REP. LURIA PRESSES PENTAGON ON CHINA

[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 27, 2021

Rep. Luria Presses Pentagon On “Divest-To-Invest”

WASHINGTON, D.C.— House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Vice Chair Elaine Luria today pressed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the military’s “divest to invest” strategy weakening our ability to confront China.

In a hearing on the Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2022 Budget Request, Vice Chair Luria sought to clarify whether America considers a Chinese invasion of Taiwan a near-term threat and whether we have the necessary ships or bombers in the INDOPACOM should this occur.

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 27, 2021 AT 9:11 PM

Paul Plante says:

The congresswoman would do well to read the following to learn something about real wars fought with real bullets, not the imaginary wars the armchair admirals like the congresswoman fight in congressional committees in Washington, D.C., before she ends up getting a lot of good Americans who have to do the actual fighting killed in her zeal to start a shooting war with China:

Cambridge University Press

0521546575 – “Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Second Edition”

Martin van Creveld

Logistics are the key to winning wars, not bold talk from armchair admirals like the congresswoman who seem to be quite ignorant of that reality.

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 29, 2021 AT 6:11 PM

Paul Plante says:

What is it with these Democrats and this bull**** about House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Vice Chair Elaine Luria pressing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the military’s “divest to invest” strategy weakening our ability to confront China?

Confront China how?

And over what, exactly?

Is she a Jingo looking to get a shooting war going with China?

She’s a real fool if she does, and I’m surprised these military men she confronts don’t come back and laugh in her face as Marine General Zinni would have done, as we see in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS January-March 2003, from pp. 86,87 of FIASCO – The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, to wit:

(U.S. Marine General) Zinni, waiting to testify, sat in the room and grew increasingly uneasy as he listened to Feith and other administration officials.

“They were nowhere near capable” of transforming first Iraq and then the Middle East, he thought to himself.

They didn’t know what they were getting into.

They were unprepared.

His private conclusion that day, listening to Feith and the other administration witnesses was, “These guys don’t have a clue.”

When it came his turn to move to the witness chair, Zinni came close to lecturing the Foreign Relations Committee on how they might better have handled the administration’s witnesses.

First of all, he said, you need to abandon the idea of an “exit strategy,” because there isn’t going to be one: “There’s things in this part of the world that are too important for us to think that this is a ‘go in, do the job as best we can, and pull out.'”

Also, you could have pinned them down on their goals.

Is it really “a magnificent democracy” they’re aiming for? he asked.

“I mean, is it truly this transformed Iraq that we’ve heard about, or are we just going to rid of Saddam Hussein and hope for the best?”

“. . . . What is it you want?”

Zinni decided that day that the neoconservatives in the administration really were consciously rolling the dice.

“I think – and this is just my opinion – that the neocons didn’t really give a **** what happened in Iraq and the aftermath,” he said much later.

“I don’t think they thought it was going to be this bad.”

end quotes

Or perhaps more appropriate is this commentary from “Dereliction of Duty” by H.R. McMaster, to wit:

“Maybe we military men were all weak.”

“Maybe we should have stood up and pounded the table.”

“…. I was part of it (ABDICATING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE TROOPS DURING THE VIET NAM WAR) and I’m sort of ashamed of myself, too.”

“At times I wonder, ‘why did I go along with this kind of stuff?'”

– Adm. David Lamar McDonald (Navy Chief 1965), 1976

end quotes

As a Viet Nam combat veteran, I wonder about that, too, and here we are, getting that cycle going all over again, or congresswoman Luria is anyway.

So why do these military men who get grilled by the congresswoman over confronting China go along with this kind of stuff today?

Are the military men still all weak?

Or just afraid to tell the congresswoman she is an out-of-touch-with-reality fool?

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 30, 2021 AT 10:37 AM

Paul Plante says:

Some essential background history here:

“Chinese Exploit Formosa Worse Than Japs Did”

– news article from The Washington Daily News on March 21, 1946

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 30, 2021 AT 5:12 PM

Paul Plante says:

Staying with House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Vice Chair Elaine Luria pressing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the military’s “divest to invest” strategy weakening our ability to confront China, if we go to the Full transcript from President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress on 28 April 2021, we find as follows with respect to “confronting” China, to wit:

In my discussion with President Xi, I told him that we welcome the competition – and that we are not looking for conflict.

end quotes

So what exact “conflict” is House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Vice Chair Elaine Luria talking about?

Has she got her own show going here, where she is now commander-in-chief of the U.S. military?

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JUNE 30, 2021 AT 9:05 PM

Paul Plante says:

Staying with the history of Elaine Luria’s “conflict” with China over something, anyway, as to who believes they own all those off-shore islands, to include Taiwan, or Formosa as it was once known, if in 1945, during the administration of Democrat Harry S. Truman, following the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, the Allies to include the United States handed administrative control of Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC), the corrupt and repressive Kuomintang of the warlord Chiang Kai Shek, thus ending 50 years of Japanese colonial rule, it would have to be the United States, would it not?

And by doing so, the United States and the Democrats would then be responsible for the WHITE TERROR, and the February 28 incident, also rendered as the February 28 massacre, 228 incident, or 228 massacre, which was an anti-government uprising in Taiwan that was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang-led Republic of China government, which killed thousands of civilians beginning on February 28, 1947.

The number of Taiwanese deaths from the incident and massacre was estimated to be between 18,000 and 28,000.

The massacre marked the beginning of the White Terror, in which tens of thousands of other Taiwanese went missing, died, or were imprisoned.

If you can find an older Taiwanese in this country today, they will spit copious amounts of venom on the name of Chiang Kai Shek, who is universally hated in Taiwan, while the reputation of the United States is badly tarnished, and with good reason when you hear the history of the WHITE TERROR first hand from a native Taiwanese.

Local native Taiwanese who had Chiang Kai Shek imposed on them by the United States, became resentful of what they saw as highhanded and frequently corrupt conduct on the part of the Kuomintang (KMT) authorities, including arbitrary seizure of private property, economic mismanagement, and exclusion from political participation.

The flashpoint came on February 27, 1947, in Taipei, when agents of the State Monopoly Bureau struck a Taiwanese widow suspected of selling contraband cigarettes.

An officer then fired into a crowd of angry bystanders, striking one man who died the next day.

Soldiers fired upon demonstrators the next day, after which a radio station was seized and news of the revolt was broadcast to the entire island.

As the uprising spread, the KMT-installed governor Chen Yi called for military reinforcements, and the uprising was violently put down by the National Revolutionary Army.

For the following 38 years, the island was placed under martial law in a period that would be known as the White Terror.

That is one of the longest periods of government repression ever, and it was supported by the United States.

The harsh conduct of Kuomintang troops from Mainland China and the KMT maladministration quickly led to Taiwanese discontent during the immediate postwar period.

As Governor-General, Chen Yi took over and sustained the Japanese system of state monopolies in tobacco, sugar, camphor, tea, paper, chemicals, petroleum refining, mining, and cement, the same way the Nationalists treated people in other former Japanese-controlled areas (earning Chen Yi the nickname “robber”).

He confiscated some 500 Japanese-owned factories and mines, and homes of former Japanese residents.

Economic mismanagement led to a large black market, runaway inflation and food shortages.

Many commodities were compulsorily bought cheaply by the KMT administration and shipped to Mainland China to meet the Civil War shortages where they were sold at very high profit furthering the general shortage of goods in Taiwan.

The price of rice rose to 100 times its original value between the time the Nationalists took over to the spring of 1946, increasing to nearly four times the price in Shanghai.

It inflated further to 400 times the original price by January 1947.

Carpetbaggers from Mainland China dominated nearly all industry, as well as political and judicial offices, displacing the Taiwanese who were formerly employed.

Many of the ROC garrison troops were highly undisciplined, looting, stealing and contributing to the overall breakdown of infrastructure and public services.

Because the Taiwanese elites had met with some success with self-government under Japanese rule, they had expected the same system from the incoming ruling Chinese Nationalist Government.

However, the Chinese Nationalists opted for a different route, aiming for the centralization of government powers and a reduction in local authority.

The KMT’s nation-building efforts followed this ideology because of unpleasant experiences with the centrifugal forces during the Warlord Era in 1916–1928 that had torn the government in China.

Mainland Communists were even preparing to bring down the government like the Ili Rebellion.

The different goals of the Nationalists and the Taiwanese, coupled with cultural and language misunderstandings served to further inflame tensions on both sides.

Upon their arrival in Taiwan on March 8 in response to the February 28 Incident, ROC troops launched a crackdown and the New York Times reported, “An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland China arrived there on March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting.”

“For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed.”

“In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead.”

“There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped, the American said.”

So what conflict with China is Elaine Luria talking about?

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JULY 1, 2021 AT 5:49 PM

Paul Plante says:

When I was young, there was no such thing as a television in our house, or a computer, or a cell phone, neither of which would come into existence for years yet to come, and we didn’t have a telephone, either.

What we did have was a plastic radio that sat on top of a roll-top desk in our kitchen, and it was tuned to the only station there was in the area, and what came out of that plastic radio when I was young was current events from the world, and so I grew up knowing more about Quemoy and Matsu then I did the local city over the horizon, and Korea, and French Indochina, as well, so when I read this thread as a Vietnam combat veteran, about congresswoman Luria grilling the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as if she were a salty, battle-hardened flag admiral and him a wet-behind-the-ears buck private, seeking to clarify whether “America,” whatever in fact that might be, considers a Chinese invasion of Taiwan a near-term threat and whether we have the necessary ships or bombers in the INDOPACOM should this occur, the reference to “America” takes me back JULY 1965, as follows, and this is from pages 311,312 of Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, AND THE LIES THAT LED TO VIET NAM by H.R. McMaster, to wit:

Greene (Commandant of the United States Marine Corps) experienced conflicting feelings during the consultation with the (House Armed Services) committee members.

Sympathetic to his commander in chief in the April (1965) White House meetings, when LBJ seemed besieged by opponents of the U.S. role in Vietnam, Greene was nonetheless “astounded by how few of the facts regarding the situation seemed to be known” to the people’s representatives.

end quotes

And boy oh boy, that seems to be the case all over again as this Democrat congresswoman seems to be stoking up another Tonkin Gulf Incident here, which takes us back to 1965, as follows:

Greene’s loyalty to the President and reluctance to contradict his colleagues (United States Military Joint Chiefs of Staff), however, prevented him from giving the Legislators his full assessment of the situation.

Two hours after the meeting, he called John Blandford (House Armed Services Committee’s chief counsel).

Greene told Blandford what he declined to say in the meeting.

The United States, Greene said, was on the verge of a “major war” that would ultimately involve a minimum of five hundred thousand troops.

The war would take at least five years, and the United States would suffer a large number of casulaties.

To set conditions for winning the war, the United States would have to undertake an “immediate intensification” of operations against North Vietnam and within South Vietnam.

Greene had given Blandford privately the assessment that the Chiefs had failed to provide either to Congress or to the Administration.

With the Administration (Democrat LBJ) ceiving the People and Congress about the depth of the American military commitment in Vietnam, the Chiefs were in a quandary.

Although the Constitution designated the President as Commander in Chief of the military, each member of the JCS was sworn to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The Constitution charged Congress, as representatives of the People, with the responsibility to decide whether to declare war.

The American People, through their representatives in Congress, were to determine whether South Vietnam’s “freedom and independence” was worth the costs and risks.

With the exception of Greene (and then only in private to a staff member), the Chiefs had decided to support their Commander in Chief by misrepresenting their own estimates of the situation in Vietnam.

Greene felt keenly the tension between loyalty to the President and his responsibilities to the American People and had chosen a middle course of publicly supporting the administration while privately providing his actual views to the Congress.

The Chiefs’ obligations to their soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines complicated already conflicting responsibilities.

As American involvement in the war deepened, Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) remained determined to depict the war very differently from the way that Greene had described it.

end quotes

So, with respect to whether “America,” which happens to be WE, THE PEOPLE, considers a Chinese invasion of Taiwan a near-term threat, shouldn’t we be provided with the information to make that determination?

Or is this Vietnam all over again?

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JULY 2, 2021 AT 5:51 PM

Paul Plante says:

And putting some more essential background history on the table in here, so the AMERICAN PEOPLE can do some independent assessment of the question of whether “America,” which happens to be WE, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, considers a Chinese invasion of Taiwan a near-term threat, let’s drop all the way back to July 3, 1884, which date marked the beginning of Sino-American relations when the Treaty of Wanghia, the first treaty signed between the United States and Qing China, established a peaceful relationship between the two nations.

The Treaty of Wanghia (also Treaty of Wangxia, Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce, with tariff of duties) was a diplomatic agreement between Qing dynasty of China and United States, signed on July 3, 1844 in the Kun Iam Temple.

Its official title name is the Treaty of peace, amity, and commerce, between the United States of America and the Chinese Empire.

Following passage by the U.S. Congress, it was ratified by President John Tyler on January 17, 1845.

It formally remained in effect until the 1943 Sino-American Treaty for the Relinquishment of Extraterritorial Rights in China.

The Sino-American Treaty for the Relinquishment of Extraterritorial Rights in China or Sino-American New Equal Treaty was a bilateral treaty signed by the United States and the Republic of China on January 11, 1943.

The formal name of the treaty was Treaty Between the United States of America and the Republic of China for the Relinquishment of Extraterritorial Rights in China and the Regulation of Related Matters.

It became effective on May 20, 1943 following the mutual exchange of ratifications pursuant to Article VIII.

After the United States declared war upon Japan on December 8, 1941, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom mutually decided that it would be advantageous to end extraterritoriality and the unilateral privileges in China that had been granted by the “unequal treaties.”

Extraterritoriality was thus ended, making citizens of the United States and United Kingdom in China subject to Chinese law, as well as the existence of treaty ports and their autonomous foreign settlements, legation quarters, and the right to station foreign warships in Chinese waters and foreign troops on Chinese territory.

“Unequal treaty,” of course, is the name given by the Chinese to a series of treaties signed between the Qing dynasty and various Western powers, the Russian Empire, and the Empire of Japan during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The agreements, often reached after a military defeat, contained one-sided terms requiring China to cede land, pay reparations, open treaty ports, or grant extraterritorial privileges to foreign citizens.

In boundary negotiations with neighboring countries, the People’s Republic of China has contested with other countries roughly 7% of the territory that was part of the Qing dynasty at its height.

With the rise of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism in the 1920s, both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China used this concept to characterize the Chinese experience of losing sovereignty between roughly 1840 to 1950.

The term “unequal treaty” became associated with the concept of China’s “century of humiliation”, especially the concessions to foreign powers and the loss of tariff autonomy through treaty ports.

end quotes

That “century of humiliation” is something the Chinese have not forgotten, and it was the impetus to send Chinese troops across the Yalu into Korea when Douglas MacArthur was ordering American troops and Marines to scour Korea all the way north to the Yalu, to blood the Chinese troops against the Marines, then the best fighting force on the planet.

Whether Elaine Luria realizes it or not, the Chinese do not intend to get humiliated by the U.S. ever again.

Know your enemy like you know yourself and God save the nation from dumb Democrats!

Going back to the Treaty of Wanghia, twenty-seven (27) short years after it was signed, the Qing Dynasty, which was rotten with corruption, fell in 1911, overthrown by a revolution brewing since 1894, ten (10) years after the Treaty of Wanghia, when western-educated revolutionary Sun Zhongshan formed the Revive China Society in Hawaii, then Hong Kong.

In 1905, Sun united various revolutionary factions into one party with Japanese help and wrote the manifesto, the Three Principles of the People.

In 1911, the Nationalist Party of China held an uprising in Wuchang, helped by Qing soldiers, and 15 provinces declared their independence from the empire.

Within weeks the Qing court agreed to the creation of a republic with its top general, Yuan Shikai, as president.

Xuantog abdicated in 1912, with Sun creating a provisional constitution for the new country, which ushered in years of political unrest centered around Yuan.

In 1917, there was a brief attempt to reinstate the Qing government, with Xuantog being restored for less than two weeks during a military coup that ultimately failed.

Getting back to the history, as a result of the Treaty of Wanghia, Formosa and its nearby islands remained under Qing rule until ceded in full sovereignty to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki following the 1884–1885 Sino-Japanese War.

Half a century later Japan was on the losing side of the Second World War, and the Cairo Declaration of 1943 established that jurisdiction over the islands would be returned to China should Japan surrender.

Note that “China” meant China, not the Kuomintang under the corrupt Chiang Kai Shek.

Getting back to the history, fighting as allies in the Pacific War, the United States formally acknowledged China’s right to all territories stolen from China by the Japanese, including Formosa.

In a statement of neutrality given by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January 1950, the U.S. Government declared it was “not going to get involved militarily in any way on the Island”.

As to this talk of China invading Taiwan, in the early 1950s, peaceful relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China began to deteriorate.

In the months succeeding the declaration of neutrality, the PRC seized all U.S. consular property in Beijing, signed the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, and began growing its forces at Chekiang and Fukien, opposite Formosa.

These developments, along with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, prompted the order of an American fleet to position itself in the Taiwan Strait to prevent a possible attack on Formosa by the PRC.

And there, people, is just how long this game, a silly game to me as a combat veteran, has been going on.

So, back to the question of whether “America,” which happens to be WE, THE PEOPLE, considers a Chinese invasion of Taiwan a near-term threat, I’m thinking not.

So what game is congresswoman Luria playing at here, and exactly who is it intended to benefit?

Some defense contractor?

According to her Open Secrets page, the Securities & Investment industry has invested $480,845 in the congresswoman while Lawyers/Law Firms have ponied up $412,102.

What are they getting out of this Jingoism?

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[thelivyjr]

THE CAPE CHARLES MIRROR JULY 3, 2021 AT 10:27 PM

Paul Plante says:

“Although U.S. advisors were fighting with South Vietnamese units and U.S. pilots were flying combat missions in South Vietnam, Kennedy denied that Americans were involved in combat, and Vietnam attracted little public or congressional attention.”

“Vietnam was far from front-page news and Americans still believed that their government told them the truth.”

Those words are from p.37 of Dereliction of Duty – Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Viet Nam by H.R. McMaster, and it is a long time since Americans, and especially the Viet Nam veterans who got to witness the lies firsthand, believed that what is supposed to be our government was telling us the truth, about anything.

Which brings us to this thread and the game this Democrat congresswoman Luria is playing with her talk of China invading Taiwan, as if the COMMIES in China were massing a million man army across the Formosa straits getting ready to make the imminent invasion the congresswoman apparently thinks is going to be happening real soon, which is pure horse****.

And the irony here is that if Joe Biden wants to stand a military force against China to protect Taiwan, to get the money to do so, Joe is going to have to borrow it from the Chinese who are now and have been funding our government operations in this country, since we are a debtor nation that has to beg for our daily bread from foreign nations such as Japan, largest holder of U.S. debt, with $1.266 trillion in Treasury holdings as of April 2020, and China, which takes the second spot among foreign holders of U.S. debt with $1.07 trillion in Treasury holdings in April 2020, just behind Japan.

As those of us who don’t park our heads in our ***** know well, China is primarily a manufacturing hub and an export-driven economy and trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that China has been running a big trade surplus with the U.S. since 1985, which means that China sells more goods and services to the U.S. than the U.S. sells to China.

Accordingly, Chinese exporters receive U.S. dollars for their goods sold to the U.S., but they need renminbi (RMB or yuan) to pay their workers and store money locally so they sell the dollars they receive through exports to get RMB, which increases the USD supply in China and raises the demand for RMB.

Then China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) buys the available excess U.S. dollars from the exporters and gives them the required yuan, and since the PBOC can print yuan as needed, this intervention by the PBOC creates a scarcity of U.S. dollars, which keeps the USD rates higher, so that China accumulates USD as forex reserves.

China’s strategy is to maintain export-led growth, which aids in generating jobs and enables it, through such continued growth, to keep its large population productively engaged, and since this strategy is dependent on exports (over 16% of which went to the U.S. in 2019), China requires RMB in order to continue to have a lower currency than the USD, and thus offer cheaper prices.

China wants to keep its goods competitive in the international markets, and that cannot happen if the RMB appreciates.

It thus keeps the RMB low compared to the USD.

And China needs to invest such huge stockpiles of cash they earn from selling import goods to us, and with trillions of U.S. dollars, China has found the U.S. Treasury securities to offer the safest investment destination for Chinese forex reserves.

So not only are the Chinese funding our government operations by buying the considerable amount of debt this country has been issuing since Hussein Obama was in the oval office with goofy Joe Biden as his vice president, but we are further enriching them by paying them interest on the money they have lent to us to keep our government functioning.

If the Chinese really wanted to hurt us, all they would need to do would be to start dumping the U.S. debt they hold, which would raise our interest rates over here and throw us into recession, or worse.

But they haven’t done that because the backlash of a recession here would hurt or cripple their economy.

So what is this BULL**** Elaine Luria is peddling about China invading Taiwan?

If they really wanted Taiwan, all they would have to do with their considerable financial resources would be to buy it on the open market.

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