In 1972, Henry Kissinger and Chinese Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua included a paragraph in the Shanghai Communique with the phrase ". . .there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China."
Carter abrogated the 1954 mutual security treaty in 1979 when he recognized the mainland government as the sole government of all of China and dropped all official ties to Taiwan.
President Bush has recently said publicly we will do whatever is necessary to defend Taiwan, as he has reestablished our assistance in Taiwan's defense and acquisition of defensive weapons.
President Bush has appointed Condoleeza Rice his National Security Advisor; she distinguished herself by counselling firmness toward China in a key article for Foreign Relations--this at a time that Henry Kissinger warned the U.S. not to interfere in the interests of China.
President Bush's appointment of Henry Kissinger as head of a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the causes of the surprise attack on September 11, 2001, is for the purpose of bestowing maximum credibility in the form of a figurehead atop a ceremonial commission.
President Bush's appointment ought not be viewed as endorsing the China policies of Kissinger, or of seeking his advise on international matters.
Lt. Gen. Charles G. Cooper, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) writes in the May 1996 Proceedings in "The Day It Became the Longest War" that a key meeting of the Joint Chiefs and LBJ at the White House in November 1965 set the outcome of the war.
During that fifteen minutes, at which Cooper was an aide to the chiefs, the service heads pitched their plan to bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong. LBJ listened, then cursed them, humiliated them, and dismissed them.
Cooper closes with:
We shall never know. But had General Wheeler and the others been given a fair hearing, and had their recommendations been given serious study, it is entirely possible that 55,000 or so of America's sons would not have been killed in a war that its major architect, Robert Strange McNamara, now considers to have been a tragic mistake.
President Bush's prosecution of the response to the attack of September 11, 2001 was to use Special Forces, CIA, and precision bombing to win the hearts and minds of the al Qaeda (see also Buried Briquets).
Henry Kissinger to the contrary notwithstanding, President Bush is not likely to go wobbly vis a vis China.
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The mistake was McNamara. McNamara was a devote of socialist Norman Thomas as decribed in McNamara's own book, In Retrospect He had more sympathy for the communists than serious disagreement. That sympathy directed his subversive direction of the war. He is quite happy to attribute the failures there to be thr result of the strength and motivation of the communists and the inherent impossibility of winning the war rather than to his role.
Two movies are instructive. The first is Saving Private Ryan's depiction of D day. The Second is We were Solders which was a true stoy. In the beginning of Soldiers Colonel Moore protests the order given that he move his people 60 at a time by helicopter into an area heavily infested with enemy troops. At the end of winning the battle the American units were taken back out by helicopter and the area relinquished to the enemy. Several months later the operation was repeated and so on for several years.
It was catastrophic. People were landed piece at a time into areas where they were massively outnumbered, where there was no cover or concealment, and there was little capacity for reinforcement or supply once the enemy attacked because helicopters couldn't operate in that environment. There was not even hindrance to the enemy moving into our lines. It was like having a D-day every two or three months.
No commander or Secretary of Defense would think of doing such a thing. It was slaughter of our troops.
If the area were to be attacked multiple times, instead of that strategy the area should have been held by permanent emplacements so that the enemy would need to take those emplacements to be able to operate in the area. At least one 155 should have been in the emplacement to attack any enemy within a radius of 19 miles. If the enemy gathered in concentrated numbers necessary to attack the emplacement, Napalm would have destroyed them. But that was contrary to the McNamara doctrine.