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No longer pretending to be enemies, where they engaged in angry oratory though doing a great quantity business together upon the side, a public love affair has broken out across the Straits of Formosa. On Friday, scheduled direct flights began between the continent and its breakaway island for the first time in 60 years, and the attack of tourists clicking their cameras was on.

Not that it was much noticed by the media or presidential candidates, but this long-spun chapter of Cold War conflict has been closed and a new series of peace proclaimed through one time strident foes. Taiwanese businessmen already are major investors in the continent, and the new Taiwan government has recognized that reality by speedily pushing for full normalization of pursuit and other accommodations.

For years now, the Chinese on both sides of the strait have been acting as if they are members of one nation, with the descendants of those who fled the continent with Chiang Kai-shek erection mansions in their old villages and increasingly preferring that their offspring study in China rather than at American schools.

Thus it was not surprising when the leader of the old nationalist Kuomintang Party, which won the recent Taiwan election, quickly went to the mainland to pledge the grow light of a starting anew era.

Gone is the prime exculpate for a major U.S. military presence in the Pacific, now that the Taiwanese have made their separate peace. What good are our fancy military arms to people musing through a consumer organic change? The concern over mainland missiles landing-place on Taiwan has been replaced with a fear that some region cousins from the mainland might be given to spitting in succession the sidewalks.

Those fears were assuaged when over-the-weekend tourists from both sides conducted themselves with proper comportment at the same time that shopping 'til they dropped.

That peace has broken out is a incubus scenario for America's military hawks in desperate need of an extenuate for soaking up more than moiety of the U.S. government's discretionary budget. There was real imaginary when Mikhail Gorbachev formally ended the Cold War and George H.W. Bush announced a 30 percent divide in military spending in 1992. Then came the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the wildest peacetime expenditure spree in history. No one in power noticed that the expensive weapons were designed to defeat an enemy that no longer existed.

That's because we were traumatized by affair called terrorism, and few questioned the decision to build weapons such as the two renovated Virginia Class submarines, at a cost of $5 billion, to catch Osama bin Laden, holed up in a cave in a landlocked nation. But submarines obviously have nihilism to do with fighting terrorists, forcing Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who represents Connecticut, where the subs are built, to play the China card: "If we do not move to breed two submarines a year as soon in the same manner with potential, we are in earnest danger of falling behind China," Lieberman insisted.

Fomenting fear of China is diffusible to making the case for the whole range of high-tech war toys that no longer have a legal military resolve. But it's a sick joke. We are paying the Chinese the interest on the money we take from them to build very expensive weapons to counter weapons the Chinese have no intention of building. The latest word from the Pentagon is that "the tidings community estimates China determination take until the end of this decade or later to produce a modern force suited of defeating a moderate-size beelzebub.."

The only adversary that interested China, according to the Pentagon report, was Taiwan, and as recent events have indicated, that game is over. But don't put off tears just yet for the denizens of the military-industrial complex. Why should they doubt our continued willingness to throw money at weapons that have no targets, when small in number in Congress or the media for aye vexation to notice?

It took Mikhail Gorbachev, in scathing criticism of President Bush and presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, to note on Tuesday that in the United States "the subject of military spending has literally been shrouded in the curtain of soft. This taboo must be lifted."

Robert Scheer's new book is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America." E-mail Robert Scheer at rscheer@truthdig.com. To find out greater amount of nearly Robert Scheer, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, go to see the Creators Syndicate Webpage at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

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