A red under every bed

Max Boot goes red hunting in a Dallas Morning News oped.

Man, look at how nuts the neocons are going. The Chinese have indeed raised their military spending over the last few years, it now stands at roughly 10-15% of US defense spending. And don't give me that "but that's only their official spending, they hide stuff in other budget items," cause we do it, too. Almost all nuclear spending, maintainance and research on our huge nuclear cache is budgeted under dept of Energy, and look at all the para-combat activities taken on by our myriad intelligence services.

Okay, point made, but just read this crazy s**t that the neocons are laying down, and tell me it doesn't sound like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove.

"

In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare, written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national-security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the public.

Unrestricted Warfare recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international-law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters). .......

There are signs of this strategy being implemented. The anti-Japanese riots that swept China in April? That's psychological warfare against an Asian rival. The stage-managed protests in 1999, after the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, fall into the same category.

The bid by China's state-owned CNOOC Ltd. to acquire Unocal? Resource warfare. Attempts by China's spy apparatus to infiltrate U.S. high-tech firms and defense contractors? Technological warfare. China siding against the United States in the U.N. Security Council over the invasion of Iraq? International-law warfare. Gen. Zhu's threat to nuke the United States? Media warfare.

Once you know what to look for, the pieces fall into place with disturbing ease.

"