^↩
12. William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report, January 3rd, 2009 ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Calculated Ambiguity In the South China Sea

By Peter J Brown
December 8, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

Just as a group of experts arrived in Hanoi last month for a first-ever workshop involving nations with overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea (SCS), China's largest fisheries administration vessel, the Yuzheng 311, dropped anchor at Yongxing Island, one of what Beijing refers to as the Xisha Islands. It was the beginning of another long Chinese patrol of the South China Sea launched from the Sanya naval base on Hainan Island.

Where China claims to many places in the South China Sea, such as the Nansha, Xisha and Zongsha islands, other claimants - including Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines - have competing claims to island groups and individual islands. They are referred to variously as the Spratly and Paracel Islands, Scarborough Shoals and Macclesfield Bank, to name but a few.

Evidence of China's growing reach in the South China Sea can be found at obscure map points such as Woody Island in the Paracels, where China is steadily expanding and improving an airstrip, as well as the remote Mischief Reef - roughly 150 miles west of the Philippines - where China has erected various structures. China's neighbors view the process as expansionist and even hostile, despite the joint signing of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.

According to some security experts, China's end goal is not merely the creation of a vast exclusive economic zone (EEZ), extending by some renderings as far south as the Indonesia-claimed gas rich Natuna Islands. They say China seeks control over the the sea as part of a plan to establish more maritime power projection, including through a fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), in sea lanes extending beyond the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. The South China Sea is the second busiest sea lane in the world and serves as China's gateway for imports of oil from the Persian Gulf and natural resources from Africa.

"China's first carrier battle groups will be based on Hainan Island, and they will patrol these resource routes. For China's political leadership, control of the SCS is a critical objective toward ensuring the economic and political survival of the Communist Party dictatorship," said Richard Fisher, senior fellow at the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center.

However, he says, the US, Japan, Australia and several Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are still standing in China's way.

"[China wants] to make it into a heavily protected territorial zone for the operation of SSBNs until such a time as Taiwan comes to provide a better base for SSBN operations," said Fisher. "China may base up to half of its nuclear missiles on SSBNs, meaning that China will only settle for dictating future regimes for the SCS."
Beefing up China's offshore presence means that its State Oceanic Administration (SOA) and China Maritime Surveillance (CMS) will ensure that fishermen and survey vessels plying the South China Sea from other regional countries have more and more encounters with larger and better equipped Chinese vessels from the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), including the Yuzheng 311.

A March 16 incident showed Beijing's growing willingness to order non-PLAN ships, including from the SOA and CMS fleets, to carry out enforcement activities in the Spratly Islands - to the chagrin of neighbors, particularly the Philippines. After US spy ship the USNS Impeccable was harassed by Chinese vessels on March 8, the Chinese dispatched what it claimed was a fishery patrol boat - not a warship - to safeguard its interests in the South China Sea.

"China would dearly like to turn its assumption of control over the SCS into a non-confrontational police exercise in which Vietnam, the Philippines and others basically do nothing," said Fisher. "Giving non-PLAN agencies larger ships and greater firepower may be an attempt at benign militarization, but it will be destabilizing just the same."

Competing claims in the South China Sea have frequently flared into showdowns, including a clash between Chinese and Vietnamese naval vessels in 1988 at Johnson Reef in the Spratly Islands. Last month's joint session in Hanoi, co-sponsored by the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam and the Vietnam Lawyers' Association, resulted in promises to start multilateral dialogue on the many unresolved and overlapping claims in the area.

"Although in the past, China has insisted on bilateral solutions, no progress has been made because most disputes require concessions by multiple claimants. The goal for this session was likely to build confidence by holding preliminary, non-binding track two discussions and it was a good sign that Chinese scholars attended the conference because it may reflect some measure of acceptance on the part of the Chinese to a multilateral approach to untangling the disputes," said Dutton.

According to one of the attendees, Carlyle Thayer, professor of politics at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy, there were no national delegations and the Chinese representatives who attended hailed only from various universities and think tanks. "The meeting was termed a workshop, and not a conference, to water down any impression that a set of conclusions by way of a resolution or statement would be issued," said Thayer.

The event succeeded in raising the profile of regional concerns about development in the reputedly oil and gas rich South China Sea that "participants characterized as deteriorating or had the potential to deteriorate," said Thayer. "A consensus emerged that a long-standing proposal for joint development should be revived for consideration by claimant states."

Dotty Maps

Perhaps more importantly, Thayer said that besides the fact that, "there was no one China position," the so-called "nine-dotted line map" was described by one of the Chinese "as currently under discussion". In 1947, the nationalist Chinese government put forward claims to the South China Sea in a map containing 11 dotted lines.

This map was adopted by the Chinese communists when they took power and later premier Chou Enlai deleted two lines in the Gulf of Tonkin to make the 11 dots into nine. Unofficial maps containing the nine dotted lines have long been in circulation. Regional officials have been unable to get China to indicate how the lines would be connected and how much of the area China is claiming, according to Thayer.

"Chinese scholars made clear that an official map of the SCS containing nine dotted lines represented the maximum extent of historical claims to the area. Chinese specialists noted that this left open areas for discussion," said Thayer. "For example, one Chinese proposed that if nations which made claims for extended continental shelves withdrew such claims, there would be several areas within the dotted line might be amenable to joint development."

This proposal is tied to the submission of claims for extended continental shelves by Vietnam and Malaysia earlier this year under a United Nations imposed timetable. Both countries submitted a joint claim to areas in the south, while Vietnam lodged separate claims for an extended continental shelf in the north.

"China lodged a protest and tabled a map with nine dotted lines to indicate the area it said was Chinese territory. This appears to have been the first time the Chinese government has tabled this map," said Thayer. "China is deliberately pursuing a policy of calculated ambiguity in this matter. It is putting off any settlement of conflicting maritime sovereignty claims until the moment suits Beijing."

There is already talk of a second South China Sea workshop in Hanoi in mid-2010. Dutton has identified a number of possible agenda items. "One positive step would be to hold a multilateral, regional forum to discuss the range of possible multilateral projects which could be undertaken to research the extent of hydrocarbon deposits under the SCS seabed," said Dutton.

"Another positive step could include development of a multilateral management framework for living resources, including a regional body to regulate sustainable fishing by all claimants under a treaty regime that allocates a total allowable catch among the various parties. Such steps would resolve some of the less difficult challenges, while postponing more difficult questions of sovereignty," he said.

Prejudiced Claims

Dutton noted that a debate within China persists as to the exact nature of its claims to sovereignty and coastal state jurisdiction in the South China Sea. Among other things, China probably prefers a political solution here, rather than a solution that applies a legal framework that might prejudice its other claims, he said.

"Chinese domestic law claims sovereignty over all of the islands in the SCS and also claims territorial seas and EEZs emanating from all of its claimed territories. However, it may benefit the Chinese to remain somewhat ambiguous as to the exact nature of the Chinese SCS legal claims," said Dutton.

"It is critical that settlement of Chinese claims in the SCS does not apply a legal approach that might prejudice its claims against Japan in the East China Sea. Thus, from China's perspective, a legal framework for resolution of SCS disputes must be developed that does not compromise its East China Sea claims."

With or without a legal framework, Thayer believes China seeks to divide regional states and strike bilateral deals.

"China has recently told the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations that they should get their act together first before approaching China for discussions on the SCS. Some ASEAN states point out that getting consensus among the ASEAN 10 states would be difficult and that a unified bloc would only create friction in dealing with China," said Thayer.

The recent workshop in Hanoi will be followed on December 16 by another round of talks on the South China Sea, the next round of the so-called Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) discussions involving delegations from China and the US. The meeting will be held at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, Hawaii.

"The Vietnam conference was essentially a Track 2 discussion of issues, whereas the MMCA is a Track 1 military-to-military dialogue," said Dutton. "The Vietnam Conference will have no impact on MMCA, as the issues are fundamentally different. The attendees at the Vietnam Conference were discussing national sovereignty and jurisdiction issues, whereas the MMCA discussions focus on freedoms of navigation and other military uses of the waters of the seas off China's coastline."

Thayer notes that the US Embassy in Hanoi did not send diplomatic observers to the workshop, thus distancing the US from sovereignty and territorial disputes in the South China Sea. "The next session of the MMCA may dampen maritime confrontation, such as the incident involving the USNS Impeccable. But a negotiated 'Incident at Sea Agreement' is likely to take a year or more before it is signed," said Thayer.

Thayer pointed to the visit to the US in October by General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission. (See Chinese general on a long march, Asia Times, November 3, 2009.) General Xu identified the four obstacles to a healthy and stable US-China military relationship as starting with Taiwan, and he called upon the US to cease its intrusion via military aircraft and ships' intrusions into China's maritime EEZ.

"China's main objective is to get the US to scale down, if not cease, its surveillance activities off China's coast and the naval base on Hainan Island particularly," said Thayer.

Besides General Xu's demands, Fisher points to a recently retired PLA general who publicly called for China to greatly increase its military force deployments in the South China Sea and to build an airbase on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.

"In addition to being only about 200 miles from the Philippine island of Palawan , it would extend PLA control over the Palawan Straits, a vital commercial sea lane for Japan , South Korea and Taiwan ," said Fisher who recently wrote an article about this issue. "An airbase on Mischief Reef would create a security challenge of a very high order which Washington could not ignore."

Taiwan's islands in the South China Sea make matters even more complicated. "There are also smaller islands closer to Hainan occupied by Taiwan. Beijing could use a number of excuses, from threatening military activity aimed at nuclear assets on Hainan, to a desire to create political instability in Taiwan as cause to take them over," said Fisher.

"Due to its decade-long investment in amphibious assault forces, the PLA could take these islands with ease. But having long ago chosen to concede to Beijing's 'One China' policies, it is highly unlikely that any Asian state would respond in a manner that defends their larger interests."

The South China Sea and even Taiwan are of less strategic importance to the US than they were during the Cold War-era. But China should not take this increasingly "disinterested" stance for granted. US strategy could shift with an up-tick in Chinese military activity in the region. And it is too early to tell if the meeting in Hanoi represents an important new chapter in China's dealings with its neighbors in particular.

"A continuation of US neutrality will only serve to hasten the day in which China becomes the region's anti-democratic hegemon with an ability to apply vast economic and military pressures to force regional conformity with its desires," said Fisher.

Peter J Brown is a freelance writer from the US state of Maine.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)