July 01, 2005

Let's say I'm one of the leaders of China and I'm wondering how to defend my country against America because I consider it a threat. How would I go about doing it?

First off, I'd know I couldn't do it militarily, not with any great effectiveness. I'd realize the U.S. is about 50 years ahead of my country technologically, and is so advanced militarily that any country that attacked it would be committing suicide. Considering what the U.S. has done in past wars, I'd bet the U.S. would annihilate China's military from the air, sink all the ships and submarines and blow up all the airplanes, then destroy the infrastructure --sewers, water, food, hospitals, electricity -- and blockade the country, just as the U.S. did in Iraq. I'd wonder how 50 million dead Chinese would sound, with the country put back about a century? I'd know it could happen, and I'd be helpless to prevent it.

You think we wouldn't do it? Think again. Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War, estimated the U.S. killed 3.4 million Asians during that war. He even admitted he was a war criminal. Duh, really? And Vietnam didn't even attack us, although of course we said it did. We attacked them, and then invaded and destroyed their country.

The Vietnamese are still suffering birth defects from the millions of tons of Agent Orange we dumped on them 35 years ago. They'll be suffering from it for a long time to come. How long? Centuries? Who knows.

And with all the depleted uranium (DU) rounds we've spread all over Iraq like some sort of satanic fairy dust, they're going to suffer for many decades, too. Birth defects and cancers are rampant there.

And how about the 600,000 who died during the War Between the States? Today that translates to about five million people, putting Lincoln far ahead of Saddam Hussein and somewhere up near Hitler in terms of being a mass murderer. And this was Americans killing Americans. You think we wouldn't wage total war against the Chinese, foreigners on the other side of world? We certainly would. We invented it.

However, contrary to our home-grown jingoists, who are so dull they couldn't cut soft butter with their foreheads, there are other, more subtle and definitely smarter ways to wage war. How about the advice in Sun Tzu's The Art of War? Think possibly the leaders of China have read it?

They might start with "...those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle." Now there's a sentence you can really expand upon.

First thing, if I were a Chinese leader, what I would want, more than anything else, is for the U.S. to widen the war in the Middle East. Attack Iran and Syria? You bet. How about Egypt? Of course. I'd pray we invade every country over there. After all, "...there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." This is something those in the the current U.S. administration do not believe. They don't even understand something as simple as, "...if you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

Widening the war will not make us safer, or impose the leftist pipe-dream of democracy on the Middle East. It will weaken us, and make us a whole lot of unnecessary enemies, too. We'll be stuck in permanent guerilla wars over there, fighting people who think we're trying to destroy their religion, take their oil, and impose our empire on them.

If I were the leaders of China, I'd be cackling. Thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands wounded, some permanently and horribly, hundreds of billions down the drain, a permanently sluggish economy, an inept President and a spineless Congress. And we're doing it to ourselves. The Chinese won't even have to fire a shot. Thank you, Buddha!

How about this one: "...if he is arrogant, try to encourage his egotism."

I'll be darned. You want to know something that's both funny and horrible? George Bush and the neocons and the Zionists and Christian Zionists panting and lusting after war in the Middle East are China's best friends. That makes them some of America's worst enemies. But then, a lot of people here already knew that, and more are waking up to it every day.

I'm still having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that people who want to kickstart Armageddon in the Middle East and bring Jesus back are unwittingly China's allies. How did that happen?

In their arrogance, blindness and hubris they want to widen two wars that are already going badly. They want to conquer the entire Middle East in the truly bizarre belief they can remake it in our no-longer-particularly-admirable
image. Well now, there's a saying: "You can conquer a country on horseback, but you have to dismount to rule it." We can quite easily conquer the Middle East; they have no armies to speak of, no navies, no air forces. But what are we going to do after that? I repeat: get bogged down in guerilla wars for decades, bleeding us of blood and treasure.

If I were China's leaders, how I would bust a gut laughing. "Look at those morons! Weakening themselves by expanding their wars! They'll be there for decades! They're cutting their own throats! Over and over! And slowly bleeding to death! And we don't have to do a damn thing to them!"

Know one of the most accurate definitions of insanity I'm familiar with? "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result."

Heck, if I was China, I'd be giving money to Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, David Frum, William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and their organizations and think-tanks and churches and colleges.

I'd do everything I could to encourage them and their nutty -- nay, insane-- anti-American messianic ideas. Nothing like having your enemy's government dominated by people who unknowningly have the same views as you do because they're too deluded to realize it. Talk about a Fifth Column.

Shoot, if I was China, I'd give money to Free Republic ("Fascists-R-Us") and even sign up to support the wars and claim those who are against them are traitors. I'd make sure the site never went under ("Hee hee. Dumb Americans. Fools and tools!").

In fact, I would be heartily encouraging America's empire. I'd do it with a straight face, although inside I'd be chortling. Troops in 140+ countries? Excellent. All empires collapse, but I guarantee you none of them believed their time would come, just as our politicians -- and some of our citizens -- think ours won't. But it will, as it always does. "The world needs you as its policeman," I would tell America. "You need a bigger military budget, more soldiers in more countries. . .to make the world safer [and you -- snicker --weaker]."

That maniacal Project for a New American Century, the Mein Kampfish Bible of the neocons? I'd support it whole-heartedly. Oops, on the other hand, those guys want the chumps, er, the U.S., to start a war with China as soon as possible. I wonder, what is the tipping point for the American public when they say, "Wait a minute, my country has just killed enough people to put us in the same league as Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot. Won't it come back on us, the way it did on them?"

One thing I definitely would do is keep the U.S. busy around the world, trying to overextend it and exhaust it. I'd have no intention of invading Taiwan, but I would shoot missiles over it so the U.S. would spend billions and be tied down in the area with troops and ships. What was that Sun Tzu said? Oh yeah, here it is: "All warfare is based on deception." And, "Hold out baits to lure the enemy."

I'd also support open borders for America, so tens of millions of uneducated and ineducable immigrants would swarm the country, dragging it down. Imagine a country with dozens of different tribes, all at each other's throats. For that matter, imagine a country with dozens of tribes not at each other's throats. Mini civil wars galore. A budding police state. Heck, the only way such a country can sorta survive is with huge and oppressive governments to repress all that infighting. The former Yugoslavia, anyone? (Oh, I forgot -- it will be different for America.)

Technically, open borders is second-best for destroying America. "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good." But hey, you have to go with what you can, right?

Those who think the free market -- which the U.S. doesn't have, by the way -- will unite many different tribes peacefully are deluding themselves. Imagine a country with one-third fundamentist Evangelical Christians, one-third Wahabi Muslims, and one-third Orthodox Jews, all trying to share the same land. They'll certainly abandon their hostilities in exchange for SUVs and DVD players. Where will this take place? In Bizarro World, that's where.

That scenario will never happen, you say? No, it won't, but there is a quote from Ludwig von Mises that is relevant: "There is no such thing as too much of a correct theory." If open borders worked, then the three aforementioned groups would get along just fine. But they wouldn't, and everyone knows it.

What else would I do? I'd support the government schools, so Americans would be ignorant and uneducated. I'd give thumbs up to socialized medicine, so many would die before their time. I'd support abortion and Social Security, so taxes will be raised on what few young workers there would be, to support a burgeoning elderly population. I'd support drugging school kids with Prozac and Ritalin, the first of which is associated with increases in murder/suicide, and the second with merely suicide.

I'd support massive taxation, inflation, deficits and regulations so the U.S.'s productive capacity would be gutted and domestic jobs would be forced offshore. . .many of them to China. And if I was China, I'd take all those hundreds of billions of dollars we're sending them and try to buy American businesses, especially oil companies like Unocal because they don't have any oil over there. I'd even try to buy Maytag, for distribution of China's products. What's that whirring sound I hear? Must be Gordon Jump spinning in his grave.

I'd be a big fan of the the Drug War. More prisons, more hundreds of billions wasted, more liberties lost. And at the same time I'd make friends with all those countries in Latin America the U.S. has alienated and attacked for so many decades, the ones from which so many of the drugs are coming. Might even encourage drug production there for smuggling into the U.S.

Sun Tzu didn't say this, but another well-known "philosopher" (at least a philosopher according to George) did: "The right hand knows not what the left hand is doing." Sounds an awful lot like the U.S. government.

I'd do everything I could to turn the U.S. into a Third World nation. Meaning, there's not a whole lot China has to do to us. After all, overwhelmingly, we're doing it to ourselves.

(Editor's note: See Immigration Quandary by William Anderson for a comprehensive article on the immigration problem.)

Lew Rockwell See Bob's archives there.

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