More tearing away at the media curtains that keep us all in a state of reflexive fear. Again…presented without much comment. It speaks for itself.
Read the whole thing.
Please.
What the Media isn’t Telling You About North Korea’s Missile Tests – Mike Whitney
Here’s what the media isn’t telling you about North Korea’s recent missile tests.
Last Monday, the DPRK fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan’s Hokkaido Island. The missile landed in the waters beyond the island harming neither people nor property.
The media immediately condemned the test as a “bold and provocative act” that showed the North’s defiance of UN resolutions and “contempt for its neighbors.” President Trump sharply criticized the missile test saying:
“Threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table.”
What the media failed to mention was that, for the last three weeks, Japan, South Korea and the US have been engaged in large-scale joint-military drills on Hokkaido Island and in South Korea. These needlessly provocative war games are designed to simulate an invasion of North Korea and a “decapitation” operation to remove (Re: Kill) the regime. North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un has asked the US repeatedly to end these military exercises, but the US has stubbornly refused. The US reserves the right to threaten anyone, anytime and anywhere even right on their doorstep. It’s part of what makes the US exceptional. Check out this excerpt from an article at Fox News:
“More than 3,500 American and Japanese troops kicked off a weeks-long joint military exercise Thursday against the backdrop of an increasingly belligerent North Korean regime. The exercise, known as Northern Viper 17, will take place on Hokkaido — Japan’s northern-most main island — and will last until Aug. 28….
“We are improving our readiness not only in the air, but as a logistical support team,” Col. R. Scott Jobe, the 35th Fighter Wing commander, said in a statement. “We are in a prime location for contingency purposes and this exercise will only build upon our readiness in the case a real-world scenario occurs.” (US, Japanese troops begin joint military exercise amid North Korea threat”, Fox News)
Monday’s missile test (which flew over Hokkaido Island) was conducted just hours after the war games ended. The message was clear: The North is not going to be publicly humiliated and slapped around without responding. Rather than show weakness, the North demonstrated that it was prepared to defend itself against foreign aggression. In other words, the test was NOT a “bold and provocative act” (as the media stated) but a modest and well thought-out response by a country that has experienced 64 years of relentless hectoring, sanctions, demonization and saber rattling by Washington. The North responded because the Washington’s incitements required a response. End of story.
And the same is true of the three short-range ballistic missiles the North tested last week. (two of which apparently fizzled out shortly after launching.) These tests were a response to the 3 week-long joint-military drills in South Korea which involved 75,000 combat troops accompanied by hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, landing craft, heavy artillery, a full naval flotilla and flyovers by squadrons of state of the art fighters and strategic bombers. Was the North supposed to sit on its hands while this menacing display of brute military force took place right under its nose???
Of course not. Imagine if Russia engaged in a similar operation over the border in Mexico while the Russian fleet conducted “live fire” drills three miles outside of San Francisco Bay. What do you think Trump’s reaction would be?
He’d blow those boats out of the water faster than you could say “Jackie Robinson”, right?
So why the double standard when it comes to North Korea? Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
—snip—
It is so hard to find anything in the media that doesn’t reflect Washington’s bias and hostility. Surprisingly, there was pretty decent article at CBS News last week written by a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. It’s the only article I’ve found that accurately explains what’s really going on beyond the propaganda. Check it out:
“Prior to President Trump’s inauguration, North Korea made it clear it was prepared to give the new U.S. administration time to review the policy and come up with something better than President Obama’s. The only wrinkle was that if the U.S. went full-steam ahead with its annual joint exercises with South Korea (especially if that were accompanied by more talk of “decapitation” and more flights of strategic bombers over the Korean peninsula), the North would react strongly.
In short, the U.S. did, and the North reacted.
Behind-the-scenes contacts went up and down, but couldn’t get traction. In April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un paraded new missiles as a warning, to no effect. The regime launched the new systems, one after another. Still, Washington’s approach didn’t change.” (Analysis: Pyongyang’s view of the North Korea-U.S. crisis”, CBS News)
Okay, so now we know the truth: The North gave it their best shot and came up snakeeyes, mainly because Washington doesn’t want to negotiate, they’d rather twist arms (Russia and China), tighten the embargo and threaten war. That’s Trump’s solution. Here’s more from the same piece:
“On July 4, after North Korea’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch, Kim sent a public signal that the North could put the nuclear and missile programs “on the table” if the U.S. changed its approach.
The U.S. did not, so the North launched another ICBM, very deliberately deeming it a warning to the U.S. that they were to be taken seriously. Still, more B-1 bombers flew over the Peninsula, and the U.N. Security Council passed new sanctions.” (CBS News)
So, the North was ready to do some serious horse-trading, but the US balked. Kim probably heard what a wheeler dealer Trump was and figured they could work something out. But it hasn’t happened. Trump has turned out to be a bigger bust than Obama, which is pretty bad. He not only refuses to negotiate but he also delivers bellicose threats almost every day. This isn’t what the North was expecting. They were expecting a “non interventionist” leader who might be receptive to a trade-off.
The current situation has left Kim with no good options. He can either cave in and terminate his missile program altogether or increase the frequency of the tests and hope that they pave the way for negotiations. Kim chose the latter.
Did he make a bad choice?
Maybe.
Is it a rational choice?
Yes.
The North is betting that its nuclear weapons programs will be valuable bargaining chits in future negotiations with the United States. The North has no plan to nuke the west coast of the United States. That’s ridiculous! That doesn’t accomplish anything. What they want is to preserve their regime, procure security guarantees from Washington, lift the embargo, normalize relations with the South, extricate the US from the political affairs of the peninsula, and (hopefully) end the irritating and endlessly provocative 64 year US occupation. Yankee go home. Please.
Bottom line: The North is ready to deal. They want negotiations. They want to end the war. They want to put this whole nightmare behind them and get on with their lives. But Washington won’t let them because Washington likes the status quo. Washington wants to be a permanent feature in South Korea so it can encircle Russia and China with lethal missile systems and expand its geopolitical grip bringing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.
That’s what Washington wants, and that’s why the crisis on the peninsula will continue to boil.
My recent post: The United States of Manufactured Hysteria.
More of the same tactic.
The U.S does this to its subjects…errr, ahhh citizens….and it does it to other countries as well. Someday it’s all going to blow up right in the faces of the hysteria merchants. Let us pray that it is not a nuclear blow-up. Better a domestic one than that.
Much better.
Watch.
AG
I wrote above:
This media tactic is insidious.
it is also very effective.
The first thing that we must do as progressives is to free ourselves from this fear. Almost total distrust of the mass media is a good start. Free of this media-inflicted fear…fear of Armageddon, fear of insurrection, fear of other races, fear of the disease(s) of the week, fear of losing elections if we don’t hew very closely to the centrist line, fear of the unknown…free of fear we can then begin to make choices that have not been informed by this fear.
Here are the opening lines of FDR’s first inaugural adress” in 1933.
I repeat:
“In every dark hour…a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves…”
That was then; this is now. We recently had a primary season and election which produced absolutely no one but Bernie Sanders who even approached “frankess and vigor” in telling the American people what is really going on, and to tell you the truth I am hard pressed to think of any remotely practical candidate since Bobby Kennedy who dared to begin to tell the truth. The controllers got rid of RFK one way and Bernie Sanders another way. In between? Nothing but crooked hustlers on both sides of the mythical political aisle, at least people who reached practical national power.
All that we have now in our wonderful Information Age (Disinformation Age might be closer to the truth.) is “fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear promulgated by mass media’s false news campaigns on every level.
Step away from the media with your brains in the air.
Please.
You be bettah off.
As will we all.
Later…
AG
Media-produced reflexive fear is like any other addictive substance. First you have to kick the addiction. Then and only then can you help others to do the same thing.
Kick.
Please!!!
AG
There’s been a claim going back to the Clinton Administration that the North Korean nuclear program isn’t really about nukes, but rather that it’s just a giant bargaining chip. I guess the guy you quoted figures that if he repeats that nonsense yet again, people will believe it. Or maybe he’s just going to squeeze his eyes shut REALLY hard and insist that Kim Jong Un doesn’t REALLY want nukes.
It really isn’t about nukes. It is about having a national security response to any nation that seeks regime change through force. It is what monarchies do. And North Korea is an absolutist hereditary monarchy that invests a lot in the survival of the royal family.
What we see now is blowback from Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech seeking to justify an unjustifiable (even the CIA was clear about this) war in Iraq and set the stage for follow-on regime change in Iran and North Korea. The neo-cons’ dream of the unchallengeable superpower empire forever, based entirely on “toughness”. When W exposed the weakness of the US as a superpower by actually testing its strategy and tactics, what the rest of the world saw was a loose cannon that needed to be deterred. Iran shifted to a Japanese-style quick-ramp-up nuclear strategy. North Korea shifted to a build-it-now-and-quickly nuclear strategy.
The US was willing to negotiate with Iran during the Obama administration because it needed their diplomatic neutrality and later their silent alliance in order to get out of Iraq and then to defeat ISIS.
North Korea was not willing to lose face by look like it had negotiated from US “toughness”, and so we got nuclear weapons, the ultimate (for now and hopefully not exceeded) deterrent weapon. The problem is that deterrence with nuclear weapons fails if you look rational enough not to use them. We cut even Donald Trump more slack on his crazy man rhetoric than we do Kim Jong Un. Watching how North Korea has rolled out its missile tests shows a great degree of pulling punches. Better register the signal before they launch a test that is really a strike.
In this dynamic, clumsy “toughness” turns out to be escalation that makes North Korea clear about our intention for regime change, not necessarily clear about our willingness to launch the devastation that a US nuclear strike on North Korea would bring to South Korea, our ally. That makes our stance look either hopelessly irrational or cruel.
Kim Jong Un now has nukes, thanks to W’s bumbling. How could the US guarantee North Korea national security and still guarantee our allies’ national security. The US does not realize the extent to which it is now in a mutually-assured destruction (MAD) dynamic diplomatically and militarily with North Korea.
And the US has the dark history of being the only nation in history to have used nuclear weapons within the context of war. We have no moral high ground at all on this issue if we are not leading the way to total abolition of nuclear weapons through negotiation with Russia and then China, and then the rest of the nuclear nations. That is going to be hard talk if it is a serious effort. There are 75 years of history of nuclear weapons that make it that way.
You are making the same kind of mistake that was made about Trump…that Kim il Jung and his advisors are total fools and that North Korea is a nation of lockstepping idiots.
This is understandable…you appear swim in the media filth quite happily as far as I can see.
They would have to be suicidal fools if they thought that they could somehow attack the U.S. by the use of nukes and still survive for more than a few hours.
It’s all a negotiation.
Kim il Jung’s posturing, Trump’s counter-threats…
The visible 1/7th of the negotiation iceberg.
Watch.
AG