Fiendish Plots Everywhere!

Max Boot is at it again. In a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times entitled “China’s stealth war on the U.S.,” Boot argues that “Chinese strategists, in the best tradition of Sun Tzu, are working on craftier schemes to topple the American hegemon.”

In 1998, an official People’s Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called “Unrestricted Warfare,” written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

“Unrestricted Warfare” recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. “The way to extricate oneself from this predicament,” the authors write, “is to develop a different approach.”

Boot continues:

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the “bandwidths understood by the American military.” They envision a scenario in which a “network attack against the enemy” — clearly a red, white and blue enemy — would be carried out “so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed,” leading to “social panic, street riots and a political crisis.” Only then would conventional military force be deployed “until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty.”

Excuse me for asking, but exactly how would such a document be any different that anything written about China by, say, the Pentagon, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, RAND, or the Project for a New American Century? Especially since so many of those PNAC people advocating a strategy of perpetual US military dominance of the globe are now in positions of power where they can try to do something about it?

Boot sees anything that China might do as some form of warfare against the United States:

The bid by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Co. [sic], to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China’s spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International law warfare. [International law warfare?!?!] Gen. Zhu’s threat to nuke the U.S.? Media warfare.

“Once you know what to look for,” he explains, “the pieces fall into place with disturbing ease.”

Sorta like all the evidence that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons touted by Team Bush and its acolytes in 2002 and early 2003?

The only he thing he has decided not to blame on the crafty Chinese is the hot weather (weather warfare), traffic congestion (traffic warfare) and the lack of razor blades in the local CVS (grooming warfare). I guess the lesson is: nothing ever happens by accident. It’s Beijing’s covert struggle against our way of life.

I’ll remember that next time the power goes out or one of my bicycle tires goes flat.

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10:49 am on July 20, 2005