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The Clinton administration is promoting military and political crises against the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Whether or not this dangerous crisis leads to war, the charged atmosphere serves several purposes of U.S. imperialism.
It is in this atmosphere of crisis created by Washington that the Pentagon is extending its military reach in the region. While the military-industrial complex plots to get richer at the expense of the masses of workers and oppressed, the ruling class as a whole is bringing greater military pressure to bear on the two socialist countries.
Whatever the outcome of the present crises, and whatever propaganda is promoted by the capitalist media, the working class needs to understand that the plans of the military machine and the corporate merchants of death will devour trillions of dollars of wealth. Inevitably, this will deprive millions of decent health care, housing, education, child care and even adequate nutrition.
According to a recent study, "Fiscal Year 2000 Military Budget at a Glance," compiled by the Council for a Livable World, the Pentagon plans to spend $1.9 trillion between fiscal years 2000 and 2005. This astronomical sum, if spent for human progress, could wipe out illiteracy in the world and provide basics like clean water, sanitation and basic medical services for everyone--with a lot of money still left over.
These weapons are intended to be used to threaten and attack any government or national liberation movement around the world that resists or challenges the domination of the U.S. corporate/military empire--whether it's the people of Iraq, Yugoslavia or Colombia.
Military profits, civilian poverty
The money is going to companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Hughes- Raytheon, Motorola, General Electric, United Technologies, General Motors and other big military contractors, plus thousands of subcontractors, who will rake in huge profits.
Yet no public housing has been built since 1996. Millions of people have been driven off welfare. In many states the spending on prisons rivals or exceeds spending on education. The need for a national health care plan has reached the emergency level. Poverty in the Black, Latin, Asian and Native communities is rampant.
Workers work harder and longer and low wages are epidemic. In the midst of a great profit boom, there is a crying social service deficit in this richest of all capitalist countries.
It is widely publicized that the Pentagon just dropped over 20,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia. But it has only now been made public that, over the past eight months, U.S. and British planes carried out 358 missions over Iraq, firing 11,000 missiles and bombs in a virtually continuous war.
Washington has just agreed to sell Israel large numbers of F-16s to fortify it against the Arab masses. Large numbers of troops are being moved into Puerto Rico, including the operational Southern Command, Navy Seals, Green Berets and other special forces for rapid deployment. This ominous move is to prepare for intervention in Colombia, Venezuela or other parts of Latin America where the economic crisis has caused revolutionary or leftist rebellion.
A U.S. military plane crashed in Colombia without a stir from the capitalist establishment. When the military was recently caught misappropriating billions of dollars in defiance of Congress, it got hardly a mention in the media. The Pentagon is getting taller and taller in the saddle.
In the post-Soviet era, when the bosses and bankers do not feel the pressure of a global confrontation on a nuclear level with the USSR and the socialist camp, the military is being given more and more license.
Ronald Reagan spent $2 trillion on the military to undermine the USSR. The end of the Cold War was supposed to reduce the deadly weight of the military in U.S. society. Yet each year it is weighing more heavily upon the masses.
The method generals and admirals use to expand the reach of the Pentagon and promote the growth of the military-industrial complex is time-tested. Create military tensions around the globe with provocations, threats and demonizations. This then justifies their pillaging of the Treasury.
A good case in point is the recent signing by the U.S. and Japan of an agreement to do joint research on what will become a multi-billion-dollar project called the Theater Missile Defense system. It is directed against the People's Republic of China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The contractors for this system include Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, Hughes/Raytheon, Motorola and Mitsubishi, among others.
Of course, these latest crises have profound political as well as economic significance, because they are both directed by imperialism against socialist countries. In that sense they are meant not only to enrich the corporations directly but to undermine socialism and strengthen the world capitalist system of exploitation at the same time.
Hysteria against the DPRK
The big business-controlled media in both the U.S. and Japan are raising a hysteria about the prospect of the DPRK testing a missile, as though this were somehow a great danger to both the U.S. and Japan. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has threatened the DPRK with retaliation and declared that such a launching would "destabilize" the region. The DPRK has said that its intention is to launch a satellite, but it also defends its sovereign right to launch a satellite or a missile.
The real "destabilizing" force in the area is the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops in south Korea poised to invade the north; the U.S.-trained and -equipped south Korean military; and the hundreds of U.S. nuclear weapons surrounding and threatening the DPRK. This country of 23 million has never acted aggressively against any nation, as opposed to the U.S. and Japan, both of which have invaded and occupied part or all of the Korean peninsula for the greater part of this century.
There is a typical tension-producing setup being engineered by the Clinton administration and the Pentagon against the DPRK. Leon V. Sigal, consultant to the Social Science Research Council, writes in a column in the Aug. 16 Los Angeles Times that the U.S. has violated the most basic provisions of the accord that laid a basis for easing military tensions on the peninsula, which Washington signed.
The U.S., writes Sigal, "has not even kept the promise to ease sanctions that it made in the October 1994 Agreed Framework, the deal that froze [the DPRK's] nuclear program." Under that accord the DPRK agreed to stop its nuclear development in return for fuel shipments. These shipments were to replace the energy that would have been supplied by nuclear power when the government completed its power project. A major condition required by the DPRK and agreed to by Washington was an end to economic sanctions.
"As a visit by U.S. inspectors ... showed, North Korea has been punctilious in observing the nuclear accord ... but [the U.S.] has yet to take the modest steps that the North was long led to expect: unfreezing assets seized in the Korean War, allowing commercial loans from American banks and licensing private investment projects in mining and agriculture," writes Sigal.
These measures were extremely urgent in light of the economic hardships the DPRK was going through, resulting largely from a combination of the sanctions and natural disasters. The DPRK, continues Sigal, "has been trying to improve relations with the United States by mutual accommodation but the U.S. has been unwilling to reciprocate."
Taiwan belongs to China
In the present crisis over Taiwan, Washington is threatening to retaliate against China if it does anything to defend its sovereignty over the island. Taiwan has been recognized as part of China since the 1600s. When the People's Liberation Army defeated the army of the landlords and warlords in 1949 and inaugurated the socialist revolution, the remnants of the defeated counter-revolutionaries, under Chiang Kai-shek, fled the mainland to Taiwan. They immediately got the full support and military protection of U.S. imperialism, which built up a system of capitalist exploitation and landlordism there.
The current Taiwan crisis was precipitated when its president, Lee Teng-hui, told a German audience on July 9 that he would only deal with the People's Republic of China on a "state-to-state" basis from now on. This provocative pronouncement by a U.S.-backed client regime virtually tore up the long-standing international recognition of the sovereignty of the PRC over Taiwan. This sovereignty had been agreed to by the U.S. in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, and was reiterated three times by President Bill Clinton during Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit last year.
Both Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have disavowed Lee Teng-hui's political position in public. But Lee has not withdrawn it.
In fact, he reiterated it to a group of Philippine legislators on July 22 (New York Times, July 23). Now the Clinton administration is warning the PRC against exercising its right to use force to maintain its sovereignty over Taiwan and admonishing the Chinese leaders not to stop talking with the defiant U.S. puppet.
Clinton arrogantly told President Jiang Zemin that Washington would take "very seriously any abridgement of the peaceful dialogue" (New York Times, July 21).
Clinton started the crisis with the Lee visit
The way these two crises have evolved and been managed by Washington is instructive about relations among the Clinton administration, the military and the ruling class. The Taiwan crisis actually originated with the Clinton administration's decision in 1995 to give Lee a visa for a visit to Cornell University, where he was to give a speech promoting "a more assertive" foreign policy.
Lee had recently shifted to the position of wanting to detach Taiwan from China, but he said it then in more guarded language. Furthermore, the invitation came at the outset of the first general election campaign in Taiwan's history, in which Lee was running for president.
This was the first overt political move by any U.S. administration to undermine support for PRC sovereignty over Taiwan--although the U.S. had been sending arms to Taiwan since 1979, in violation of the 1972 agreement on "one China." The visit broke up an agreement between the PRC and Taiwan, signed in 1993, to have periodic meetings to work towards eventual unification.
Unification between antagonistic social systems poses extraordinary problems and dangers for the PRC, particularly in the context of its market reforms and capitalist development, which are making corrosive inroads into the socialist structure, fostering unemployment and undermining the morale of the working class. Nevertheless, Taiwan belongs to China and it is the sovereign right of the PRC to defend its territory against any and all imperialist attempts to sever it from the mainland politically.
In March 1996, during the election campaign, China launched several missiles across the Taiwan Straits to remind the Taiwanese capitalists and their U.S. masters that the PRC reserved the right to use force to maintain its sovereignty over Taiwan. Washington sent two aircraft carriers into the straits in a show of military support for Taipei.
Pentagon pushes forward after 1996 crisis
After the crisis of 1996, according to the Los Angeles Times of July 24, "a Pentagon review ... concluded that the United States needed to broaden its contacts with Taiwan's armed forces." The paper wrote that "over the past three years, the Clinton administration has quietly forged an extensive military relationship with Taiwan, authorizing the kind of strategic dialogue that had not been permitted by any previous administration since 1979." That was the year after the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan, in accordance with the "one China" agreement with the PRC.
A Taiwanese source quoted by the Times said that "The discussions turned from procurement to policy.... We never had that sort of conversation with the Pentagon before.... We share with the United States the action plan if we are attacked." In fact, just last October Tang Fei, the chief of general staff of Taiwan's armed forces, met with Defense Secretary Cohen and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton, over the objections of the PRC.
During the three years that the Pentagon has been secretly working Taiwan into its anti-China military strategy, Clinton has been publicly promoting the policy of trade and "engagement." But this policy had been and still is regarded warily by the Pentagon, which feared that Clinton and the corporations might put profit before military advantage and inadvertently give China some military benefit.
Equally importantly, the military was afraid of a public softening of the U.S. attitude towards China. Easing of tensions would create an atmosphere that would work against military expansion in the region. The interim compromise proposed by the generals and admirals was to gain the right to carry on secret strategic talks, to balance out the public policy of engagement. Clinton of course agreed.
Lee/Helms axis
There are those who contend that the current crisis with Lee was not the direct work of the Clinton administration. This is a speculative matter, known only to those in the inner circles of the Pentagon. But it is definite that Lee is coordinating with a right-wing faction of the Pentagon whose congressional mouthpiece is Jesse Helms, senator from North Carolina. Helms still refers to the PRC as "Red China" and is using a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, co-sponsored by him and Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, as a platform against the PRC. The act authorizes the U.S. to sell more sophisticated arms to Taiwan and demands, among other things, that the PRC renounce the use of force to retain Taiwan.
According to the New York Times of July 23, Helms saluted Lee's courage and accused the Clinton administration of dragging the United States "even deeper into a one-China hole." This policy of creating a political crisis to provoke a military confrontation with the PRC is reminiscent of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy during the war against Yugoslavia. It reflects the ultra-militarist adventurism of the current to which Gen. Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, belongs.
Clinton and Pentagon planned military provocation
However far up the ladder of the Pentagon hierarchy Lee's support goes, the Clinton administration, in collaboration with the brass, was preparing its own military provocation at the very moment that the political crisis broke out over the "two-state" challenge to socialist China's sovereignty.
Eleven days into the crisis Clinton finally made a last-minute decision to postpone a long-scheduled visit of a Pentagon missile team to Taiwan. According to the New York Times of July 22, the team "was to include officials from the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which directs research and development of anti-missile technology, as well as representatives from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Department's Pacific Command."
The weeklong visit was cancelled 12 hours before the delegation was to leave. Its purpose was to assess "all defense needs."
This trip was undoubtedly linked to preparation of the Theater Missile Defense System that the Pentagon is planning for the region. China has said time and again that the deployment of such a system, particularly if it included Taiwan, would be regarded as a major act of aggression and would totally destabilize the region militarily.
So U.S. imperialism is insisting that China renounce the use of force to uphold its sovereignty and that the DPRK forgo developing any means of defense against a military encirclement. But meanwhile the Pentagon pushes forward with its militarization of the region, threatening and provoking the two socialist countries and all the oppressed peoples of Asia.
U.S. missiles target China, DPRK
Putting the hysteria of the capitalist media about "threats" to the U.S. from the PRC or the DPRK into some kind of rational perspective, Patrick Tyler, writing in the New York Times Magazine of Aug. 8, cited comments from Wolfgang Panofsky. Panofsky, who studies China's military, is a physicist from Stanford University who was an adviser to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Carter on nuclear weapons policy.
Panofsky pointed out that China has fewer than 30 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S., while "the president of the United States has at any time at his disposal about 10,000 nuclear weapons, about 6,000 of which could be programmed to strike China." It must be pointed out that hundreds of those weapons are already targeted on the DPRK. He also pointed out that China has never used nuclear weapons in its diplomacy and has never activated its nuclear force during a military crisis.
Commenting on the recent Cox report, issued by a bipartisan congressional committee set up to attack China for alleged nuclear spying, "Panofsky explained how he had read the entire Cox report and found it so full of false assumptions, unsubstantiated claims and errors" that it was virtually useless.
In fact, the former head of counter-intelligence at the Los Alamos laboratory, Robert S. Vrooman, has now revealed that the Chinese scientist, Dr. Wen Ho Lee, who was fired for "spying" for China and upon whom the alleged activities for which the entire Cox report was based, was singled out and persecuted solely because of his Chinese ethnicity. There was no investigation of any whites.
Vrooman asserted categorically that after a three-year investigation of the case, there is "not one shred of evidence" against Lee (New York Times, Aug. 18).
Of course, China, the DPRK or any other socialist or oppressed country has the right to get whatever information it needs to defend itself by any means necessary. But Panofsky and many other authoritative figures have shown that the Cox report is just a Pentagon-inspired document calculated to destroy any possibility of relaxing military tension between imperialism and socialism.
Profits above all
Whether or not the present crises break out into military hostilities, the military-industrial complex and the ruling class have already attained one of their major objectives. They have opened the door to pouring additional weapons and technology into Asia, directed against the socialist countries.
While the struggle against the DPRK has been primarily one of almost uniform confrontation, threats, sanctions and vicious demonization, the struggle against China has been more complex. Wall Street and the corporations have succeeded in penetrating the vast Chinese markets, although under the control of the PRC. They want to weaken if not abolish this control and deepen their penetration. In addition to making profit, they are hoping that the market reforms will so erode the socialist system as to open the door to counter-revolution.
On the other hand, they know that the one lesson of the struggle against the USSR was to impose maximum military pressure so as to undermine socialist construction.
In China, the military is primarily paid for out of the socialist sector. Any military pressure on China weakens that sector and thereby relatively strengthens the capitalist market while depriving the masses of benefits derived from socialist construction. But the enormous mass outburst after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia showed that unbridled aggression by the imperialists risks pushing China back onto the anti-imperialist road and undermining the pro-capitalist elements.
However, it should never be forgotten that capitalism is irrational. For profit, the capitalist class will do anything. That is their only overriding interest.
They will trade with and invest in China while promoting war and threatening destruction on a mass scale at the same time. The Fortune 500 have just succeeded in lobbying the Republican-dominated Congress to pass Most Favored Nation status for China, which opens up more trade. Yet at the same time they have allowed this latest provocation on Taiwan to proceed.
At the present time none but the ultra-right seem prone to have an all-out war with China. The rest seem more inclined to escalate military pressure incrementally. But none want to call off the Pentagon, either. And U.S. imperialism is prone to aggressive adventurism and miscalculation. So the anti-war movement must remain vigilant and demand that the Pentagon get out of Asia.
The only realistic course for the mass of the people in the U.S. is to open up a struggle against the militarists in the Pentagon, the politicians like Clinton who do their bidding, and the vicious exploiting ruling class that dominates society and for whose protection the military exists in the first place.
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