Jim Roepcke did a pretty good summation on his site of what would happen if a U.S. fighter took out a Chinese spy plan of U.S. coastal waters. But would American pilots really act irresponsibly?
If you think the Americans wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to fly dangerously close to a spy plane, let’s recall the USAF fighter that clipped the Italian gondola at the ski resort killing civilians. Or the USAF fighter that recently accidentally dropped a bomb on US and Kuwaiti inspectors. Or the sub that surfaced on a Japenese fishing boat.
There’s another thing that annoys me about the videos being released after the crew was finally returned — namely I don’t think you can trust anything that comes out of the Pentagon.
Would the Pentagon put out manufactured videotape? Well, it’s certainly managed to do clever things with video before. Remember after U.S. fighters hit that Serbian bridge, killing all those civilians? The Pentagon released videotape proving that the jets didn’t have time to stop the missile. Only several months later did it come out that the video was not in real time but had been sped up as part of a compression scheme.
I also remember seeing video tests from the Pentagon of an anti-missile system destroying missles in mid-air — again, it later turned out the missiles had been rigged with explosives.
The Pentagon has about as much crediblity as People’s Daily in my opinion. It doesn’t mean they’re not telling the truth, but I wouldn’t give too much weight to any evidence they produce.
Besides, think of how much bigger the Bush tax cut could be if we’d just stop landing American tax dollars at Chinese military bases.