6/07/2006

Telling the truth like they never did before.

Lately I can sense a shift in the way truth is being generated in the media. Our local press are now churning a different kind of truth from the west after a series of rubbish from the Robert Kagan type. Today there is a shift, a paradigm shift of a sort, from Tom Plate, who once used to churn up Kagan type of craps. He wrote a piece in the Straits Times looking at the American hang up over an emerging China. He was equally appalled and astonished that the Americans did not know why the Chinese have a need to beef up their military capabilities while the Americans kept on 'warning regularly, through periodic reports and episodic statements, about its(China) relentless ferocity.' And he pointedly say it in no simpler terms why the Chinese need to build up. "What precise theory of exceptionalism would allow the US to forge ahead militarily, spending far more of its national treasure on arms both proportionately and aggregately than other countries, but would also forbid other nations from doing the same?....Is it that it is okay for the US to possess a vast stockpile of weapons but it is not okay that others have them, precisely because the US would never use them but the others might?...Guess which superpower has consistently refused to offer the world a 'no first use' policy?( ie first to use nuclear weapons)" His final statement, a simple advice to the American leaders, is "If we want others to build down their forces, then we have to downsize ours too so that we can then righteously insist that others follow our lead." He should have asked the Americans to revisit the SALTs they had with the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s, and the underlying principle behind the SALT talks.

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