For the last couple of years I have interviewed several people detailing the very real and significant threat that exists with the Communist Red Chinese.

Steven Mosher, author of "Hegemon" presents one of the most compelling and clearly documented cases that China has been, is and will continue to work their plan for hegemony...first in Asia, and then the world. Bill Gertz, from the Washington Times, corroborates the Mosher claims in his book "China Threat." Chuck DeVore collaborated with Mosher to write a fictional “what if” titled succinctly “China Attacks.”

In January, WorldNetDaily posted the results of "Operation Spike," covering the year's 10 most underreported stories -- one of which was "China's animosity toward the United States." Based on the Clinton administration's unprecedented coziness with the communist Chinese -- illegal donations; technology transfers, sales and thefts; "permanent normal trade relations" status; training China's military in the United States; Clinton's own statement that "the Chinese will ... run [the Panama Canal] in a competent and able and fair manner" -- China should be America's best friend. And during 2000, most "mainstream" media coverage of the world's most populous country has conveyed this impression.

In reality, China has threatened unambiguously and repeatedly to bomb the United States if the U.S. interferes in the mainland's relentless campaign to conquer Taiwan.

In a January 1996 meeting, Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of China's general staff, told former Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles W. Freeman Jr., "In the 1950s, you three times threatened nuclear strikes on China, and you could do that because we couldn't hit back. Now we can. So you are not going to threaten us again because, in the end, you care a lot more about Los Angeles than Taipei."

"China is neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia, but a very special country," reiterated a recent editorial in the People's Liberation Army official newspaper. It warned that U.S. intervention in a conflict between China and Taiwan would result in "serious damage" to the United States, reminding readers that the PRC "is a country that has certain abilities of launching strategic counterattack and the capacity of launching a long-distance strike" -- a scarcely-veiled allusion to a nuclear attack.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin said to his central military commission, the leading generals in the People's Liberation Army, air force and navy, that they should "prepare for war with the United States by the year 2008."

Now, finally, the Washington Post has run an article about a piece on Taiwan by National Defense University professor Richard Russell. Russell's piece lays out precisely the same argument made by Steven Mosher and Chuck DeVore in their novel "China Attacks."

According to Russell's article in the U.S. Army War College quarterly Parameters, “War over the Taiwan Strait could come sooner rather than later.”

Notwithstanding the previous conventional wisdom that China’s military is too technologically backward and unsophisticated to launch a sustained, large-scale attack on Taiwan, they may not need to.

Long ago and far away when I was teaching tactics in the Army, there were three axioms inculcated into every class as necessities for a successful raid or ambush: 1) surprise, 2) firepower and 3) violence of action! Long before I presumed to teach, Sun Tzu declared in "The Art of War":

Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it. ... So a military force is established by deception, mobilized by gain, and adapted by division and combination.

Well it’s about flipping time our defense planners woke up and smelled the tea.

Russell’s “what if” smacks a chilling consonance with what Mosher and DeVore have written.

For too long, the career wonks have been loath to acknowledge the very real and significant Chicom threat. Chinese planners have been aided in their not-so-covert quest for hegemony by the strategic myopia and "politics" of the dark days of the Clinton regime.

The Clinton whole-cloth fiction of China as a “strategic partner” was analogous to the frog that agreed to ferry the scorpion across a pond.

I was appalled to learn from Mosher and others that the intelligence personnel and resources commitment to studying China were a mere pimple on the butt of a flea compared to what we used to have to keep tabs on the Soviet Union.

The inimitable frustration of China observers like Mosher, DeVore, Gertz and others has been the deaf-dumb-blind denial of both Department of Defense and State Department careerists.

The appointment of Donald Rumsfeld was a glimmer of hope that policy could and would change.

Russell observes, “The United States, meanwhile, clings to a policy of 'strategic ambiguity,' recognizing only one China, with diplomatic ties to Beijing and withholding diplomatic recognition from Taiwan. The United States argues that any Chinese military aggression against Taiwan would be a serious threat to American interests, but so far has stopped short of extending formal security guarantees to Taiwan, fearing that such agreements would embolden Taiwan to formally declare independence and trigger a conflict with China. The Bush administration does appear to be edging toward a more assertive position in support of Taiwan than was the case during the Clinton era, however. President Bush in April 2001 publicly stated that the United States would do 'whatever it took' to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.”

However, we may face a redefinition of “whatever it took” if or when China moves on Taiwan.

What if ...

• The U.S. was to suddenly find itself on the ground in the Mideast fighting a for real combined arms war?
• Our attrited forces and table of organization and equipment (thanks to the Clinton regime reduction in forces) cannot meet or exceed the standards of Gulf War I (after all, the Defense Department is conceding the cruel reality we don’t have the capability to be engaged in two theaters of operation simultaneously)?
• Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, or any combination thereof spreads our desert-camouflaged butts over a wide area of operation defending soccer mom’s ability to gas up the SUV?
• Congress continues to embrace petty partisan bickering rather than acknowledge the imperatives of national security?

We "could" boycott the upcoming Beijing Olympics. We "could" try economic or trade sanctions (but the World Trade Organization would probably end up fining the U.S.).

It is moderately encouraging to read Russell’s article in a War College quarterly. However unless or until the Department of Defense and the State Department extricate their collective head from rectal defilade and take the necessary steps now, China can and will move one step closer to their goal of hegemony.