The other day, in a military show of air power and defense capabilities in the face of a future China attack on Taiwan, something surreal and yet very real took place just an hour from my home in southern Taiwan. For a few hours on a weekday morning, six warplanes practiced taking off and landing on a temporarily blocked section of a main national freeway to simulate a possible response to a future Chinese attack.
It felt surreal watching the local TV news, because one doesn’t often see national freeways in any country blocked off to become temporary takeoff and landing fields for fighter jets. Imagine such a scene on I-95 in the east coast of the US or Route 66 in Texas.
As I watched the news clips being repeated on local TV that day and the next, I couldn’t help but think that I was once again experiencing the Alice in Wonderland quality of life in this part of the world, where the “Goliath” of China has more than 1,000 missiles aimed at the “David” of Taiwan, all in the name of peace and “peaceful rising.”
If China is rising peacefully, then I must be watching the wrong TV channel. And if Taiwan stands a chance of surviving a massive military attack from China, well, there’s no hell that could ever host such a massacre.
Who’s the director of this geopolitical tragicomedy filled with scenes of F-16s, French-built Mirages and Indigenous Defense Fighters taking off and landing in the weekday morning calm of an empty national freeway as a single OH-58D helicopter hovers overhead to provide “security” for the operations?
US Senator Richard Lugar recently told US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that unless Washington supplied Taipei with relatively advanced F-16 fighter jets and upgraded Taiwan’s existing F-16 fleet, Taiwan could be left “with no credible air-to-air deterrent.” Oops.
According to an Associated Press dispatch from the sidelines of that early morning military exercise, “Taiwanese requests for F-16 hardware have been pending since the administration of [former] US president George W. Bush. The [US President Barack] Obama administration has refused to make a decision, caught between its strong desire not to anger China — with which it maintains a complex and wide-ranging relationship — and its equally strong commitment to provide Taiwan the means to defend itself from a possible Chinese attack.”
Under the conditions of the morning military exercise, the freeway landing was made necessary because “a simulated Chinese attack had already taken out nearby Taiwanese air fields.”
Ouch. Welcome to the land that Lady Liberty protects, but which a Biblical Goliath threatens.
Like scenes from a war movie, TV viewers in Taiwan that day were treated to news segments of AH-1W and CH-47 helicopters joining waiting fighters and resupplying them with Harpoon and other missiles so they could continue their “missions” against the attacking Chinese. A mere “simulation,” of course.
Throngs of residents — binocular-toting plane-spotters and amateur war gamers — crowded the area to watch the surreal military exercise proceed and shoot videos of it with their cellphone cameras for posterity.
The entire exercise went off without a hitch.
However, Taiwan still wants to buy 66 US-made F-16C/Ds.
The Obama administration’s response? Do the math: The US is worried that such fighter sales would make China angry.
God forbid a war should ever break out between Taiwan and China. It won’t be a pretty picture and it won’t take place on a blocked-off national freeway.
Dan Bloom is a freelance writer in Taiwan.
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