Becoming The "Enemy"

If you remember back 8 years ago, "serious" national security "experts" like Dick Cheney tut-tutted about the Clinton Administration's silly obsession with Osama Bin Ladin when Communist China stood as the next threat for the US.  The right, of course, needs an enemy, and a rag-tag bunch of terrorists hiding in caves in Afghanistan could not then have justified trillion dollar increases in military spending. The only possible enemy out there was China.  China fit the bill -- it was at least nominally communist, had a horrible human rights record, and was growing both economically and military at a pace that made it a potential rival.  

The anti-china rhetoric heated up, and the (justifiable) criticism of its human rights record intensified. Then Bin Ladin proved a worthy rival after all, and China became not a competitor, but a regime to emulate.

We adopted Chinese torture techniques, and not only held alleged enemies of the state without due process, but, in several instances, we did it on China's say-so.  I think its worth looking back at this, to see where Bush - Cheney (McCain) has taken to us.

Right from the start of his administration, Bush put China on notice that they were a rival, not a friend, of the new government in the US.  As an article in the first few months of 2001 noted:

President Bush had already put China on notice that it could not expect the same sort of attentive diplomacy it received at the end of Mr. Clinton's term. Mr. Bush came to office saying he had abandoned the Clinton administration's aspiration to make China a ''strategic partner.'' Instead, he called the nation a ''strategic competitor,'' a term that translates harshly in Chinese.

April 12, 2001 NY Times

In April 2001, a US spy-plane crash landed in Chinese territory, escalating tensions between the countries.  We seemed to have acquired the new enemy the right was longing for.  As an analysis from June 2001 explains:

Partly as an unintended consequence, but mostly by design, the administration's actions have appeared to cast Beijing as America's enemy. The expanded arms sales to Taiwan, rhetoric that enlarges the commitment to defend the island, the thinly disguised decision to make Chinese missiles a target of revised missile defense plans, the proposed shift in defense strategy from Europe to the Pacific and the call for new long-range weapons to counter China's military power have come in stunning procession. President Bush's support for trade with China cannot by itself neutralize the antagonism that Beijing leaders clearly sense.

June 2, 2001 NYTimes

The split between a somewhat rational State Department, which viewed China as a potential strategic partner, and the Cheney-Rumsfeld neo-con cabal, which saw China as the new Great Enemy, existed even before 9-11.  And then, as later, the neo-cons were winning.

Then came 9-11, and it did change everything, if you were a neo-con.  They want from building up China as the new enemy, to welcoming China as a strategic partner in the fight against Islamofascism.  

Caught in the middle of this sudden about face were the Uighur Muslims, a minority from far western China that had been brutally oppressed by Beijing.  I recall an interview on NPR in mid 2001 with a Uighur who expressed hope that the US would come to their aid against China like we did for the Kosovar Albanians.  They viewed the US as their best hope in the world -- and they couldn't have been more wrong.

As the NY Times has reported:

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

nytimes 7-1-08

The Uighur's enemy was China, which would not allow them to practice their traditional way of life, forced them to have abortions instead of the large families they preferred, and rounded them up and arrested them without charge.  Now, for no good reason, they were declared our enemies too.

Several Uighars ended up in Gitmo -- their fight for rights in China had led them to be held without charge by the US in Cuba.  It is now clear that we held them solely on China's say-so.  A recent opinion from a US Court of Appeals makes clear that Bush administration's only grounds for holding these people was information from the Chinese government:

   Many of those assertions are made in identical language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a single source. And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.

opinion link

At the same time that we were holding Chinese men without charge based on China's say-so, we were adopting China's "enhanced interrogation techniques."   We know now that the torture program used in Gitmo was copied from a manual created to teach Americans to survive Chinese torture techniques.  In short, the torture techniques honed in communist China were now enthusiastically adopted by the United States.

Just to drive this home, at the very same time that we were holding Chinese dissidents without charge based entirely on information provided by China, and applying Chinese torture techniques, we were still continuing to criticize China's human rights abuses. Here's Colin Powell in 2004:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Monday that China had agreed to discuss the American request for a new dialogue over the detention of Chinese citizens without due process and other human rights violations. The talks broke off earlier this year because of Chinese objections to American criticism of its practices.

October 26, 2004

If we were the light of the world, the shining city on the hill beckoning others to emulate us, the world has grown dark.  Under the Bush administration's leadership, we chose not to lead the world by example, but to become followers of tyrants.