I’m going to take a break from my wall-to-wall election 2016 coverage to talk about one of those very serious issues that were already septic when Obama took office in 2009 and have remained that way throughout his presidency. One of the big ones is Korea, which this president is handling pretty poorly, though perhaps marginally better than his predecessor, who chose to include North Korea in his “Axis of Evil”.
Obama hasn’t gone that far, but with all that’s at stake on the Korean peninsula, it is reckless merely to follow the same path as even some of your more sane predecessors in office. It’s late in the game, but a real effort should be made to defuse this confrontation before someone makes a mistake. Mistakes in Korea can cost hundreds of thousands of lives in a very short time; no policy of either containment or rollback is worth that level of risk.
I raise this now because over the last week, Obama flew some nuclear-capable stealth fighters over South Korea in an obvious demonstration of our willingness to “go there” – this in response to a missile test by Pyongyang. I guess the annual joint exercises we do with South Korea every March is not enough, though the well-rehearsed maneuvers are designed to mock an amphibious invasion of North Korea. With something like 50 U.S. military installations in South Korea, effective operational control of Seoul’s armed forces by the U.S., and plenty of American war planes and troops on the premises, it’s little wonder that North Korea wants a deterrent.
It’s probably wise to recall that the North was bombed to a fare-the-well during the Korean War. They have a living national memory of what it is like to be annihilated. It’s a large measure of what makes them kind of crazy. I know we have a tendency to shrug off other nations’ concerns about our saber-rattling, but in this case we’re dealing with a country that has already been blown up by us once. When we fly nuclear-capable aircraft over the peninsula, the intended threat has some resonance. Their dispute is more with us than with the South. When they go out of their way to get attention, it’s to get OUR attention. Given all that’s at stake, we should talk to them … like, now.
Next week: Scalia and the election.
Before anyone accuses me of it, I am not a fan of the clerical regime in Iran. The Iranian people have, however, been subjected to sustained attack by the United States since we expanded our empire during and after World War II. We have caused them immense suffering, through the overthrow of their democratically elected government in 1953, through the imposition of our close ally, the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, through our support of Saddam Hussein in his murderous war against Iran, through decades of draconian sanctions. There are many Americans – some friends, even – who will list for me the strikes against Americans attributed to Iran (all in the context of various military adventures on our part), but in all honesty, they pale in comparison to what we have done to them.
The mainstream media portray this as a kind of battle royale between the President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans, extreme left and extreme right. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the one-party state we call politics, there is a remarkable consensus on the topic of Iran. Both factions – Democrats and Republicans – consider Iran an outlaw state, both insist that it can have no nuclear technology, both blame it for the abysmal state of relations between our countries, both condemn it as a supporter of international terrorism, both repeat the mantra that “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran (a thinly veiled threat that is in itself a violation of the U.N. charter), etc., etc. What separates the two sides is nothing more than nuance.
Okay, that’s all good. But as the president lists all of the horrors Islamic extremists have unleashed onto the world, there’s one question that begs to be asked: is ISIS responsible for more death than we are? How many Muslims have we dispatched over the last 15 years? Sure, ISIS is a bunch of crackheads, thugs, and killers. But they are bush league next to us. As all of these war-fevered pundits and Congresspeople run around fulminating over the “death cult” that is ISIS, do they give even a passing thought to our own 70 year history of threatening the entire planet with nuclear destruction? That’s not a “death cult”?
Jump forward about a week. India launches its AGNI-V A5 ICBM, what is indisputably a ballistic missile. Their officials brag that it is capable of carrying nuclear warheads and that it can reach Beijing or Shanghai – two major cities in a nation India fought a war with in 1962. The reaction over here? Crickets. Serious crickets. Ho-hum. Boys will be boys. Now this week, Pakistan (which has fought three wars with India) launches their latest ballistic missile. Here is the report from the Daily News:
Of course, we all know how this story ends. What became of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons ambitions about which “there can be no doubt”? It was just as defector Hussein Kemal described it in the mid 1990s, in interviews that were well circulated before the Iraq war: Iraq had never gotten beyond the theoretical stage in weapons development, and what technology they had relating to uranium enrichment was broken up and buried after the Gulf War. And their missile technologies? We all know about the aluminum tube hoax. Then there were the deadly drones – basically model planes bound together with duct tape. This is why the current claims about Iran shouldn’t be taken too seriously.