Adm. William J. Fallon, you'll remember, was the first Navy officer who was commander of CentCom, the US military command that covers the Middle East and much of Central Asia. He was shown the door after one year after a controversy over his comments -- perceived as critical of the President's Iran policy -- which appeared in an interview with Esquire.

One clever person once quipped that the silver lining to the neocons' war on terror craziness was that at least it distracted them for a decade from their primary aim of fomenting a war with China. Along those lines, here's a passage of an interview with Fallon in yesterday's Boston Globe that TPM Reader JT flagged to our attention ...

"When I was in the Pacific [as the head of the US Pacific Command from 2005 to 2007] there were people with different viewpoints. One of the challenges I saw out there ...was that we had one long term issue and that's called China. It seemed to me that of all the things we needed to deal with we had better figure out how we are going to come to grips with the future relationship between the US and China."

They are the owners of most of our debt. Between China and Japan they are sitting on $3 trillion dollars [of US debt]. People say 'look at all [the rest of] these problems in the world.' They are all interesting. For my money, if you fix the problems here most of those others go away because it is our behaviors that are the cause of some of our challenges."

The size of the country and its influence is staggering. So we've got to figure this out. There were people who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here because sooner or later we're going be at war with China. I don't think that's where we want to go. And so I set about challenging all the assumptions and I came back here about once a month and sat down with Secretary Rumsfeld. I'd walk through what I was thinking, why I was thinking that way. There were people who didn't like that."

[My reputation became] "Fallon loves the Chinese, doesn't see any problem with this." [I responded with] "What are the priorities, guys? Do you want to have a war? We can probably have one. But is that what you really want? Is that really in our interest? Because I don't think so." We had a lot of initiatives underway [on military-to-military relations with China] and some of that stuff didn't go over too well back here.