By Owen Paine on Wednesday March 12, 2008 01:27 PM
Mr Y -- my man at the bottom of Foggy Bottom's great-game pile --
now sends me e-mails from time to time. His half-drunk late-night
phone calls seem to be a thing of the past. Perhaps he has a
girlfriend. Here's his latest:
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Paine!!! READ THIS!!!!! http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2008-03/04/content_7714169.htm
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Very funny, Y. I clicked over to China Matters:
http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/
... a great site for sideliners like me interested in great-game antics -- kung fu division. They give us the gist:
http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/2008/03/china-jumps-off-iran-sanctions-merry-go.html
Apparently what got Y excited was a think piece by one Tian Wenlin of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Comrade Tian, it seems, wants to be the admiral Mahan of Han chauvinism:
"Looking at the four conflicts [First Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq War], the bigger the discrepancy between US and opposing forces, the easier it is to provoke an American desire to attack -- Saddam Hussein voluntarily destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, thereby allowing America to attack without worry. In the opposite example, North Korea -- "China Matters remarks:
"China's rising paranoiacs will find a goodly amount to chew on in Tian's conclusion that military strength -- specifically, naval strength and aircraft carriers, lots of them! -- are necessary to secure China's economic progress."There's a nice by-the-way quote from Iran's prez Ahmadinejad:
"If this question [nuke building] is resolved, the United States would bring up human rights. If human rights were resolved, they'd bring up animal rights."
