Christ, what is this war doing to us?

The conservative NRO features a piece by a Heritage Foundation analyst warning that China is setting the stage to legitimize an invasion of Taiwan if the island ever seeks to declare its independence.

The Chinese, unfamiliar with a true “rule of law,” are now prepared to respond with their own “law,” one that probably will say, “China shall wage war against an independent Taiwan.” This, notwithstanding that Taiwan is already independent in every way — including by its own insistence — and that Taiwanese have been carrying on their own existence separate from China’s for over a century (if one doesn’t count the three postwar years of what was legally a Chinese “military occupation” of a former Japanese colonial territory). If the U.S. administration is ruled by principle instead of craven expedience, it will respond to this Chinese ploy with the kind of forceful declaration usually reserved for Taiwan’s leaders. So, President Bush should declare explicitly, in terms identical to his jibe at Taiwan’s democratically elected president last December, that China’s proposed anti-secession legislation “indicates that China may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose.” This would be a nice bookend to President Bush’s overreaction to Taiwan President Chen’s rather benign effort last December to legislate a “referendum” of protest against China’s undeniable missile threat to the island.

[….]

If Chen Yun Lin can take a healthy dose of reality back to Beijing from his Washington visits, perhaps China’s National People’s Congress can begin to focus on China’s real problems — ones like the vast official corruption at all levels of government and party, rural poverty, the collapse of public healthcare, the financial crisis, unsafe mines, AIDS, and the wholesale pollution of its waters and earth.

Of course, if this analyst of Asian Studies knew anything, he’d know that his last paragraph is absurdly naive and impossible. Why would the CCP shine the spotlight on its own warts and excesses, when it can whip up popular sentiment with emotionally charged rhetoric about Taiwan? It’ll never happen.

Update: One more snippet I wanted to include from the article because it’s just so amusing:

Although the actual text of the draft “law” has yet to be published, it appears to be a watered-down version of a truly fanatical “Unification Law” advocated by at least one Chinese professor, Yu Yuanzhou of Wuhan University, whose proposed legislation requires the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to attack Taiwan as soon as it is able. Yu’s legislation, which has been circulating on the Internet for over two years, calls for the PLA to immediately start bombarding Quemoy and Matsu — and it “would not be limited to conventional weapons.”

Well, that makes a lot of sense — wipe out Taiwan with nuclear weapons so it can be re-unified with the Mainland. How very strange.

Well, not really, but it’s nice to win — even if these popularity contests are rather meaningless. Thanks for the votes.

We haven’t even gotten the results of the Asian Blog awards yet and now, for whatever reason, I’ve been nominated for a Koufax Award for Best Single Issue blog (for Asian Politics). You simply shout out the name of your choice in the comments below the post. Please consider taking a moment to vote for Peking Duck, and thanks!

(By the way, this is an award I cannot win, and if you want your vote to count you may want to choose Orcinus. He deserves it.)

Orcinus takes us inside the diseased mind of wingnut psychopath Michael Savage, and it is not a pretty thing. He doesn’t think the tsunami was a tragedy, and he almost seems to think it was a useful means of thinning out Muslim populations. And for killing those sexually deviant Thais.

You need to see this to comprehend how twisted Savage is. Now, normally I wouldn’t waste much space on the rantings of scum like this, but it’s important you remember this: Just a year ago Savage was a host of a show on mainstream cable news network MSNBC. Before that, I used to listen to him on a mainstream talk radio station as I drove home from work. His books regularly make it onto the New York Times Bestseller Lists.

Savage is the perfect example of a topic Orcinus writes about frequently, i.e., the creeping of fringe freeper thinking into the mainstream media, an ominous pattern that started with Rush Limbaugh. Not long ago these ignoramuses would have been laughed at as clowns, as idiots, as goons. Now, Ann Coulter is an “analyst” on Fox News and these charlatans have become acceptable participants in our mainstream media.

Remember, Hitler was the butt of jokes for years before he assumed power. He was off to the extreme right, totally on the fringe. But somehow he managed to seep his messages into the mainstream consciousness, and soon, before anyone could even understand what was happening, his messages were not only okay, they were embraced by millions.

There’s no evidence that we’re in danger of succumbing to a Hitler (yet), but there’s ample evidence that violent, ugly, dangerous, thuggish messages are indeed becoming mainstream. It’s okay for protestors to be arrested for wearing an offensive T-shirt at a Bush rally. It’s okay to defend torture. It’s okay to hold people incommunicado without charges indefinitely. It’s okay to weaken our congressional ethics rules and to bribe journalists. It’s okay to spit on Muslims and even to openly discuss putting them in internment camps.

Anyone who wants a refresher course on this phenomenon, and anyone who doubts its existence, should comb through the Orcinus blog. You can’t say we weren’t warned.

…if Bill Clinton had been caught paying a journalist $250,000 in taxpayer money to hawk his policies, as the Bush administration has been caught doing? Can you imagine the howls of outrage, the demands for the heads of the journalist and the Democratic officials responsible? This is a scandal for which there’s no way out — it cannot be justified in any way. For now, Armstrong is offering up the embarrassingly weak excuse, “Well, I really believed what I was saying about No Child Left Behind.” So why did he accept a quarter of a million dollars to say it?

Of course, the Republicans will walk away without a scratch (the journalist will have to go, I suspect; he can never be credible again). Clinton would have been flayed alive, and Rush and Sean and the gang will just laugh this off as those wacky libruls making a lot of noise over nothing. Fuck ’em.

Update: As predicted, Armstrong Williams has indeed been fired.

Chicago-based Tribune Media Services dropped Williams’s column yesterday, saying he had violated his contract. “Accepting compensation in any form from an entity that serves as a subject of his weekly newspaper columns creates, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest,” prompting readers to ask whether his opinions “have been purchased by a third party,” a company statement said.

Our friend Jerome Keating thought some of you would find this site of interest, and he explains why:

Taiwan POW Camps: a Website That Some May Find Useful

One would have to be dense to have not noticed the rancor and venom expressed in recent weeks as strong post World War II feelings on war crimes and atrocities surfaced on the different postings.

A group of which I am on the Board of Directors is the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society. One of our goals is to provide information to researchers, scholars, museums and POW groups on the Taiwan POW’s story.

There were 15 Japanese POW Camps on Taiwan between August 1942 and September 1945. Some 4000 Allied prisoners spent time in these camps. Some were here for the duration of the war; others stayed temporarily before being moved to Japan. The majority of the duration prisoners here were from British Commonwealth countries; the Americans generally spent 3 to 5 months and were moved to Japan. Obviously many endured the suffering, beatings, and forced labor of prisoners and many died.

We have been able to locate all these camps and each year on the weekend closest to November Eleventh (Remembrance Day) we have a remembrance service where many survivors in their seventies and eighties return to visit the camps and put closure to a painful and tragic part of their lives.

This weekend we will lay a wreath in Kaohsiung Harbor for those who (60 years ago) went down with the Enoura Maru, one of the Japanese POW “Hellships” that transported prisoners in the Pacific. This ship laden with prisoners was mistakenly bombed and sunk by Allied planes as it rested in Kaohsiung Harbor on its way to Japan.

I present this site because some may be interested in this brief period of Taiwan history and others may want to see how another group comes to terms with the past. Of the POW’s, we have found that a minority are bitter and will probably go to their graves that way; but the majority are able to find their own way to make a separate peace. They are particularly thankful that their suffering is recognized and not forgotten and with that they are able to let it go. Many bring their children and grandchildren to visit what is a painful memory for them. A special communication is achieved between members of such families.

I offer no solutions. The site is www.powtaiwan.org

Jerome

And when I say extreme, I mean like really, really extreme.

First take a look at this.

Then take a look at this.

I have to force myself not to feel a twinge of bemusement.

A senior World Bank official expresses strong skepticism.

China’s growing reliance on imported oil, pollution and looming water shortages pose the major threats to its economic development, a senior World Bank official said Thursday.

“The sustainability issues in China are the key issues in the next three to five years and the ones that are most likely to jeopardize its economic success,” said Yukon Huang, a senior adviser to the bank who formerly headed its office in Beijing.

China is now the world’s second largest oil importer, and it suffers from poor efficiency in turning oil into economic output – just 1/7 that of Japan, Huang said at a seminar organized by Singapore’s Institute for Southeast Asian Studies.

If China “cannot improve in terms of its efficiency the cost will be unbearable,” Huang said.

Economic growth – now running at about 9 percent, will likely fall to a more moderate 6 to 7 percent in coming years, Huang said, adding future growth would come less from new investment and more from greater productivity.

While China has cut industrial air pollution, the improvements have been offset by rising private car ownership, Huang said. China is now home to seven of the 10 worst polluted cities in the world, he said, saying that was something the country was “going to have to deal with.”

Huang called growing pressure on dwindling water supplies China’s “Achilles heel,” saying that wouldn’t be solved by projects under way to pump water from the relatively wet south and west to the arid north.

The struggle for water will lead to “a fight between rural interests, urban interests and industrial interests on who gets water in China,” Huang said, adding 75 percent of China’s rivers are too polluted to drink, fish in, or even use for irrigation.

When people argue with me that China’s pollution problem is “getting better” or is “under control,” I wonder what they’re smoking. Considering the sheer gravity of the crisis, a bit of improvement or holding steady isn’t nearly enough — the entire system needs to be overhauled, and that isn’t happening anytime soon.

Tragically, the current every-man-for-himself mentality doesn’t lend itself to caring about the mess they leave behind; that’s someone else’s problem. And one day, that’s going to come back to haunt them. It may be sooner than they expect.

As Atrios would say, “oy.”

The head of the Army Reserve has sent a sharply worded memo to other military leaders expressing “deepening concern” about the continued readiness of his troops, who have been used heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warning that his branch of 200,000 soldiers “is rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.”

In the memo, dated Dec. 20, Lt. Gen. James R. “Ron” Helmly lashed out at what he said were outdated and “dysfunctional” policies on mobilizing and managing the force. He complained that his repeated requests to adjust the policies to current realities have been rebuffed by Pentagon authorities.

The three-star general, who has a reputation for speaking bluntly, said the situation has reached a point at which the Army Reserve is “in grave danger of being unable to meet” its operational requirements if other national emergencies arise. Insistence on restrictive policies, he continued, “threatens to unhinge an already precariously balanced situation in which we are losing as many soldiers through no use as we are through the fear of overuse.”

His pointed remarks represent the latest in a chorus of warnings from military officers and civilian defense specialists that the strains of overseas missions are badly fraying the U.S. Army.

We’re totally fucked. For the most stinging post of the week on Iraq, you simply have to read this. Just a small taste of a great post:

Reality is that the situation in Iraq is horrible, the outlook for any lasting peace is grim, and that this has nothing to do with a nebulous, malignant, all-powerful “Left”, and everything to do with the people in power who make bad and stupid policies. You can pull your head out of your ass, stop dreaming up stupid conspiracy theories about how everyone around the world you don’t like is working together to destroy Freedom, and tell them that they need to do a better job. And if they won’t do a better job, the solution is not to get upset at people who aren’t waving their pom-poms or denouncing Saddam single-mindedly enough for you, it is to fire the fuck-ups so we can maybe have some chance at salvaging something from this fiasco.

And, before you ask: no, I have no clue about how we can improve things in Iraq. I don’t have a single idea for how we can un-shit the bed, and I don’t hold out much hope that this whole bed-shitting episode is ever going to be brought to a lemony-fresh conclusion. I do, however, know who shit the bed, and have some sense of how frequently he shits there. Let’s stop shitting for a start.

Pretty evocative metaphor.