US overreacting to UN referendum: Yates

"I don't feel very comfortable about the sophistication of the US approach [to the UN referendums]."

Steven Yates, former aide to US Vice President Dick Cheney

A former senior Bush administration official has criticized the US government for taking a prolonged and public stance against plans by Taiwan to hold a referendum in March on UN membership, saying the measure is likely to fail and that Washington should have realized that in the first place.

Steven Yates, a former senior Asia adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and one-time lobbyist for Taiwan, told a seminar at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington on Tuesday that the experience of the two referendums during the legislative elections on Saturday, and of two similar polls during the 2004 presidential election, shows that any controversial measures in Taiwan are "doomed to fail."

Policymakers Washington should realize this and should therefore not have made a big issue of it, he said. As a result, he felt the Bush administration's position on the UN referendum was "ill-advised."

"I don't feel very comfortable about the sophistication of the US approach, where we feel obliged to speak out publicly on domestic political matters that are likely to sort themselves out, even if they have international implications," said Yates, who now runs his own international consulting firm.

The failure of Saturday's referendums and those in 2004 means that "there might be some questions about how wise it is for the US -- as a matter of policy -- to begin responding to the prospect of a particular referendum very early in the process, if domestic partisan competition is going to defeat [the March referendum] to begin with," Yates said.

The UN referendum plan has been roundly -- and repeatedly -- criticized by US officials, most recently by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called the plan "provocative policy."

China long described the referendum as a move toward a declaration of independence for Taiwan, and this language was picked up last year by US officials, primarily Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte in an interview with Hong Kong's Phoenix TV in August.

The issue has soured US-Taiwan relations and it is felt that the vehemence of the US response stemmed from intense pressure from Beijing at a time when the Bush administration was in dire need of Chinese cooperation on a host of international issues.

Arguing no controversial referendum can be adopted in Taiwan, Yates said: "If the [Chinese Nationalist Party] KMT as a party decides for its own reasons that it wants to boycott the referendum, it can't pass," Yates said.

"I think that any mathematician would say that the numbers do not favor passage on any referendum that is remotely sensitive," he said.

"And the high threshold [for passage of a referendum] in Taiwan makes those referenda almost doomed to failure from the start," he said.