10 March 2007

Sounds of the Bugle



We are approaching a watershed moment. I am not talking about March madness, or at least not precisely. The basketball tournament will carry is from the last of winter almost to the Cherry Blossom Festival on the Tidal Basin.

My son puts it more elegantly, saying that you crack that first beer and the next thing you know, Tiger Woods is winning the Masters at the Amen Corner at Augusta National.

I tried to do some accounting of the costs of war the other day, the direct and indirect ones. I was too lazy to go through the various budget submissions, nor factor out the costs of the sanctions enforcement operations that preceded it.

I looked at the off-books submissions and the associated non-direct costs of the Veteran's Department, which is the overhead cost of a global military enterprise, and was only mildly surprised to discover that there are still four recipients of Civil War pensions and annuities, and hundreds still on the roles from the Spanish-American conflict over a hundred years ago.

I was forced to conclude that war is very expensive indeed, even if we are paying less for it as a percentage of the gross national product than we did during the Cold War.

Despite the grim tidings from the War, the economic engine of the United States remains the wonder of the modern world, the very center of the global system of systems. But it seems to me that our leaders have spent wildly of our treasure. The Social Security trust fund has been looted and filled with Treasury IOU's signed with the immature scrawl of our grandchildren.

Far too many of us live on the bubble's thin edge, and the Chinese have announced the formation of a new financial bureau to invest the trillion dollars represented by those IOU's.

I do not see China as replacing us in the near term, but they have done their homework, and they have a plan. At some point the great balance will shift and someone will say "no." I hope it is not over Taiwan, much as I like the industrious residents of Formosa, and I certainly respect their equally industrious cousins across the Straits.

I do not consider the future of Taiwan to be part of the enduring strategic goals of the United States, though I will acknowledge the psychological importance of resolution in supporting commitments.

I vividly recall the moment when tiny specs of land in the green water of the Formosa Straits last played their role in Presidential politics.

Quemoy and Matsu are only eight miles from the mainland, well within artillery range of modern systems, and almost close enough to hear the faint sound of a bugle in the night. The old Generalissimo always said that he would launch his return to the other part of the Republic of China from his heavily fortified bases there. Chiang provoked China on two occasions by moving large numbers of troops to the islands, and both times the US responded with military actions, including nuclear threats, in support of Chiang's provocations.

On 05 January 1950 President Harry Truman announced that "the United States will not involve in the dispute of Taiwan Strait", which meant America would not intervene if the Chinese communists were to attack Taiwan.

That was part of the colossal misunderstanding of the truculent Kim of North Korea, whose misinterpretation of the demarcation of the post-war world was momentous enough to almost spark another global conflict. He crossed the 38th Parallel on the 25th of  June that year, and South Korean and American forces reeled south under the onslaught.

As part of the effort to stabilize the western Pacific and avoid general war between the Chinas, President Truman declared the Straits to be neutral territory. To enforce that status, dispatched units of the Seventh Fleet to keep the prospective belligerents at arm's length. From that moment dates the US military mandate to defend Taiwan, though it originally was as much to protect the Communists from renewed adventures by the Nationalists.

The misunderstanding in Korea lurched to an inconclusion in 1953, but the crisis in the Straits continued for two years. The American right-wing clamored to “unleash” the Generalissimo, who dispatched 58,000 troops to the fly-spec islands. By 1954, the JCS was considering the use of nuclear weapons against China to put an end to fighting. The Mutual Defense Treaty with Chiang was signed in December, 1954, though fighting continued into 1955, prompting the Congress to pass the Formosa Resolution.

The situation was grave enough that the Last Lion, Winston Churchill, advised against the atomic defense of Quemoy and Matsu. There was hysteria in the air. In March of 1955, Secretary of State Dulles told the American people to be prepared for possible nuclear strikes against China, and Chief of Naval Operations Robert Carney stated that President Eisenhower was planning "to destroy Red China's military potential," by mid-April.

I don't remember any of that. But I do recall that during the 1960 debates between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, both candidates pledged to use American forces to protect the islets from invasion by the Communists. Vice President Nixon charged that Senator Kennedy, being weak on national defense, would not use U.S. forces to protect Taiwan's forward positions.

Times have changed, though I think that some do not recall the road that has been traveled to arrive where we are. Sometimes we cannot hear the bugles in the night, the ones that rally the troops and propel them forward. They shout out bravado on the one side, and fear on the other. I have heard them down through the years, sometimes as a tinny sound far distant, and sometimes close by.

Thirty years after the misconception that scoured the Korean peninsula, I was working in the lower level of the old Imperial Japanese bathhouse that served as the command bunker for US Forces Korea at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, long ago. It was red-brick and human scale, having survived the massive destruction of the capital, which had changed hands four times between the armies and was much the worse for wear.

It was not so grand as the marble of the preposterous Combined Headquarters of the United Nations establishment across the compound, but it was where the real power resided, and where the real secrets were held.

The Indications and Warnings Center- the INDIC- was a small all-source space of the old school. Plexiglas-covered map boards and indirect lighting; a console along one wall behind which the NCO of the watch and the SIGINT advisor flanked the junior officer.

A tall old Marine Colonel with a lean military bearing happened to be in the spaces on night, slow time for the watch between shooting incidents and the NKAF day-VFR air force all tucked in their bunkers. The Marine was peering at the upper portion of the large ground order of battle panel. Thinking he might need an orientation, I left the safety of the console and walked over to him. I invited his attention to the DMZ, thinking he might not recognize it.

He was kind, for a tough old bird. He said he had been up there, and was looking for the place his unit had been camped within sight of the Yalu, the night that they heard the Chinese trumpets in the darkness.

That changed everything, and quite suddenly. I hope that our inter-wired world is far too mutually dependent for any misconception so grave to happen again.

Of course, that is what the Europeans said in 1914, and you can see what happened to them. All the pretty empires, gone.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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