The Japanese media recently quoted Japanese police authorities as saying that the ideas for Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks in the US were very likely pulled from Unlimited War (
The report said that the book details various guerrilla warfare tactics, including the type of terrorist suicide hijackings used on Sept. 11, and terrorist wars waged through computers. The report also said that Japanese police had obtained some related "internal" documents circulating within the PLA, and that the US Defense Department is translating them.
The book itself is not an "internal" document. It was written by two PLA officers, Qiao Liang (
Why do I say that the US is the book's target?
First, Qiao acknowledges in the foreword that he met Wang in Fujian Province in 1996, when China was holding military exercises in the Taiwan Strait to influence Taiwan's presidential election, and that the subsequent intervention of US aircraft carriers prompted them to write the book. As China was forced to suspend its exercises (as a result of the US carrier intervention), Qiao began to wonder how to address US hegemony.
Second, the blurb on the book's back cover says that, since the Gulf War, US military strategies and theories have become models for emulation. On the basis of their research over the years, the two authors put forward persuasive arguments against the US strategies. They also present the idea of "unlimited war" as the way to deal with new US military models. Although they wrote the book in 1996, their concept of unlimited war was inspired by the 1991 Gulf War.
Third, the book expresses sympathy for the weaker side in the Gulf War, Iraq -- sympathy not only for its defeat but also for its people's sufferings under the sanctions imposed after the war.
The authors describe Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as a "family affair" within the Arab community. (In that case, was the Japanese invasion of China also a family affair of the east Asian community?)
The authors' attitude toes Beijing's line in pretending to be neutral while in fact supporting Iraq.
Fourth, the book asserts that the US "has made itself a terrorist." This is a reference to both the US prosecution of the Gulf War and its intervention against ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, in its role as "world policeman."
The authors even express their belief that the US would like to "produce an enemy even if there is none" to ease unemployment among American soldiers and "a sense of emptiness" in the US Congress. The authors deliberately blur the line between terrorist acts against civilians and war between states. In reality, they are speaking for terrorists and turning their guns on the US.
The theories of unlimited war contained in the book appear neutral only on the surface. While thinking up strategies for weaker countries, the book also calls on stronger countries to beware. It says that both weak and strong countries may use the unscrupulous "unlimited war" tactics. But because democratic countries are constrained by international norms, the book in fact ends up encouraging terrorists.
In one chapter, for instance, the authors discuss trade wars, financial wars, "new terrorist wars" and biological attacks. The section on "new terrorist wars" gives a nod to the bombing of two US embassies in Africa. "State power, no matter how mighty, will find it difficult to gain an upper hand in a game without rules," it says.
The book acknowledges that visible states, as well as invisible cyberspace, international and state laws, norms and standards and moral principles cannot constrain terrorist groups waging unlimited war. Despite its statement that terrorist groups have "the destructive characteristics of irresponsibility and the defiance of rules," the book also ambiguously says that "in disrupting international order, non-state powers also curb the destruction inflicted on the international community by some big countries."
Such statements in effect glorify terrorists and encourage their arrogance. It was not surprising that in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the two authors hypocritically expressed their condolences to the US before calling on the US to engage in self-examination.
Why does China have such great interest in unlimited war? Because, compared with the US, it is a weak country. But more importantly, American values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law serve as natural enemies for authoritarian rogue nations of China's ilk. China can only expect to deal with the US by means of unlimited war.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks represented only one of the possibilities under this new kind of warfare. Chinese hackers launched cyber attacks after the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the EP-3 incident in April last year, but China failed to gain any advantage from those attacks.
The entire world must be on alert for the type of methods these rogue nations and terrorist groups might employ to oppose democratic countries and humanity at large. If humanity wants to be free from the fear of terrorist attacks, the only way is to exterminate terrorists and root out the hotbeds of terrorism.
Paul Lin is a political commentator based in New York.
Translated by Jackie Lin
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