A side order of craziness

At the same time the Neocons were actively preparing for a war with Iraq, and in the longer term for regime change in Iran, North Korea and Syria. They had this going on as little side project:

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations – creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says

.… “The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

“This went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist [and] told him multiple times to re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”

No wonder Baradei calls them the crazies.

[Hat tip: Blood & treasure]

Technorati Tags: US, Politics, Neocons, War Pimps