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the matter of the settlement, a few questions:
1. When do we renew our surveillance flights? If reports are
to be believed, these flights have been going up "several" times
per week. That is a lot more often than the U-2 flights over Russia
back in 1960, which resulted in the raucous summit in Paris, the
withdrawal of an invitation to President Eisenhower to go to Moscow,
and a big page in the history of the Cold War. If we are doing surveillance
flights in southeast China, why so intensively? What is it we are
on to? Is what we are discovering there something that justifiably
requires intensive monitoring?
2. If these flights are necessary for U.S. interests in Southeast
Asia, what are we prepared to do to continue them? What is China
prepared to do to obstruct them? Have we put down the (regrettable?
sorrowful?) end of the Chinese fighter plane as the just deserts
of cowboy highflying?; or, have we concluded that the pilot who
went down was acting on Chinese orders to obstruct the passage of
our EP-3E? If a) the Chinese are determined to obstruct the flights,
and b) the United States is determined to continue the flights,
how do we propose to do this? Are we intending fighter protection
for our next flights? Will we be sorry, or very, very sorry, if
our fighter plane knocks down a Chinese fighter plane?
3. Is it possible that we have developed the technology to get the
information we need through satellite surveillance? This was what
happened in 1960 when we phased out the U-2s. The Soviets having
achieved anti-aircraft technology of their own, we went to our Peeping
Toms. Do we have Peeping Toms that will do what we want done in
southeast China? If so, is it understood in Peking that we are going
to end the surveillance flights, relying on satellite flights? If
so, are the Chinese going to spread the word that they have effectively
stopped our flights, giving Peking an enormous psychological lift?
4. How come military specialists who have focused on the events
of the past fortnight haven't told us what exactly it is that we
are looking at in southeast China? We have been told that the Chinese
are stepping up their submarine building, and we know that that
can be harrowing news. In the 1980s, the Soviets were launching
one MIRV- equipped nuclear submarine every month, and that news
made even the likes of Henry Kissinger extremely apprehensive. Is
that what we are staring at from our EP-3Es? But why do we need
to do that so often? If it took about a month for high-powered Soviet
technology to produce one war submarine, it would take more than
that much time for the Chinese to do the equivalent. So why do we
need to check the progress so meticulously?
5. Something else is clearly going on. What? Is it some new and
terrifying military device especially calculated to subdue Taiwan?
Does it have to do with bacteriological warfare? Chemical warfare?
But what do flights of such frequency do that gives us critical
information? How is it that we can't just extrapolate what we see,
giving us a reliable idea of what the Chinese are up to, or can
accomplish, in one month, or two months? Is bureaucratic rigidity
at play? Former Defense Secretary William Cohen said over the weekend
that we "should resume surveillance flights" right away. He didn't
say why, but as someone who was secretary of defense up until a
few months ago, he should be expected to know what are the urgent
reasons for continuing intensive aerial reconnaissance.
6. Granted that the Peking Adult Education machine is at liberty
to spread whatever word it wishes to describe the American response
to its protests, we can of course insist that we are custodians
of the correct meaning of the English language — in fact, we
can say the truth, which is that in lexicography, we long ago outpaced
the font of the mother tongue, Great Britain. But whatever we say
we intended to say by what we said — what matters is what crystallized
opinion takes out of it all. Either the Japanese, the Indonesians,
the Taiwanese, and the NATO powers are going to see what we did
as reasonable and consistent with sound strategy, or they will conclude
that the United States was scared off by Chinese bluster. Whether
that is true is known only by President Bush.
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