Lucas: Biden needs real muscle to stand up to China over Taiwan

If Joe Biden really wants to stand up to China, he’d send Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller to Taiwan.

Scheller, now out of the brig, would take charge of the Marine contingent already there training small Taiwanese fighting units for an expected invasion by forces of the Communist People’s Republic of China.

There is nothing the Chinese Communists fear more than an angry U.S. Marine. And Scheller has a lot to be angry about. He just needs to be aimed in the right direction.

Hopefully, the U.S. training in Taiwan will be an improvement over the training the U.S. provided to build up the Afghan National Army. So far, under the leadership of Commander in Chief Joe Biden, the only thing Biden has Built Back Better is the Taliban.

Scheller is being prosecuted by the military for speaking out against the deadly debacle of Biden’s reckless evacuation of Kabul in which 13 young soldiers were killed, and for which no one has been held accountable.

And unlike Gen. Mark Milley, the woke bloke who presides as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Scheller would not tip off China of any impending U.S. attack.

“The war was a strategic failure,” Milley said at one point during his testimony on Afghanistan before Congress. If so, he was in charge. But he still has a job. How can that be?

It’s because Milley is a Trump critic who secretly leaked inside information about Trump to connected Washington reporters to make himself look good and Trump look bad.

That is about all a bureaucrat needs to survive, if not succeed, in a Biden administration.

While Milley, a four-star general, escapes punishment for the humiliating Kabul evacuation, Scheller is punished for criticizing it. Any day now Biden will pin another medal on Milley’s chest, if he can find room for it.

Scheller, meanwhile, was released from the brig at Camp Lejeune, N.C., last week after a week of imprisonment at the same military installation where he earlier commanded an infantry battalion.

That was before he was fired from his command after ripping the country’s military and political leadership following the suicide bombing death of the 13 U.S. soldiers.

Scheller, a 17-year combat veteran, now faces six charges for his heated criticism of the Kabul evacuation fiasco, not the least of which is a charge that he disobeyed orders to halt his criticism.

One of his attorneys, Timothy Parlatore, confirmed to CBS News that Scheller would be pleading guilty, but didn’t say to which charges, at his court martial this week. He will probably be given a dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

Rather than having Marines like Scheller watching their back, the Taiwanese people are forced to rely on Biden and Milley for help in warding off a potential Chinese invasion.

After Biden and Milley cut and ran in Afghanistan — and abandoned stranded Americans and Afghan allies — it is no wonder the Taiwanese people are anxious.

China knows that the window of opportunity is open for them under a weak Biden, despite a show of force by the U.S. and its allies.

This show came during a joint military exercise off the Japanese island of Okinawa made up of three western aircraft carrier strike groups and a Japanese aircraft carrier. It was designed to send a message to China over Taiwan.

What was striking about the exercise was that it was held off the coast of Okinawa, and that it involved a Japanese aircraft carrier. Okinawa was the site of one of the bloodiest U.S. battles against Japan during World War II. Some 12,522 Americans were killed taking the island.

The last time the Japanese had aircraft carriers in the region was when it attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941. Declaring war, President Franklin Roosevelt called the attack “a day that will live in infamy.”

Now U.S. Marine Corps fighter jets are taking off from Japanese aircraft carriers.

The game of war doesn’t change — only the players.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.