Memory like an Elephant I have

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:17 PM Permalink

Here is a recent article on how messed up the Bush policy towards Taiwan was. Basically, the gist of the story is that the Bush administration tried to encourage the government of Taiwan to break off from China, which is a foreign policy position that is far off base from the Nixonian standard set up in 1971 (that there is only 'one china').

Excerpt: “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.”

With all the meddling, they nearly started a nuclear war!

Well, the story rang some bells for me and then I remembered there was an early scandal with this administration. One of the first actually, and it was sort of called "Taiwangate". It was all about some illegal slush fund in Taiwan that was funneling a covert PR campaign throughout the world and a few early Bush appointees may have been the direct recipients of the slush fund money.

Excerpt: To recap: news reports in Taiwan and Hong Kong, citing classified government records, say that as part of ex-President Lee's covert campaign to win friends and influence governments around the world, key members of the pro-Taiwan lobby in the United States received money, wittingly or not, from a slush fund. And two alleged to have done so are currently high-level U.S. government officials.

(Here are a few more articles on Taiwangate: OnlineJournal, WaHoPo, and TalkingPoints Memo.)