CHINESE CASTRATION

Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the scarier the world gets — because you keep noticing that many of the folks who run it are not very smart?

I was at a private luncheon in Washington earlier this week and among the guests were two guys from the CIA. Not only were they clueless — we were discussing Russia — they were just not bright. OK — so picking on folks from the Three Bad Words is too easy. Let’s raise the bar and talk about the Chinese.

There are a lot of people here in DC who constantly worry about the Chinese, and predict the Chicoms — China’s Communist rulers — will soon pose the greatest threat to America’s security. The worriers offer considerable evidence for their argument and they may well be right. But here’s a question:

If the Chinese are so smart, how come they are busy surrounding themselves with neighbors who can aim nuclear missiles at them?

North Korea exists at the whim of China. The Chicoms provide North Korea’s coal for fuel, food for its soldiers, all its financial and banking services — and the expertise, technology, and money for North Korea’s nukes. The nukes are for extorting money and concessions from South Korea and the US. But what if China decides it’s no longer worth it to prop up a useless poverty pit and sells out Pyongyang? Kim Jong-il could easily order his nukes be aimed at Manchuria rather than Seoul and Japan.

While it is far from clear if the North Koreans actually have or are close to having any nuke warheads (see this week’s Intel Bulletin, “Is North Korea Faking It?”), it is clear that once they do, Japan will go nuclear in a heartbeat.

Japan has a lot of nuclear power plants and has lots of stuff with which they can assemble bombs quickly. Current estimates are that once a North Korean threat gives them no choice, they’ll have warheads aimed at North Korea within six months. Any missile that can reach North Korea from Japan can reach China.

Given the bottomlessly bitter memories of China’s occupation by Japan during WWII and the horrible atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese (the Rape of Nanking is only the most famous), a nuclear-armed Japan is China’s worst nightmare. Yet it will be a nightmare of China’s own making.

That’s the nuclear threat from China’s east. North of China is Russia, still bristling with nuclear-tipped missiles capable of targeting any place in China. To the south is India, armed with several dozen nuclear warheads currently aimed at Pakistan and all of which can be re-aimed at China.

Then there’s Pakistan, to China’s west. We now know that China is responsible for the expertise and technology (the money was provided by Saudi Arabia) enabling Pakistan to become a nuclear power. The motivation was keep Pakistan and India at each other’s throats.

It apparently never dawned on the Chicoms that a Pakistani nuke with a range capable of reaching cities in India like Madras or Calcutta can reach Chinese cities like Urumchi — and that sooner or later, the price for allowing the Saudis to import their fanatical Wahhabi Islam into Pakistan along with their money would be to draw attention to the plight of China’s oppressed Moslems in far western China.

The inhabitants of far western China are not Chinese — except for the colonial capital of Urumchi — they are Turkic Moslems who hate the Han Chinese as imperialist tyrants. The Chinese call the region Xinjiang, the people who live there call it East Turkestan, as distinct from formerly-Soviet West Turkestan across the border. West Turkestan is now composed of independent countries like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and the East Turkestanis want to cease being a colony of China’s and be independent as well.

The East Turkestanis are the most oppressed Moslems in the world. No where on earth are Moslems less free to practice their religion than in Xinjiang-East Turkestan. As Pakistan has now trumped India militarily (see “The South Asia Mexican Stand-Off” in this week’s report), we will soon see the Paks demanding that their Moslem brothers in East Turkestan directly across their border to the north receive more religious freedom and political autonomy from the Chinese. And what are the Chinese going to do about it?

Take a look at a map of Asia, and you can see that China is managing to surround itself with a ring of nuclear missiles aimed at it. The big gap in the Russia-Japan-India-Pakistan encirclement can be plugged by the US Navy in the East and South China Seas. The Pentagon has now authorized Taiwan to acquire the Aegis missile defense system, neutralizing China’s missile threat to Taiwan.

China is well on its way to castrating itself militarily. Russia and Japan and India and Pakistan are about to figure out that if they form an alliance (and especially along with the US), they have China by whatever gonadal remnant China still possesses.

How do you say “Oops…” in Chinese?