Thursday 27 November 2008
U.S. Needs New China Plan, Former Commander Says
“There were people who warned me that you’d better get ready for the shoot ‘em up here, because sooner or later we’re going be at war with China,” recalled the commander, William Fallon, a retired navy admiral. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go. And so I set about challenging all the assumptions.”
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U.S. Needs New China Plan, Former Commander Says
By Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe
26 November 2008
WASHINGTON: In 2005, the top U.S. military commander in the Pacific confronted Pentagon hawks who insisted that he prepare for a future war with China, warning the defence secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, that the United States was headed for disaster if it insisted on confronting the Chinese militarily.
“There were people who warned me that you’d better get ready for the shoot ‘em up here, because sooner or later we’re going be at war with China,” recalled the commander, William Fallon, a retired navy admiral. “I don’t think that’s where we want to go. And so I set about challenging all the assumptions.”
In his first extensive interview since resigning from the navy this year, Fallon said that the United States desperately needed to come up with a strategy for dealing peacefully with a rising China.
Fallon, currently a fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies, is well known for his differences with the Bush administration, especially over Iran policy. He resigned unexpectedly in March as chief of the U.S. Central Command - responsible for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - after publicly voicing criticism over its refusal to engage diplomatically with Iran. An Esquire magazine profile of Fallon in March set off the media firestorm leading to his resignation.
But it is clear that Fallon clashed with top Bush administration officials bent on using U.S. military might over other levers of power, such as diplomacy and economic cooperation, several years before he took command of U.S. forces in the Middle East in March 2007.
In an interview Monday, Fallon recalled that after he became chief of the U.S. Pacific Command in 2005, “I came back here about once a month and sat down with Secretary Rumsfeld. I’d walk through what I was thinking, why I was thinking that way. There were people who didn’t like that.”
U.S.-China relations had soured in 2005 after the Pentagon issued a high-profile report highlighting a growing threat from China, and after Rumsfeld publicly rebuked China’s military buildup in a speech in Singapore.
Describing the message he brought back from the region at the time, Fallon said he told his superiors: “What are the priorities, guys? Do you want to have a war? We can probably have one. But is that what you really want? Is that really in our interest? Because I don’t think so.”
The friction with some of his political bosses in Washington continued when Fallon, a former navy pilot, was picked by Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, to run Central Command in 2007, just as the “surge” of additional U.S. combat forces was getting under way to try to quell skyrocketing violence, much of it said to be the fault of neighbouring Iran.
Fallon said he quickly realized that dealing with Iraq’s neighbours, including Iran and Syria, would be critical to bringing long-term security to Iraq - not a popular position in the Bush administration.
Fallon said that the Esquire article was “unfortunate.”
“The story came out, and it was obviously a political attack on the president and used me to put the president in a very awkward position,” he said. “The rest of the news hounds jumped all over it, and it became a free-for-all.”
Looking ahead, Fallon said he believes the war in Iraq “is essentially over.”
“We have some combat activity still ongoing occasionally up in the Mosul area, but other than that it’s pretty much over and been over,” he said.
But the war in Afghanistan, though showing some progress in recent months as a result of increased cooperation with neighbouring Pakistan, is “probably a bigger challenge than Iraq,” Fallon said.
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