Ahaha... what a moron.

Originally posted by Knotter8
Sorry, but none of those things are gonna happen if the USA is less active by military force in foreign countries.

Anyone else wanna bet China would be at war with Japan if we bailed?  They want some fxcking payback!

wave goodbye to south korea too!

[GmanJoe]

Taiwan would have been gone 20 years ago as well. China is only holding back coz of the US military presence.

Originally posted by Knotter8

However, pro active military recruitment is imho taking things way too far.

That type of thinking made the Netherlands a Rest Stop for the Third Reich on the Autobahn to France.

Originally posted by GigaShadow
That type of thinking made the Netherlands a Rest Stop for the Third Reich on the Autobahn to France.

Yeah, so ? The bad guys were still the nazi\'s.

Also, you guys shouldn\'t mistake my arguments as arguments against the USA.

I mean, wouldn\'t alot of American tax payers and families be waaaaay more happy if all nations would find a non military way of starting a problem solving process instead of this ongoing tour de force which claims lotsa money and lives/injuries/traumas ?

I assume we all agree on that ?

nope

it\'s a necessary evil
always has been, always will be

Yes history has this way of repeating itself.  You Euros should have known this by now.

Even if there\'s no WWIII in a hundred years, it\'s because we\'ve carried a big stick.

Sigh....

Maybe history is repeating itself becuz this is a vicious cycle ?

Until now ppl have ignored a 3rd option...

Imho we should strive for a win/win solution instead of the old win/loose which indeed is the ever repeating cycle of a standoff by means of force.

The problem is man\'s desire to conquer and control, to gain more power.  Saddam did it with Kuwait, NKorea over SKorea, Japan over China, Germany over Europe...

Nations will always try to gain more power, that\'s inevitable.  You can try to dream a world where people from foreign nations will always get along but it will never happen.  Try talking Palestine and every other mid-eastern country into forgetting about Israel.

there is no third option

anything else is utopia, and foolish

[clips]

Originally posted by Knotter8
Sigh....

Maybe history is repeating itself becuz this is a vicious cycle ?

Until now ppl have ignored a 3rd option.

i agree....no one has to look further than what\'s goin on in iraq to see that it\'s a huge mistake.....it\'s all water under the bridge now, but you don\'t even here anything of wmd\'s that was supposedly in iraq....the argument you\'ll get from supporter\'s of the war will always be..."well he was a bad guy anyway and he needed to go"..:rolleyes:...yea he and a hundred other dictators all over the world that the u.s. or "bush" has seemed to have ignored....

we got the wmd

he\'s on trial right now for crimes against humanity (which aren\'t continuing if you didn\'t notice)

anyone on a national level we missed?

[GmanJoe]

Perhaps Europeans better start learning to speak Chinese. Japan is toast.

China to demand Arms technology to pay down our deficit.

WASHINGTON -- In the corridors of the Pentagon and Congress, and in the secretive recesses of the People\'s Liberation Army in China, hard-liners in each country are highlighting the potential threat posed by the other side to enlist support for a major new buildup of conventional arms, according to diplomats and military and intelligence analysts.

As President Bush prepares for his state visit to Beijing this week, tensions between the two defense establishments bubble just beneath the surface of diplomatic and economic cooperation.

In computer war games, American warships face off against an armada modeled on China\'s advancing naval fleet. The American Shipbuilding Association, a powerful industry group lobbying for a larger Navy, posts what it calls an alert on its website: \'\'China\'s Navy will overtake US fleet by 2015."

Chinese paratroopers, meanwhile, storm the beaches of an imaginary country in a training exercise that looks a lot like an invasion of neighboring Taiwan. And hundreds of Chinese computer analysts routinely hack their way into the US Department of Defense, and have successfully penetrated hundreds of networks and stolen large amounts of data.

Responding to every move with a countermove, both sides are raising the risk of serious miscalculation, China scholars and leading American defense specialists warn. Others go even further, suggesting that military hawks -- including mainstream politicians -- are raising the possibility of a future conflict between the United States and China to justify buying new weapons and maintaining large standing armies and navies.

\'\'It is a very dangerous relationship that has to be managed carefully," said Kurt Campbell, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and now the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in National Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. \'\'This could spin out of control."

Yet for all the alarm about China\'s military buildup, China is still spending less than one-quarter of what the United States spends annually. That is causing some analysts to warn that the real danger now is that the United States is overreacting to the \'\'China threat."

\'\'Some in the US armed forces have rediscovered the Chinese threat as a way to keep the status quo," said Loren Thompson, chief executive officer of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., a conservative think tank. He noted that US officials increasingly invoke the Chinese military to justify Cold War-style weapon systems including missile defense systems, destroyers, submarines, and fighter aircraft.

Over the past five years, the military budget of China has more than doubled; it\'s now about $90 billion a year. China spends more on its army, navy, and air force than any other Asian nation, and is pushing an ambitious modernization program and seeking sophisticated weapons systems to project its influence overseas.

From Taiwan to Tokyo to Washington, China watchers see this increasingly muscular Chinese military -- funded by the robust growth of the Chinese economy -- as a force to be reckoned with in East Asia and beyond. And some view it with outright alarm.

\'\'What I am worried about is we are going to end up facing a communist military backed by a capitalist industrial base of enormous power," Representative Duncan Hunter of California, Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, remarked last year.

A new book by Constantine Menges, a former CIA officer and security adviser to President Reagan, maintains that Beijing sees America as its \'\'main enemy." The book, titled \'\'China: The Gathering Threat," accuses China of stealing the designs of US nuclear warheads and other military secrets. He warns that China could kill 100 million Americans in a nuclear strike.

One of the primary reasons for the growing mistrust is the still-closed nature of the communist regime in China, according to US officials. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said during a recent visit that Beijing is sending \'\'mixed signals" about its intentions in Asia. China says it has peaceful intentions, but, according to Pentagon assessments, appears bent on being able to retake Taiwan by force and to use its military to reshape the Asia-Pacific region.

Bellicose statements by Chinese militarists about Taiwan and the United States add to the rhetorical heat. General Zhu Chenghu, dean of China\'s National Defense University, said earlier this year that if Washington interfered militarily in the Taiwan issue, Beijing could launch nuclear missiles on \'\'hundreds" of US cities.

The available data suggest that Beijing is indeed in the midst of a major military modernization.

According to a recent Pentagon report to Congress, China will soon be able to mount an effective attack to recapture Taiwan, which broke away from the mainland in 1949. The report predicted that China will soon have enough ships, submarines, missiles, and other armaments to blockade Taiwan, limiting the ability of the US Navy to protect the island. China now has as many as 730 short-range ballistic missiles positioned opposite Taiwan, up from 500 reported last year.

China\'s own internal publications outline its goals: \'\'A major strategic task of the Communist Party of China in exercising state power is to secure a coordinated development of national defense and the economy, and to build modernized, regularized, and revolutionary armed forces to keep the country safe," according to a US government translation of China\'s 2004 annual military \'\'white paper."

That goal has led China to \'\'give priority" to building a modern navy, air force, and artillery \'\'to strengthen the capabilities for winning both command of the sea and command of the air, and conducting strategic counterstrikes," the Chinese plan says.

There are also signs, according to the Pentagon report, that China\'s military is looking beyond Taiwan, including the introduction of new mobile, long-range missiles that could hit targets around the world with nuclear warheads.

\'\'They are building an amazing number of ships and are doing things with ballistic missiles which are very impressive," said retired Rear Admiral Eric A. McVadon, former US military attache in Beijing. \'\'The question is can they pull this all together. Can they find US forces and attack them?"

China is searching far and wide for the technologies it needs, including from Russia, Israel, and Europe, and is securing access to new military hardware like never before. New trade agreements and friendlier ties have helped the Chinese defense industry acquire state-of-the-art warships, submarines, and communications systems, and improve its own products.

Beijing improved its government-run defense industries in the mid-1990s. As a result, it is beginning to narrow the technology gap with the West in some key capabilities.

China has also placed new emphasis on people. It is steadily doing away with its conscript military -- young Chinese men forced into military service -- by recruiting volunteers, just as the United States started doing three decades ago.

China is also investing greater resources in top-rate training and education programs, realizing that if its troops do not possess the right skills, its new weapons cannot be properly utilized, according to the Pentagon\'s recent report on China.

US military and intelligence organizations are scrambling to learn not only what the Chinese military is doing, but also what its goals are. \'\'We really need a better grip on that," Murray Scot Tanner, a China specialist at the government-funded Rand Corporation, said of Beijing\'s intentions. \'\'Otherwise there is a vacuum [that can be] used to think the worst."

But some specialists argue there is reason to believe that China\'s goals are to use the security of its new military strength to fuel its integration into the global community. Some government analysts and private specialists say the recent rhetoric used by some Bush administration officials and China hawks in Congress does not fully account for this possibility.


What\'s more, China probably wants to avoid Washington\'s encroachment into its traditional areas of influence, such as a recent US-Vietnam defense pact, which it considers threatening to its historic sphere of influence. Much of China\'s military modernization is aimed at maintaining what it sees as regional stability, in this view.