Rumsfeld’s massive “own goal”

There have been lots of reports that the “shock and awe” component of the Rumsfeld-Cheney invasion of Iraq last year was directed primarily not at the Iraqi people–who were merely to be pawns in this nasty game–but towards China.
Was it in “Plan of Attack” that I read some evidence of that? Or was it someplace else?
Well, it could make sense as an explanatory theory… Perhaps… Except that if the idea of launching that particular war, in that particular way (using lean, mobile forces… the kind that can be fairly easily deployed over large distances… Ooops! But they ain’t much good at running an occupation!) … If it was indeed Bombs-Away Don’s brilliant idea that doing that would scare the Chinese shitless, then… he scored one heck of a large-scale own goal, didn’t he?
How shocked and awed do YOU think the Chinese are by his little display of power (and its less than glorious outcome)?
In the International Herald Tribune today, Jane Perlez writes:

it is hard not to notice the legacy of America’s shrinking influence in Asia over the last four years.
A profound rearrangement is under way, with China and its expanding economy leading the charge, and in some instances, it’s to the exclusion of the United States…
At the same time, the central banks of China and Japan are holding $1.3 trillion of U.S. government debt, a position that gives Asia quite a bit of leverage, economists say.

She then asks, quite sensibly,

Is anybody in terror-obsessed Washington paying attention?

She quotes one senior Asian diplomat as saying that since the mid-1990s, China’s diplomacy has been “consistent, subtle and creative.” During the same period, he said, the “U.S. has been out to lunch.”
She adds:

China has been able to make these strides, not only because the United States is distracted, but because it has never been less popular in Asia.
“I think today, circa Nov. 1, 2004, respect for the United States is at a historic low,” said Noordin Sopiee, the chairman of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies in Malaysia.
“The key factor that underlies U.S. unpopularity – and the U.S. has never been more unpopular – is not any specific policy, but the simple fact that the U.S. is No. 1. That makes everybody uncomfortable.”
Noordin said he believed there were some “perceptive” officials in Washington who understood China’s reach in East Asia. “But everyone in America, from top to bottom, seems captured and confined by a particular American world. Everyone else, the rest of mankind, seems to live in a different world.”
When it comes to writing the diplomatic history of the Bush administration, the war in Iraq and American fears of terror will dominate. But it will also certainly be recorded that this was the period when American influence in Asia, the driving force of the region in the second half of the 20th century, began its downward spiral and America did not see it.

Oops.