By Tom Plate
Dennis Blair, the man who is to become the new U.S. director of National Intelligence, distinguished himself as the military commander-in-chief over the United States Pacific Command. This is an important fact behind his appointment by President-elect Barack Obama. He's to serve as a sort of shotgun sheriff over all U.S. intelligence organizations.
The admiral, now retired, had been the top dog over all U.S. military forces in the Asia-Pacific from February 1999 to May 2002. This was a big job, and he did it very well. You have about a dozen major worries in the position, with China being roughly numbers one, two, three and four. India, Pakistan, North Korea and others are on the worry list, but none can hurt the United States (not to mention Taiwan) as much as China.
In April 2001, Blair and the U.S. government was hit with the notorious EP3 spy-plane crisis. A scrambling Chinese fighter flew too close to a lumbering U.S. surveillance plane hovering off China's coast, clipped its wings (presumably accidentally), and went down. The Chinese pilot's body was never recovered, but when the U.S. crew somehow landed the spy plane in mayday mode on a Chinese military airfield in nearby Hainan Island, an international crisis was born. The Chinese made a big propaganda deal out of the incident, and did not immediately release the U.S. crew.
Directly involved in the effort to tamp down the crisis and induce Beijing to come to its senses and return the airmen and the plane (which eventually it did) was Admiral Blair and Joseph Prueher, his equally impressive predecessor in the Pacific Command job whom then-President Bill Clinton had named ambassador to China. Prueher worked from Beijing and Blair worked from his desk at Camp Smith (Pearl Harbor, Honolulu) to defuse the crisis.
The hyper-nationalistic American news media at times seemed on the verge of all but declaring war and so I immediately telephoned Blair at Pearl Harbor to ask him ― then off-the-record ― how bad the crisis was and when the airmen might be returned by the Chinese. Blair seemed as composed as a Mozart string quartet and answered with notes of coolness. I remember him saying something like: If everyone acts sensibly and keeps the public-opinion posturing to a minimum, it could all be over in ten days, give or take a day or so on either side.
Ten days later ― to the day ― the Chinese government released the crew (the plane itself was to come home later ― in body parts). The precision of the Admiral's prescience was not that surprising: Some of our top military guys are that good. And ever since the historic Pearl Harbor debacle in 1944, the U.S. military establishment has always been keen to assign its best officers there. Prueher and Blair (and Blair's successor Thomas Fargo) certainly met that standard.
When you think of the U.S. military, you perhaps reflect automatically on American militarism. But America's best officers are far more sophisticated than that. Prueher wasn't sent to Beijing as ambassador because he was a tin-eared soldier good mainly for rattling missiles. He went because of an exceptional professional record and a thick Rolodex of contacts in the upper ranks of the People's Liberation Army.
Remember the tense Taiwan Strait crisis in 1966? Prueher, then-Pacific Commander, came to appreciate the vital need for preventive diplomacy (not preventive war) to obviate unneeded war. Miscommunication and misunderstanding were volatile fuses that could have turned a minor crisis into a major conflagration. So after China stood down from intimidating Taiwan, Prueher quietly visited China to develop counterpart relationships with the Chinese military commanders. Five years later when the EP3 crisis surfaced, Prueher was behind his ambassador's desk in Beijing furiously flipping through his Rolodex of PLA contacts as Blair in Pearl Harbor was helping him make the calls.
Military leaders of the caliber of Blair and Prueher are not that common, perhaps, but nor are they that rare in America. And they seem to rise to the top of the U.S. military at least as noticeably as talent does in the U.S. Congress (note: to say the least).
Consider Army Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the top US commander in Iraq, and now the chief of the all-important U.S. Central Command. Even many of the Iraq war's most righteous critics count him as a virtual American idol and national treasure. It was no coincidence that Petraeus was the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1983. Blair himself was a Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford.
The incoming intelligence chieftain will certainly want to draw heavily on his experience at Pearl Harbor, worrying about and relating to China. There will be no more important and complicated relationship in the U.S. foreign-policy portfolio. Having a man in this key job who knows the Pacific in general ― not just China but Indonesia, the Philippines and the Koreas ― is a tremendous plus. And having a military man in that sensitive spot who is not a militarist is so vital. In Congressional testimony in November 2007, Blair said: ``The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived." That perspicacious perspective was a key reason Blair got the job ― thankfully.
Syndicated columnist Tom Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He can be reached at platecolumn@gmail.com.