union campaign contributions vanished tomorrow, most Democratic officeholders would be bankrupt overnight, and the Democratic Party would immediately shrink to permanent minority status.

Direct contributions to Democratic candidates is merely the tip of the iceberg, however. A much larger and indeterminate contribution takes the form of money funneled through party and other organizations, the supply of ground troops to man telephone banks, do door-to-door campaigning, or get-out-the-vote efforts on election day that if paid for would be worth many millions of dollars. In Michigan, the UAW got the auto companies to make election day a holiday so that union workers could get paid by their companies for campaigning against Republicans. This amounts to an illegal corporate contribution to political campaigns, but no law enforcement official has seen fit to issue any subpoenas.

The current president of the SEIU is Andrew Stern, a former New Leftist who came out of the University of Pennsylvania. One of the eulogies given at a Democratic Socialists of America memorial after the death of DSA co-founder Michael Harrington gave tribute to “the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU….” Stern is one of many radical union organizers who came out of the Midwest Academy which was formed by SDS radicals Heather and Paul Booth to train community organizers and infiltrate the labor movement. Paul Booth, who was a secretary-treasure of SDS is now the assistant to Gerald McEntee, a member of Al Gore’s kitchen cabinet in the 2000 campaign and the president of the other powerful government union, AFSCME. Heather is the guiding force of the radical organization ACORN and was a legislative aide to Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum before he retired. So successful has the Booth’s Academy been that its work is now carried out by Union Summer, a program entirely financed by the AFL-CIO to train radical college students to become union organizers. Union Summer is run by the son of Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin, nephew of Democratic Senator Carl Levin, so incestuous is the Union-Democratic nexus.

Andrew Stern’s rise to the presidency of SEIU was paved as director of organizing under John Sweeney when he was president of SEIU. Stern advanced to the presidency after Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, became the President of the AFL-CIO. In 1996, Stern told his members that he expected “every leader at every level of this union – from the international president to the rank-and-file member – to devote five working days this year to political action.” (Reported by Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray in their new book Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics (New York: Crown

Forum, 2004). Stern’s order is tantamount to a labor levy worth between $500 and $1,000 that each SEIU member is expected to donate to the Democratic Party.

In addition to SEIU’s commitment of $65 million to defeat President Bush, the AFL-CIO has already allocated $44 million for the same political purpose – which makes $109 million from just two labor organizations out of the many dozens that fund political activities. Up to a quarter of all the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Boston will belong to the two largest Teacher Unions, one of which by itself, the National Education Association, has 2.7 million members and far more money than SEIU.

The money doesn’t all go one way, however. From 1996 through 1999 the Clinton Administration gave more than $1 million in tax dollars to the SEIU as grants, largely from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Money being fungible, one could reasonably assume that some taxpayer dollars have filtered back to the partisan coffers of Democratic political candidates such as Al Gore in 2000 and John F. Kerry in 2004.

No wonder the unions want to provide as little financial disclosure as possible – and are eager to remove President Bush for attempting to shine light on how they use members’ dues money. Such disclosure was supposed to be required as of 2004, but another Democrat-appointed Federal judge blocked implementation of the LM-2 Financial Disclosure Forms for unions until after this year’s elections, after which a new Democratic President Kerry elected with union money might be able to rescind all disclosure requirements for unions.

SEIU began as a Chicago-based janitors’ union. It was Stern, using New Left tactics of the 1960s with Sweeney’s approval, who shut down parts of Los Angeles with a “Justice for Janitors” strike that blocked not just one company but city streets as well. These workers, at Stern’s direction, wore red shirts and carried signs depicting brooms held in the clenched fist that symbolizes Marxism.

“We’re going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America,” Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his convention address last month.

But Stern’s ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is

to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss, Andy Stern. Stern’s current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether.

SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call “Corporate Campaigns” or the “death of a thousand cuts.” Like the Furies of Greek mythology, this cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company’s reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.

The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted NO to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker’s neck – and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.

“He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks,” Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined “Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union” after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. “They politicize the union’s staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union’s business…. ‘It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,’ said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help.” (Stern sounds remarkably like King George III explaining why the colonists should have no right to vote in the American colonies.)

“Some SEIU staff say straight up, ‘This isn’t a workers’ organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn’t be an organization,’” wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the leftist magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of another leftist magazine The Nation.

In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as “Union Democracy.”

SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin:“The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International

Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland’s Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. ‘Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,’ observes one labor official.

“The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU’s boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation,” wrote Kotkin. “No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now ‘in complete accord’ with the AFL-CIO’s program. ‘The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,’ wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention.

“That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists,” continued Kotkin. “particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. ‘All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,’ complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. ‘It’s like the 1930s all over again.’”

Some SEIU activists boast that they are the “new CIO,” referring to the radical, class warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented American Federation of Labor to create the AFL-CIO in 1955. Today’s SEIU “leaders tend to be radical, even socialist,” wrote Ryan Lizza, Associate Editor of the liberal magazine The New Republic in 2003.

Such leftwing ideology was on display last month in San Francisco as the SEIU convention moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members’ dues to Democrat Howard Dean’s quixotic, losing, anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.)

This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU’s allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows.

But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via

easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers, who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: Import poor immigrants, who with proper union brainwashing can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population.

As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com last March 2, SEIU’s Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the leftwing Democratic Party auxiliary Americans Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros.

As Kotkin quoted, you might think that this is the year 2004 – but in the New Labor movement, minds have regressed to the 1930s and are again hypnotized by and enamored with totalitarian statism, ideological hatred for American capitalism, and socialist utopian fantasies that history for the rest of us has utterly discredited.

As happens with individual human beings, perhaps with the labor movement growing old and feeble, as it nears death, senility has taken it into a second childhood of Marxist reveries and memories. The bad news is that this dying, senile movement is still able to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from workers and use that money to elect leftwing Democrat politicians. By doing so in 2004, organized labor could shorten the liberties and life of the United States.

The National Journal reported, e.g., that SEIU’s Stern played a big role in persuading the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent to pick as his running mate Senator John Edwards.

But why should we be surprised that a public employee union is socialist? In its perfect world everybody would be a unionized government employee – and the tooth fairy would each night leave enough money under the government’s pillow

to pay for it all, including the Bal Harbor, Florida caviar and Havana cigars of the idle rich union bosses.

A fourth reason the SEIU in particular, and organized labor in general, is desperate to defeat President Bush this November is its own survival. Half a century ago nearly half of private sector workers were union members. Today that proportion has plummeted to one American private sector worker in 12 – according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics (DLS), only 8.2 percent of private sector workers.

(One reason for this decline that organized labor, of course, refuses to admit is that unionized companies, forced to pay wages imposed in violation of the law of supply and demand, became uncompetitive in the global marketplace and have been going out of business. This is why “union alley,” the political-economic disaster zone analogous to tornado alley from Illinois to Pennsylvania, is known as the Rust Belt.)

This is why AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s battle cry has been that unions must either “Grow or Die!”

(This, ironically, is the same dilemma that Lenin ascribed to capitalism, a need for constant growth that inevitably leads to imperialism, capitalism’s “final stage”…so by Lenin’s logic we apparently are now witnessing Organized Labor’s final, imperialistic stage, its desperate dying grab for absolute power.)

Today more Americans are employed by government than work in manufacturing – actually making things. And today, according to DLS, 37.2 percent of public sector (i.e. government) employees are unionized. This is virtually the only sector of society where unions have been growing.

And this is precisely the niche in which SEIU and AFSCME dwell, the two unions that in 2002 gave more soft-money political campaign contributions than any others. Both these unions have a vested interest in helping Democratic politicians who will block efforts to reduce government and to lower taxes. They urgently need, for their own selfish reasons, to elect politicians who will press to make government ever-bigger so that it can produce more and more

union-dues-paying jobs for welfare workers, socialized medicine healthcare workers, Medicare nursing home workers and the like.

To make such expansion possible, SEIU’s President Stern recently joined what some labor activists call “the gang of five” – he and his fellow Presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (with a history linked to organized crime); the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) (also with a history linked to organized crime); the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters – to create the “New Unity Partnership.” (HERE and UNITE also formally merged in July 2004 to form the new mega-union UNITE HERE with approximately 840,000 members.)

Stern argued in his convention speech last month that the AFL-CIO’s “loose trade association of 65 disparate unions” is too weak to carry the labor movement successfully into the future. To revitalize Labor, he has proposed consolidation of these 65 into no more than 15, and perhaps as few as five, giant unions with enough money, power and political clout to intimidate companies, industries, politicians, even entire

countries as unions like SEIU and its New Unity Partnership become the international union equivalent of multinational corporations.

Stern’s ballyhooed vision for “New Labor” is really a century old, akin to the goal of the International Workers of the World (IWW) “Wobblies” to create “One Big Union” for all workers so powerful that it could impose socialist-anarchist government, confiscate all private companies, redistribute all private wealth, and end war by having the world’s workers refuse to fight. The IWW refused to forgo strikes during World War I, opposed the war, came to be widely perceived as unpatriotic and anti-American, and this led to the extinction of this early dinosaur version of the labor movement.

These are the same old leftward reptilian footprints, right down to last month’s SEIU withdraw-the-troops resolution, that Stern today is following. Because of their stranglehold on the Democratic Party, this is an ominous portent of politics to come.

—FrontPageMagazine, July 14, 2004

There are many Israel-haters on the Left—but none more persistent, or rabid, than far-Left British actress Vanessa Redgrave. The mummified Marxist is a longtime enemy of the Jewish state.

In 1977, Redgrave did a “documentary” titled “The Palestinians” that showed her in a PLO training camp, dancing as she waved a rifle over her head. (Doing the fedayeen two-step?) In accepting an Oscar for Julia (1978), Redgrave railed at the “Zionist hoodlums” (an expression Soviets propagandists applied to those protesting the treatment of Russian Jews).

In 1980, Redgrave proclaimed, “The State of Israel must be overthrown, there is no room for such a state.” In December 1981, she told the publication Arab Perspective, “The Zionist state is the cause of conflict and violence in the Middle East.” The establishment of Israel in 1948 was presumably preceded by millennia of peace and brotherly love in a region renowned for harmony.

In the same interview, Redgrave declared, “I am against the racism and violence of the Zionist state of Israel,” then adding (almost as an after-thought), “but I also oppose anti-Semitism.” On the other hand, she isn’t on record actually condemning a specific act of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, or anywhere else.

Her statements last week were fully in keeping with a quarter century of evil lies and a steady stream of venom directed at the only democracy in the Middle East.

“An Israeli sniper will shoot at a classroom full of Palestinian children who are in their uniforms and scarves,” Redgrave informed the press.

“Any Palestinian mother or schoolchild knows that a schoolchild who is dressed in a uniform can be and is frequently shot in the head—not in the chest, not in the legs, in the head.” Redgrave wasn’t talking about collateral damage. She was charging the Jewish state with deliberately engaging in infanticide.

When asked for her source on this updated Blood Libel (Jews murdering non-Jewish children), Redgrave cited a documentary by the UN Relief and Works Agency (“Huda’s Story”). The child, who lives in Gaza, “was indeed wounded in the head, but by a ricochet bullet,” according to UNWRA’s spokesman in the Gaza Strip. No one knows whether the shot was fired by Israeli forces or Palestinian gunmen.

From this, Redgrave concocted a lurid lie of Israeli snipers peering through their scopes at rooms full of little girls in uniforms, trying to decide which of the kids they should kill for fun.

Speaking of the murder of innocents, in May, Palestinians ambushed a Jewish convoy in Gaza. After her car was forced

off the road, Tali Hatuel (age 34) and her four children were shot and killed—not with a sniper’s rifle but at close range. As a finishing touch, Palestinian assassins shot the pregnant woman in the stomach, to ensure that her unborn child did not survive.

Redgrave is, to put it mildly, a piece of work. A leftist who makes Michael Moore look like a Republican, she is Noam Chomsky in a dress—Goebbels with an upper-class British accent.

A longtime member of Britain’s Workers Revolutionary Party—which proclaims on its website, “We are Marxists and fight for the principles founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky”—she left in the course of one of those periodic Trotskyite splits and helped to found another proletarian-vanguard, The Marxist Party.

True to her principles, Redgrave never met a Communist butcher she didn’t adore, and never encountered an act of Western self-defense she wasn’t prepared to denounce.

In 1962, she became one of the first celebrities to visit communist Cuba, where she was rumored to have had an affair with Fidel Castro. (How old is Sean Penn, anyway?) In 1967, she took out a full-page ad in the United Kingdom, denouncing U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

In the 1980s, she was active in the nuclear freeze movement and protested American policies in Central America, especially our opposition to the saintly Sandinistas.

Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Redgrave demanded “withdrawal of U.S., British and all imperialist troops from the Gulf.” In fairness, she also called for the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait—but was prepared to allow that occupation to continue indefinitely rather than apply force.

Last year, she was a regular at antiwar protests in London. (Said she of the effort to remove Saddam Hussein: “The British and American governments are about to destroy all hopes for peace anywhere in our world, forever.”) She also posted 50,000 pounds bail for a Chechen accused of complicity in the 2002 Moscow theater siege, where 116 died.

In June (in the course of delivering a petition to 10 Downing Street), Redgrave charged that Bush is operating a “concentration camp” in Guantanamo, where prisoners are routinely subjected to “torture.”

There is no record of Redgrave ever denouncing Islamic terrorism (other than the pro forma, “of course I don’t support terrorism, but…”) or condemning the Cambodian genocide, Vietnamese re-education camps, North Korean nuclear blackmail, or Castro’s treatment of political prisoners. Such would not have served the interests of the revolution.

Besides accusing Israel of infanticide, the sexagenarian actress attacked its security fence. It’s “a barrier higher than any wall I’ve seen and even higher than the Berlin Wall,” Redgrave insisted. Would that be the enclosure built by Marxists to keep their slaves from escaping, Vanessa?

“I see a government (Israel’s) that is deliberately trying to destroy the peace,” Redgrave raved.

And which “peace” would that be?—the peace of Arafat and Hamas, the peace of mortar attacks, snipers and suicide bombers, the peace of Palestinian imams who preach jihad, the peace that has claimed the lives of almost 1,000 Israeli civilians (mostly women, children and the elderly) in the past four years?

The security fence is designed to protect Israelis from the ravages of this peace.

Except for a few zigzags, Israel’s fence is on the Green Line, which demarcates pre-1967 Israel. The 480-mile barrier is almost entirely chain-link fence, with only 5 miles of concrete barrier, primarily near the Palestinian cities of Qualqilya and Tulkarim—hotbeds of terrorism.

By making it harder for Arafat’s killers to reach Israeli cities, or forcing them to take more circuitous routes (often resulting in their capture), construction of the fence has led to a significant decrease in suicide bombings.

The idea that a free people have no right to employ passive defense measures to protect themselves from random slaughter could only be embraced by a self-proclaimed Marxist —or the United Nations.

While Redgrave was spreading atrocity stories, on July 9th, the International Court of Justice decided the fence violated international law. The court rejected out of hand Israel’s explanation for the barrier and accepted without reservation Palestinian arguments.

ICJ is the chief judicial arm of the United Nations, which has spent 30 years bashing the Jewish state in resolution after resolution. The “justice” Israel receives from a UN body is the same it can expect from a Trotskyite actress masquerading as a goodwill ambassador.

Redgrave’s the name, red graves are the game. In the 70s, she and her comrades helped inter countless Vietnamese and Cambodians. She’s aided Castro in keeping the Cubans in a Marxist morgue.

In the growing alliance of the Left and militant Islam, Vanessa Redgrave would put Israel into its own place of eternal repose. Shovels in hand, The International Court of Justice is there to assist her.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, July 14, 2004

Constantine Menges: A Tribute
by Kenneth Timmerman

With the passing on Sunday of Constantine Menges, whose hauntingly prescient foreign affairs columns have graced these pages for many years, the Free World lost a revolutionary strategist.

An academic by training, Mr. Menges was recruited by new CIA Director William Casey in May 1981 to be national intelligence officer for Latin America. It was not just Constantine’s impressive intellectual firepower that attracted Casey but his fierce independence, tenaciousness and overriding vision that it was America’s destiny to serve as the standard-bearer of freedom to the oppressed of the world. Casey wanted to challenge the corporate views of agency insiders, and saw Mr. Menges as the right man for the job.

Constantine’s goal in life was to devise strategies for defeating tyrannies, just as V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky had devised strategies to create them. He was a professional revolutionary on the side of freedom.

Just before joining the CIA, Menges proposed the U.S. government establish a “National Foundation for Democracy,” to promote nascent democratic movements in countries under communism and other forms of tyranny. President Reagan embraced the idea, and two years later convinced Congress to fund the National Endowment for Democracy.

While working for Casey, Mr. Menges urged the CIA to adopt a “pro-democracy” approach toward defeating communism in Latin America that skillfully blended support for pro-democracy political movements with selective use of force. When he moved to the White House in 1983 to become a special assistant to the president for national security affairs, his first assignment was to draw up plans to restore democracy in Grenada after a communist coup. It was this part of the Grenada mission, more than the military intervention alone, that marked the definitive end of the Carter era and demonstrated it was possible to “roll back” communism, surely Ronald Reagan’s greatest legacy.

When I met Constantine four years ago, I never would have imagined it would be in the “sunset” of his life. He had just turned 60; he and Nancy, his wife of 25 years, were enjoying

Georgetown like a young married couple. Dining with them at restaurants, or in their home or in mine, invariably became an intellectual fireworks display. Constantine was not only bursting with his own ideas, but knew how to inspire others.

Indeed, over the past two years, Mr. Menges has been more active than ever in warning of new threats looming just over the horizon. He warned the Bush administration repeatedly about the active infiltration of Iraq by thousands of Iranian government thugs and intelligence operatives.

Even as the U.S. was celebrating the end of major combat activities in May 2003, Constantine predicted the lull in violence would be only a respite. The Iranians had established 42 Arabic radio and television stations beaming anti-American propaganda into Iraq, he said, without an effective U.S. response. The results were predictable, and deadly.

In Iran itself, Constantine urged the Bush administration to aid pro-democracy groups to build a broad-based national movement capable of challenging the tyrannical rule of Iran’s clerics. As a strategist of freedom, he knew dictators could be defeated—but that it required hard work, good planning, training and dedication. Armchair revolutionaries, who ran for cover at the first shots, would never do the trick, he knew. But equally dangerous were armed Marxist-Islamic groups who sought to replace one dictatorship with another.

The son of German refuges from World War II, he had a special understanding of appeasement, and blasted the Clinton administration for caving in to Communist China. But in a just-completed book-length manuscript called “2008: The Preventable War,” he was scarcely gentler toward the Bush administration for failing to recognize the threat of growing military and strategic cooperation between Russia and Communist China.

Those whose loss is arguably the greatest, however, are those who have never met him and who don’t even know his name: freedom-lovers in countries such as Iran, who aspire to break the yokes of tyranny. They have lost not only a friend, but a revolutionary thinker and strategist who understood that if you failed to fight for freedom you inevitably die in chains.

—The Washington Times, July 16, 2004, p. A16

Communist China’s Military Threat

The Pentagon’s “Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China” is a troubling document for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these is that the report makes clear that China, despite attempting a more tempered approach in recent years, is still committed to Communist ideology as it relates to foreign policy. Released in May, the report outlines how China’s military buildup is in direct connection to its regional ambitions, which include challenging U.S. dominance in the Pacific. China’s goal of regional hegemony is still many years off, though approaching at a pace that demands immediate attention.

China reasons correctly that it must upgrade its military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to U.S. armed forces standards through a prolonged concentration on increasing investment and procurement of high-tech, “network-centric” systems. As the report notes, “China’s military modernization is oriented on developing the capabilities to fight and win ‘local wars under high-tech conditions.’ Based largely on observations of U.S. and allied operations since Operation Desert Storm [in 1991], PLA modernization envisions seeking precision-strike munitions, modern command and control systems, and state-of-the-art [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR)] platforms. Beijing sees its potential future adversaries, particularly the U.S. Armed Forces, acquiring these advanced systems, and this is the driver in PLA defensive and offensive force modernization.” According to the report, China’s military spending will increase 11.6 percent to $25 billion this year. The amount in

real terms is actually higher, the report cautions, when research and foreign purchases are added, which would bring it between $50 billion to $70 billion. Such spending makes China the third-largest defense spender after the United States and Russia. China’s military imports also rose 7 percent from last year, 90 percent of which come from Russia alone.

With its ISR advancements, the PLA expects to ‘provide a regional, and potentially hemispheric, continuous surveillance capability,” according to the report. This would include land, air, sea and space systems comparable to U.S. systems. Also included in the PLA’s modernization program are space-based systems with military and intelligence potential, anti-satellite systems capable of disabling enemy satellites and electronic warfare systems capable of concealing PLA movement and operations, weakening enemy air-defense early-warning systems and disrupting integrated air-defense systems. In short, these are not only the high-tech systems that the U.S. military has employed with such deadly efficiency upon lesser enemies, but they are the sort that a military would need to defeat the United States.

The balance of power in Eastern Asia is quickly shifting in China’s favor, especially in regards to Taiwan. Even if high-tech nations restrict arms trade with China, it is committing more resources toward modernizing its military than any other nation in the region. It is only a matter of time. As such, it is clear that the Bush administration’s security strategy of ensuring U.S. military preeminence in the world applies to both fighting terror as well as guaranteeing peace.

—The Washington Times, June 26, 2004