Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel and a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in little-noted remarks early last month that "neocons" in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China. The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson's account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials.
The right-wing Republicans in particular continued to embrace Taiwan as an anticommunist bastion 125 miles off the Chinese coast, long after their own party leaders and U.S. big business embraced the communist regime.
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, some of Taiwan's most fervent allies were swept back into power in Washington, particularly at the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, and Steven Cambone, Rumsfeld's new intelligence chief, and Pesident Bush's controversial envoy to the United Nations, John Bolton.
The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on," Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, "essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing."
Another key character in the minidrama was Therese Shaheen, wife of Rumsfield's spokeman, DiRita, the outspoken chief of the U.S. office of the American Institute in Taiwan, which took on the functions of the American embassy after the formal 1979 diplomatic switch. She openly championed Chen and the independence movement, at one point even publicly reinterpreting Bush's reiteration of the "one China" policy, saying that the administration "had never said it opposed' Taiwan independence." Powell asked for her resignation.
The independence issue, agrees China experts Richard Bush and Michael O'Hanlon, is Beijing's third rail--touch it and you die. (Source: Jeff Stein, CQ.com, Jun 3. 2007),