Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Quid Lo Mein”

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October 15, 2009

Quid Lo Mein

Hatched by Dafydd

Doesn't President Barack H. Obama have enough bad ideas on his own? Must he also recapitulate every horrific blunder of every Democratic president who came before him?

It's not enough that he adopted Jimmy Carter's Middle-East catastrophe of a foreign policy; now he's kow-towing to the Chinese the same way Bill Clinton did, by sharing our most vital missile technology with Red China:

President Obama recently shifted authority for approving sales to China of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department -- a move critics say will loosen export controls and potentially benefit Chinese missile development.

We are assured this will not result in any decrease in the rigor with which we guard our most sensitive missile secrets. But if it did, how would we know? A key element Obama altered is the requirement that Congress be notified of any missile-technology transfers:

The presidential notice alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act that required that the president notify Congress whether a transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China's missile programs.

The law was passed after a late-1990s scandal involving the U.S. companies Space Systems/Loral and Hughes Electronics Corp.

Both companies improperly shared technology with China and were fined $20 million and $32 million, respectively, by the State Department after a U.S. government investigation concluded that their know-how was used to improve China's long-range nuclear missiles.

Bill Clinton famously accepted $3 million in campaign cash that came (through an easily exposed cut-out) from the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China. And that was just a drop in the bucket of millions of campaign dollars from suspicious sources related to China and Indonesia.

Shortly thereafter, Clinton made several policy changes that China had been demanding for decades. Besides relaxing the rules on technology-sharing, allowing Loral and Hughes to sell extremely sensitive hardware and software to Red China -- for example, allowing them to better simulate nuclear test blasts via software -- Clinton also made clear we would not intervene if China attacked Taiwan and several other concessions.

I highly doubt that the Obamacle will accept any campaign contributions from the PLA -- at least knowingly; considering how seriously the campaign relaxed standards on credit-card donations, he may well accept such donations willy-nilly, perhaps not even knowingly.

But he has his own soft spot that the mandarins can hit with their eyes closed: I don't know for sure whether the Chinese government quietly hinted that, if Obama failed to meet their demand that technology transfers be approved by Commerce, not the White House, then perhaps they would severely cut back on the number of United States Treasury bills they would buy... a multi-hundred billion dollar "loan" that is the only thing currently standing between us and total economic collapse. Maybe Chinese negotiators made no such threat; maybe they thought it would be too "unfair" a bargaining chip, too much like extortion, skulduggery to which Red China would surely never stoop.

Perhaps we can rely upon Barack Obama's word that he will faithfully defend the United States from Chinese hegemony, even if it means the utter ruin of our economy on his watch. Or maybe we can rely upon the Secretary of State to have a completely different and much tougher approach to China than she does to Russia -- or than she and her husband had, as "co-presidents," in the 1990s.

But should we bet our national security on it?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 15, 2009, at the time of 5:32 PM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: Dick E

Dafydd-

The presidential notice alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act that required that the president notify Congress whether a transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China's missile programs.

Um … what am I missing here? The President can, by decree, change a “key provision” of a law passed by Congress and signed by his predecessor. If he can legally do that, there must be considerable wiggle room in that provision, and Congress must not have considered it to be quite as key as the Washington Times does.

(No, I’m not suggesting that it’s a good idea to transfer high tech military secrets to China. I just wonder whether we’re getting the whole story here.)

The above hissed in response by: Dick E at October 15, 2009 9:23 PM

The following hissed in response by: scrapiron

Slick Willie and Al Gorabge sold missile guidance systems to China for personal gain (money in the pocket). Don't think President O'Dumbo won't end up with millions of dollars in a foreign bank account,in his or MO's name.

The above hissed in response by: scrapiron at October 16, 2009 8:19 PM