China Attacks US Satellites [Sobek]

As far as I can tell, it's a temporary "blinding" rather than permanent damage, designed to keep us looking at China but not from looking at anything else. From the UK Telegraph:

China has secretly fired powerful laser weapons designed to disable American spy satellites by "blinding" their sensitive surveillance devices, it was reported yesterday.

Purple Avenger comments: "As an aside, we're now at war with China. They've been shooting at our sats."

I don't know if that means we're at war, really. Apparently people can do all kinds of things to the US, like Iran funding attacks in Iraq or Mexico teaching people how to invade our borders, and we don't really consider it "war" until we retaliate. And nothing in the article suggests we're going to do that. Quite the contrary:

"The hitherto unreported attacks have been kept secret by the Bush administration for fear that it would damage attempts to co-opt China in diplomatic offensives against North Korea and Iran."

The Bush doctrine ("if you're not with us, you're against us") is actually nothing of the sort. China is clearly against us, but the US is for some reason under the impression that we can leverage them to our advantage in certain areas. Even to the point that we'll take a couple of attacks without comment to avoid diplomatic concerns. This is the height of "nuanced" (read: useless) foreign policy, but the Lefties of course will never give Bush et al. due credit.

One thing that concerns me: the Administration was trying to keep this story secret. So why is it showing up (a) at all, and (b) in a British paper?

posted by Ace at 02:05 PM

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