Related: U.S. Using Japan to Make War on China
"China raises no objection to US B-52 bomber flights" by Jane Perlez | New York Times, November 28, 2013
BEIJING — China has appeared to soften the rules it had issued for its new air defense zone, raising no objection Wednesday to flights by two US B-52 bombers and Japanese airliners that ignored Beijing’s demands to file advance flight plans and saying only that it had monitored the planes.
What is the big deal of having to file a flight plan with them anyway?
The subdued initial response came just days after China warned of possible military action if planes did not comply with the rules for flights through a large stretch of airspace that it now says it controls over the East China Sea.
Those wimps, thank God!
The unarmed B-52s flew through the newly declared zone overnight Monday, and Japan’s main civilian airlines passed through Wednesday without notifying the authorities in Beijing.
Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways said they had initially complied with China’s demands, but after a request from the Japanese government of Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister, they reversed their position.
I noted that yesterday and it irritated me. Who is stirring it up?
Offering more temperate remarks compared with the earlier bellicose statements of China’s Defense Ministry, a Foreign Ministry spokesman on Wednesday said that Beijing would differentiate its reactions.
How about the bellicosity displayed by Hagel yesterday?
“We will make corresponding responses according to different situations and how big the threat is,” the spokesman said in explaining why China had refrained from implementing the regulations against the B-52s.
He rejected a suggestion at a news briefing that the lack of enforcement on a first test by the United States had made China look like a “paper tiger.”
In Tokyo, a Japanese official said the Chinese ambassador had told Japan’s Foreign Ministry that the new air defense zone rules were not intended to affect civilian flights and would not endanger their safety. The official, who is with the Transportation Ministry, declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
In a sign of the sudden seriousness of the issue, the new US ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, criticized China’s creation of the air defense zone in her first speech since assuming her post two weeks ago, saying that “it only serves to increase tensions in the region.”
I was hoping for a statement about Fukushima, but oh well?
Tensions have escalated since China published a map of a new “Air Defense Identification Zone” on Saturday that overlapped with an air defense zone of Japan, increasing the possibility of an encounter between Japanese and Chinese aircraft and heightening tensions over islands in the East China Sea that both countries claim....
By sending the B-52s to the area, the United States, a treaty ally of Japan, directly entered the dispute for the first time.
But China did not seem perturbed by the potential for added strains in the relationship with the United States over the new zone.
A senior Chinese analyst, Shi Yinhong, who sometimes advises the Chinese government, acknowledged that the new air zone had worsened the already poisonous relations between China and Japan, and represented a test of wills between the United States and China.
The creation of the defense zone was designed to challenge Japan directly, another Chinese analyst, Zhu Feng, said.
“Japan always has the backing of the United States and shows unbelievable arrogance to the Chinese proposal to have talks on a bilateral basis over the islands,” said Zhu, a professor of international relations at Beijing University. “Japan’s arrogance is unacceptable.”
One of the goals of creating the defense zone, Zhu said, was to force Japan to negotiate with China over the ownership of the islands, which are administered by Japan. Chinese officials say the islands are rightly China’s because they say Japan grabbed the territory during the start of its imperial expansion in the late 1800s. The Japanese say they peacefully annexed the islands, which they say were empty and unclaimed.
No mention of the mineral resources underneath, which is what this is all about.
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Meanwhile, back on the Iranian burner:
"A nuclear deal accord appears to enjoy both wide public support and the endorsement of top clerics. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has publicly supported nuclear negotiators and opposition to the deal seems limited, but opinion can shift quickly in Iran."
So says the pre$$ that so profoundly hopes for war.
