美国前军官，说了大实话
2024-06-22 09:34阅读：
日前国际智库“席勒研究所”的一场活动上，联合国前伊拉克首席武器核查员、美国海军陆战队前情报官员斯科特·里特在回答提问时指出，“美国根本没把菲律宾当朋友，美国只是在利用菲律宾，把菲律宾当工具——而当菲律宾不再有利用价值时，美国将把它扔进历史的垃圾堆”。
他还喊话菲律宾，“与中国展开外交接触，不要继续被美国利用”。
斯科特·里特曾担任联合国伊拉克武器核查委员会（UNSCOM）的首席武器核查员，并在美国海军陆战队担任情报官员。他参与了冷战期间的各种情报活动，有着丰富的军事和情报经验。
当地时间6月12日，席勒研究所在美国华盛顿举行新闻发布会。斯科特·里特在回答有关南海问题的提问时表示，美国把菲律宾当“工具”，而不是朋友，“真正的朋友不会陷你于灾难之中。”
斯科特·里特从自己的经历说起，1986年，他被派往菲律宾担任排长，增援苏比克驻军。因这段经历，他对菲律宾人民充满了同情心。
他喊话菲律宾：“你以为美国是你的朋友，乌克兰人也是这么想的，他们正成千上万地死去或流离失所，而朋友是不会让对方损失如此惨重的，朋友也不会眼看着对方被摧毁，更不会让对方家庭分崩离析，过上难民的生活，永远生活在贫困之中。朋友不应该这样做。”
“美国从来都不是乌克兰人的朋友，当然也不是菲律宾人的朋友。”斯科特·里特说，“你们只是一个工具，当这个工具不再有用时，美国就会抛弃你们。”
据他所说，抛弃菲律宾的方法，是让菲律宾在战争中遭受重创。美国其实是在利用菲律宾达到暂时制衡中国的目的。
他还指出，菲律宾人可以找回与中国打交道的能力，菲律宾完全可以重新打开外交渠道，以此预防战争，不要再表现得像美国殖民地的臣民。
Scott Ritter's warning dwarfs
Marcos' Singapore rhetoric
By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan
Part Two of Three: Delusions of Grandeur Clouds Foreign
Policy
“It’s high time the Filipino people pressure their government to
start sitting down and engaging the Chinese government
responsibly.”
June 15, 2024 – In an article appearing in the Manila Times today,
American intelligence and foreign policy experts said the United
States was just using the Philippines to create the conditions of
potential conflict with the China even if it knew it could not
fight and engage China and win.
An online media briefing early Thursday morning (Manila time) at
the US National Press Club in Washington DC, featured Scott Ritter,
Retired Colonels Richard Black and Lawrence Wilkerson.
In Wilkerson’s analysis, “It’s a different world. It’s a totally
different world. It’s no longer unipolar. It’s multipolar. And it’s
going to act that way. It’s going to have a new financial system, a
new monetary exchange system, a new banking system. Everything’s
going to be new.”
Col. Wilkerson was chief of staff of former Secretary of State
Collin Powell.
Col. Black, who is also former politician who served in the
Virginia legislature, said it was time for the Philippines “to use
diplomacy and to attempt to resolve the issue. Whatever you do, do
not simply become a tool of the United States and be led into an
armed conflict that ends up in disaster for the Filipino people.
Because if you do, you will break the heart of a whole lot of us
who just dearly love the Philippines and, and the people of the
islands.
But it was the chilling answer from Ritter, an external contributor
to Energy Intelligence, to the question, “HOW TO STOP AN IMMINENT
WAR IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA?” that every Filipino must pay attention
to and take close to heart. I am quoting him in toto:”
“Just so you know, I have a little bit of background in the
Philippines. In 1986, I was deployed there as a platoon commander
to reinforce the Subic garrison. After the fall of the Marcos
regime, there was concern about the new people’s army.
“So, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Philippines. Let’s
build upon what Colonel Wilkerson had said earlier. The United
States is incapable of fighting a sustained conflict against a
peer-level force.
“The United States cannot fight and engage China and win. We will
not beat the Chinese. We cannot beat the Chinese.
“And we know this, and yet we’re using the Philippines to create
the conditions of potential conflict with the Chinese. Please
understand that for the Filipino people, this is a recipe for
disaster.
“You think America is your friend?
“So too did the Ukrainian people, and they are dying by the
hundreds of thousands. Friends don’t let friends die in those
quantities.
“The Ukrainians have been displaced by the tens of millions.
Friends don’t let friends have their cities destroyed in this
manner.
“Friends don’t let friends have families separated, have mothers
and children destined to a life of refugee status in perpetual
poverty.
“That’s not how friends behave. America has never been the friend
of Ukrainians, and we are not the friends of the Filipinos. We
don’t like you. If we did like you, we wouldn’t be doing this to
you.
“We are using you. You are a tool, nothing but a tool. And when the
tool ceases to be useful, we will discard you. And discard you
means usually after a war that devastates you. We are using you to
gain some sort of momentary leverage over the Chinese. We will
fail.
“The Chinese will win, and you will be destroyed. End of story.
It’s high time the Filipino people pressure their government to
start sitting down and engaging the Chinese government
responsibly.
“China is not your enemy. China is your neighbor. China is your
friend. China doesn’t want war. And if you would engage China in
diplomacy, and as we’ve all indicated here, America has long since
lost the skill set necessary to carry out diplomacy. But the
Filipinos, the Philippine people can reignite this, to relearn it,
to use this skill to prevent a war.
“But if you continue to behave as colonial subjects, and I know
that’s a sore, sore, sore subject of the Filipino, because you were
the colonial subjects of America. We still view you as our colonial
subjects. We don’t like you. We don’t care about you. We just want
to use you. Grow up.
“Grow up and act responsibly. Take control of your own future.
America is not here to help you.
“America is here only to use you until there’s nothing left. And
then we will discard you on the trash heap of history.”
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer whose
service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the
former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving
on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and
later as a Chief Weapons Inspector with the UN in Iraq from
1991-98.
Marcos’ Singapore Contradictions
The mainstream press regarded President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s
speech at the 21st IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 31
as a cogent and firm statement of the Philippines’ position on the
South China Sea and the need to maintain peace and stability in the
region by upholding international law.
But in addition to what those in peanut gallery onto deeper
analysis by academia, it was a ball of lies and confusing
rhetoric.
First, he emphasized that Filipinos are a peaceful people,
committed to the values that engender amity, fraternity and
sovereign equality among nations.
The man authorized four additional US military bases in addition to
the original five of the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation
Agreement.
He then reaffirmed our people’s adherence to international
law.
But by that he meant only singular compliance to the United Nations
Convention of the Laws of the Seas, and an onerous 2016 Arbitral
Ruling that the Philippines registered with the Permanent Court of
Arbitration, that has been disowned by the United Nations. He has
also invited the United States, Japan and Australia, even France
and Germany to hold joint patrols in our territory in violation of
UNCLOS provisions on “innocent passage”.
“Our commitment to peace and to the rule of law inheres in how we
have defined our sovereign home,” Marcos said. “When we established
our Commonwealth in 1935, we put together a ‘Constitution’ that
defined our territory in accordance with the international treaties
that became the basis of our archipelagic unity.”
The Philippines, he said, put forward the archipelagic doctrine,
which defines the waters around, between and connecting the
different islands of the Philippine archipelago as integral parts
of Philippine territory subject to its exclusive sovereignty,
regardless of the width or dimensions of these waters.
But he overreaches and insinuates defining our territorial waters
beyond what the 1900 Treaty of Washington particularly provides.
That treaty specifically adds only the islands of Cagayan de Sulu
and Sibutu and their dependencies at the southernmost tip of the
Sulu archipelago.
Marcos said “This (archipelagic) doctrine has since been enshrined
in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS), which also clarified the limits of each state’s maritime
zones and defined the extent to which they could exercise
sovereignty, their sovereign rights and jurisdiction over those
zones.”
Of course, he was referring to Article 46 of UNCLOS which was
vouchsafed by Paragraph 573 of the 2016 Arbitral Award that the
Philippines is an archipelagic state. But in observance of Article
47 of UNCLOS, as clarified by Paragraph 574 of the award, the
Philippines cannot demarcate an archipelago in the Spratly
area.
“Accordingly, we have made a conscious effort to align our
definition of our territory and our maritime zones with what
international law permits and recognizes. This has been inscribed
in Article 1 of our Constitution,” Marcos said.
Our Constitution cannot amend international law. He himself
criticized another country in the same speech alleging it has done
so.
This, he said, was in stark contrast to assertive actions that aim
to propagate excessive and baseless claims through force,
intimidation and deception.
“In the West Philippine Sea, we are on the frontlines of efforts to
assert the integrity of the UNCLOS as a Constitution of the
Oceans,” Marcos said.
This is misleading and self-defeating. International law is not
based on constitutional law. International law is based on
relations between and among countries. There is no world
government. UNCLOS is just one treaty among more than 250,000 inked
through centuries. It is thus obvious that it is not the totality
of international law that more than written treaties, also
comprises a majority of unwritten customary laws between and among
states.
“We have defined our territory and maritime zones in a manner
befitting a responsible and law-abiding member of the international
community. We have submitted our assertions to rigorous legal
scrutiny by the world’s leading jurists,” he said.
“So, the lines that we draw on our waters are not derived from just
our imagination, but from international law,” he said. “We have on
our side the 1982 UNCLOS and the binding 2016 Arbitral Award, which
affirm what is ours by legal right.”
Finally, he admits where his misconception of the problem emanates.
Both UNCLOS and the Arbitral Award, have northing to do with
sovereignty. So yes, those lines come from his imagination.
There is country that have acquired domain over the South China Sea
features through millennia of customary law. In recent history,
China has firmed up its sovereignty not only with a statutory
construction that started with the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894,
through the Cairo Conference of 1943, and perfected it in the 1971
recognition of the United Nations that the Peoples Republic of
China is its only one, legitimate government under its Resolution
2758.
Not only does our foreign policy under Marcos ignores this
deliberately, but on the ground rebukes and challenges China’s
effective control of the affected waters, which is a more
compelling customary law. Worse, when the Chinese enforces their
sovereignty, we “cry wolf” and accuses the sovereign power of
“aggressive and illegal” action. Isn’t this delusional?
“In this solid footing and through our clear moral ascendancy, we
find the strength to do whatever it takes to protect our sovereign
home — to the last square inch, to the last square millimeter,” the
President said.
“The life-giving waters of the West Philippine Sea flow in the
blood of every Filipino. We cannot allow anyone to detach it from
the totality of the maritime domain that renders our nation whole,”
he said.
I think it most unfair for the President of the Philippines to even
suggest its armed forces and citizens will draw blood over a wide
expanse of rocks where the country does not even have an official
map that is authorized by the United Nations and registered with
the International Cartographic Association.
Marcos does not want to go war with the Armed Forces of the
Philippines armed only with Carpinocchio’s 1734 Velarde map, would
he?#
