North Korea:
While the world receives
an Olympic reprieve as the Korean peninsula seeks reconciliation, or
at least peace over who can throw themselves fastest down a icy slope
on a piece of wood, it seems reasonable to consider how close to war
North Korea and the United States are.
There have been the tweets
and off the cuff remarks by the President. Lindsey Graham and
McMaster have offered percentages which should elicit terror rather
than elation.
On February
3rd,
talking about North Korea, the President said, “We have no road
left,” praised himself for his effort, and blamed prior
administrations for the current situation. Four days earlier the CIA
director, Mike Pompeo, said North Korea appears to be “a handful of
months” short of deploying a nuclear weapon capable of striking the
United States.
With this
achievement, will North Korea have crossed the President's
Red
Line? When President Obama
delineated his red line in Syria, he blundered terribly, and the
appropriate actors called him out. The current President though,
made the worst mistake possible: repeating an error he excoriated.
So might Trump, recognizing his conundrum, enforce his edict with
fire and fury? Are you ok that with that, because it doesn't appear
the Pentagon or the public is.
The New
York Times reported on February
1st,
the Pentagon appears worried the White House might intend to start a
war with North Korea, and that providing too many options could
increase the likelihood that the President acts. Personally, I
disagree: if you offer him too many options, maybe he'll be seized by
analysis paralysis. McMaster criticized the Pentagon for
undercutting the President's threats, by slow-walking plans to the
White House. McMaster's logic: If there is no military option
available, than diplomacy can not succeed, which can also phrased: no
stick, no success.
While the White
House expresses a mixture of enthusiasm and ambivalence to the
conflict, others agree that the public has been improperly informed,
with Vox
comparing the nation to a sleepwalker. They quote Democratic Senator
Tammy Duckworth, and Iraq war veteran, who recently visited South
Korea as saying, “We are far closer to actual conflict over North
Korea than the American people realize”. Which raises the
question: do United States citizens believe war is imminent?
Polling
seems to indicate a few conclusions.
A clear majority of United States citizens believe; North Korea is a
serious threat, the United States should negotiate, the President
can't be trusted, the United States should attack only if attacked
first, and the United States will not be at war with North Korea in
the near future. These results prove Senator Duckworth's sentiment,
that the public is not expecting war. If war is as imminent as
Senators Duckworth and Graham believe, who's at fault for the
public's misconception.
I
was in 9th
grade when the United States invaded a bear trap of its own making,
in order to eliminate Al-Qaeda and prevent Osama bin Laden from
initiating further terrorist attacks against the West. I was two
years older when the United States invaded Iraq under the guise of
curtailing the nation's brutal weapons and the barbarity it inflicted
on its own citizens. The Bush administration inflamed these
anxieties into a conflagration, fueled by lies.
The immense outpouring of propaganda,
and the failure of the press to resist it, is still astonishing, made
more so by the lack
of criminal prosecution.
In comparison, North
Korea's atrocities against its own citizens far exceed Iraq's, it has
the nuclear and biological weapons which Saddam had destroyed
and discontinued,
and Kim Jong Un has threatened the United States more than Iraq ever
did. On these three criteria, an invasion of North Korea is more
justified than the 2003 storming of Iraq, yet the occupation was a
grave injustice and a costly mistake. Any assault of North Korea
would be an unconscionable error.
In short, an attack
on North Korea is likely to render the global power structure
unrecognizable, by altering the United States irreparably. With
mounting debt, acquired mostly due to the two unendable wars begun by
the Bush administration, and the Great Recession (whose fault should
be laid at every President beginning with Reagan), a third, more
costly war, will place an immeasurable strain on the United States'
Treasury and the global power of the dollar (this debt is compounded
by the Republican giveaway to corporations). While
economists
debate
whether the debt of the United States is a problem (and Republicans
only express concern when a
Democrat resides in the White House), a common citizen can question
the value of charging a expansive, expensive war (assume value equal
to Iraq, 2.4
trillion) to the mounting unpayable
bill.
In a further difference with Iraq, North Korea maintains a superpower
patron, China, who defended them in the original Korean War. While
no one's certain what China intends, experts
agree that Xi Jinping, doesn't want a unified Korea aligned
with the United States, nor countless, desperate refugees fleeing the
conflict, destabilizing China.
But if the White
House is willing to overlook all these issues and set themselves to
war, why isn't the White House making the same propagandic push as
the Bush administration? Perhaps they hope to avoid it, stumbling
haphazardly forward and back, or maybe they intend to build this
ominous atmosphere with vague threatening statements as its own case
for conflict. Or most worrisome, as the Vox article quotes Joshua
Pollack, as saying, what
keeps him up at night is, “If you believe that war is imminent,
you’re going to want to get your shot in first.”
Is
the Trump Administration's lack of propaganda an attempt to get the
first shot? Or is it: indecision, bluffing, incompetence? And which
is worse?
Next week, an examination
of the President's State of the Union speech in relation to the
Korean conundrum.
Recent:
Relevant:
Comments
Post a Comment