In my previous blog, I repeated that the reason I left out General Zhu's nuclear comments in my second report was to avoid a "phony war" between U.S. and China during Canadian general election, which would necessarily take Canadian voters' attention away from the real issues pertinent to them. I knew that General Zhu's remarks and Bush administration's media nuclear bomb were related. In fact, I knew these two events were connected through me.
I wasn't intentionally trying to hide anything. But the attacks from American and British pundits left me precisely with that bad feeling. It looked like that my omission of General Zhu's nuclear comments had instead drawn people's attention to them.
At the mean time, President Chirac's speech on nuclear issue on January 19 caught my eye the next day on Norman's Spectator. The following was his digest on January 20, the same days when my report was attacked by pundits at both The Guardian and The Washington Post:
--Let's hope this is not translated into Hebrew
"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envision using . . . weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part," Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in Brittany. "This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind."
At that time, my understanding of General Zhu's comments was that Zhu was allowed to make those comments so that I could criticize him to gain goodwill from the Americans, and that Bush administration knew about this intention of Chinese government.
Reading President Chirac's speech, I was worried that he might be talking about Chinese government with respect to General Zhu's nuclear comments, because my omission of Zhu's comments in my report had just drew attention to them. And if President Chirac was warning the Chinese, it was natural for me to assume that he obtained his information from the Bush administration. (I read a column by David Ignatius of Washington Post on February 1. The column described how closely the national security advisers of these two presidents worked together.)
That's why one of the points I made on February 27 - the first opportunity I was able to do so - was in the form of memo to President Bush :
Memo to Mr. Bush: The Chinese leadership had no ill-intent against your great country and with all due respect, I think you knew it.
That's also why I felt it was imperative that I "put everything on the table so that there will be no international misunderstandings, intentional or otherwise" (posted on April 15), especially with the heightened tension across Taiwan Straits.
I would like to stress that I have immense respect for President Chirac, whose profound knowledge of Chinese culture and history impresses me greatly. However, I did not, and still do not, know for sure whether President Chirac's speech on January 19 was indeed prompted by my second report. So I would like to beg for President Chirac's forgiveness if I misinterpreted his speech. On the other hand, I feel that, irregardless of whether President Chirac's speech was prompted by my report, going over these events at least helps to illustrate two points: (1) that, prior to mid-March, I had absolutely no idea that my own blog Summer Hibernation could have a nuclear interpretation, let along have been the potential source of controversy; and (2) that it was out of concern for world peace and stability that I risked complicating my own legal situation on February 27 to start putting everything I knew on the table.
