How many of you out there would just love to see Colin Powell back in the saddle as US secretary of state? Or, better yet, as secretary of defence, giving the boot to his nemesis - the war-prone Donald Rumsfeld?
Surely this delicious thought occurred to those of you who admired the former secretary of state's recent speech in Asia, which scoffed at the idea that China was anything approaching a serious military threat to the US. That comment came on the heels of a grim lecture by Mr Rumsfeld recently, in Singapore, that painted China as the second coming of the former Soviet Union and Darth Vader.
At the same time, Mr Powell did not go into denial about the Chinese military buildup. The career soldier put this development in realistic contexts: the mainland's ambitions are to maintain a credible military deterrent against the possibility of Taiwanese independence, and to underscore its inevitable rise as an important power.
Here are a few relevant facts: China's military expenditure is far less than that of the US. It is not the government in Beijing, after all, that ever invaded Taiwan. In a sense, it was the right-wing, nationalistic losers of the Chinese civil war who did so in 1949.
It was not the mainland that invaded Hong Kong: in a sense, it was colonial Britain that did so in the 1840s, as the fruits of its opium wars. And it is not China that has asked the UN Security Council for permission to invade Iraq, as the US did even without the UN's blessing.
This is not to say that China is the second coming of Costa Rica. Its encrusted political system can barely manage all the internal turmoil. Recent news reports have been aflutter with video footage of rural instability in a village just 100km from Beijing. Given the government's generally effective clampdown on negative news of this sort, one can only guess at the true extent of social unrest in China.
