LOS ANGELES -- How many of you out there would just love to see Colin Powell back in the saddle as U.S. secretary of state? Or, better yet, as secretary of defense, giving the boot to his arch-nemesis -- the war-prone Donald Rumsfeld?
Surely this delicious thought occurred to those who admired the former secretary of state's recent speech in Asia that scoffed at the idea that China was anything approaching a serious military threat to the United States. That comment from our most respected military man came on the heels of a grim lecture by Rumsfeld, in Singapore of all places, that more or less painted China as the second coming of the late Soviet Union and Darth Vader.
At the same time, the ever-sane Powell, a former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, an architect of the successful 1991 U.S. air war against the Saddam Hussein regime, and a soft-spoken skeptic of the 2003 U.S. ground invasion of Iraq, didn't go into denial about the Chinese military buildup. The career soldier put the mainland's ambitions in realistic contexts: to maintain a credible military deterrent against the possibility of formal Taiwan independence, and to underscore its inevitable rise as an important power.