War over Taiwan? / Erap dips some more

War over Taiwan? The war drums have been pounding since months ago that China would invade and take over Taiwan if the latter heads toward independence after the March 19 elections. China demands reunification talks be renewed in the shortest possible time. The Taiwan stock market has plunged 617.65 points amid fears pro-independence presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) may emerge the victor. The race has been tight, fierce, even savage. Alongside Chen, a native Taiwanese, the two other major candidates are the KMT's Lien Chan and independent James Soong, formerly KMT.

It's too close to call, and that's what makes the Taiwan elections hold the world by its collective gut. If indeed Chen should win, will China invade and will the United States pull out all the stops to roll back the hordes and the missiles of Beijing?

The US-Taiwan-China triangle is the world's most threatening flashpoint today. And I have very little doubt that if Chen wins and proclaims Taiwan's independence from China, the latter will react instantly. A rain of short-range Chinese missiles will hurtle over the 100-mile Taipei Strait separating Taiwan from the mainland. The objective, should this be achieved, is to cripple the heart of Taiwan's economy, and bring Chen and the Taiwanese to heel. Question again: Will America declare war and order the Pacific Fleet to bomb China back to the Stone Age as once Gen. Douglas MacArthur threatened to do?

Before the 1996 elections in Taiwan, won by incumbent president Lee Teng-hui, China fired missiles off Taiwan in an effort to stop Lee, an Americanophile. Washington brought its massive missilery and navy to bear, sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the Western Pacific near Taiwan. Lee Teng-hui won by a massive majority. Flushed with his triumph and strong US support, Lee stirred the political pot even more.

He enraged Beijing by saying henceforth Taiwan would deal with China on a "state-to-state" relations. That was it.

Now let me peer into my crystal ball. I strongly suspect it was Washington who easily nudged Lee into saying this. Washington, to my mind, never expected Beijing's reaction. Beijing rattled its nuclear missiles, and warned it had "the weapons to launch a long-range counter-attack." Prof. Zhu Chenghu, deputy director of the Army University's institute of strategic studies, said: "China is not Iraq, nor Yugoslavia. She is a country with strategic attack capabilities. So it would not be wise to fight against a country like China."

The Beijing regime led by Jiang Zemin has still 20 years or more before it can presume to catch up with the US' awesome nuclear arsenal that can hit any target in the world many times over. But short of devastating New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Washington with nuclear missiles, China could have the capability to cripple America's nuclear network of off-shore missile bases in the Middle East and the Pacific.

Question again: Even if the US mainland is saved, can America risk this kind of nuclear war?

I agree with the CIA's (Central Intelligence Agency) finding that China does not have the military air and sea capability to put troops on the ground for an invasion of Taiwan. And sustain it. CIA director George Tenet said as much. But China's short-range missiles are the problem. They can rain death and destruction, break the will of Taiwan's leaders, eventually isolate the island, and -- possibly -- stop America in its tracks.

Under such circumstances, the calculation goes, the US will not go to war against the mainland. There is another factor that could unhinge the war scenario. The two other presidential candidates are Kuomintang or former Kuomintang, vice president Lien Chan, 63, standard-bearer of the ruling Nationalist Party, and rebel Nationalist candidate James Soong, 57. Chen, the fire-spewing pro-independence candidate, is 48. A native Taiwanese, Chen boasts he is the only presidential candidate without a college or university diploma and never studied in America.

He has no emotional ties whatsoever with China, no bonds, no interlaced culture. He is inordinately proud of Taiwan, its immense progress and its achievements, and Taiwan got to where it is today -- without China. By his standards, China and its 1.2 billion people are still awkwardly backward, so what sense is there in negotiating reunification with China?

But Chan and Soong are mainland Chinese whose families fled China with Chiang Kai-shek when the communists overran China in 1949. They are more flexible, certainly more politically sophisticated than Chen, and their roots are in the mainland. Negotiations? If that's what China wants? Okay, let's have negotiations. There's no timetable anyway. Chen and Soong would have no difficulty, if either wins, traveling to China for a "summit" meeting with Jiang Zemin.

When you look close, the whole thing is America's doing -- and America's problem. While the US seeks to engage China in fruitful and strategic relations, it holds Taiwan at bay. Taiwan, no doubt as a result of American economic and military aid, has become an economic tiger, prosperous and progressive. Just to be sure China cannot successfully invade Taiwan, America has armed Taiwan to the teeth by virtue of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. And the Pacific Fleet stands by.

But Taiwan is China.

And China will see to it that the United States will never succeed in wresting Taiwan away, making it independent, making it, as the old saw goes, a floating aircraft carrier armed with a Theater Missile Defense, a nuclear dagger aimed at the heart of China. America's big problem is bring China into the community of nations, set up Henry Kissinger's favorite rapport de forces, essential to setting up an international balance of power among the US, China, Europe, and Japan.

Besides, there are international treaties and understandings. Following World War II, Taiwan -- occupied by the Japanese for 50 years -- was ceded to China. In 1971, a United Nations resolution was passed "ousting Taiwan as the representative of China and replacing it with the People's Republic of China." In no time at all, 1972, President Richard Nixon visited China, a visit topped by the Kissinger-Chou En-lai communiqué to the effect there was only "one China." In 1980, the World Bank and the IMF voted to replace Taiwan with the People's Republic of China. The assumption, of course, was that Taiwan was a renegade province.

In time, and the Chinese measure time in generations, the China-Taiwan imbroglio will be a thing of the past. One China, two systems.

President Joseph Estrada's approval ratings are like the Ten Little Injuns. One by one, they disappeared, and finally -- as it happens today -- only one is left. December last year, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) had his net approval rating (NAR) down to five. All palace alarms went on last December. Today the favorite expression is that the wagons are circling round the president who is being besieged by a gauntlet. And so his men, if not his women, are out to see to it that the president does not go further down.

The one percent NAR is under-standable. Hardly had Erap Estrada recovered from Concord (Constitutional Correction for Reform and Development) and its accompanying baggage of scandals than when he got hit again by two scandals that were even more lethal. The first was the Norberto Manero pardon whose disgusting post-freedom sideshow was his post-freedom ride aboard a Mercedes and first-class lodgings at the New World Hotel, This was a Malacañang boo-boo owned up by no less than presidential executive secretary Ronaldo Zamora. And boy, you could smell all that sh-t hitting the electric fan.

Oh, yes, Manero is back in the can but the damage to the president has hobbled him seriously.

But the ensuing scandal was even more devastating. If SEC chairman Perfecto Yasay is right -- and many believe him -- the president called him up five times to extricate presidential buddy Dante Tan from "insider trading" and "mani-pulation" charges in the Philippine Stock Exchange. This was the blooper involving BW Resources, rendered all the worse because the SEC is a quasi-judicial body immune from any presidential intervention. Result was the collapse of the Philippine Stock Exchange.

The stink was terrible. It was a Mount Pinatubo spewing corruption. Foreign investors in our stock market fled. As the Asian Wall Street Journal reported we are close to becoming the basket case of the region again. Another scandal looms, fire trucks, Nora Aunor and Paquito Diaz. Gahd!