The
Relentless Push Towards War
This time with North Korea. Why?
By Chris Martenson
The only
real constant to be found in both European and
US politics is war. A steady feature of both
regions for the past 20+ years has been small,
lucrative conflicts waged against countries
unable to effectively defend themselves.
It
doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office in the US
-- Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal --
there’s a war machine constantly running. My
concern is that there's a building risk that one
day that war machine is going to bust apart. And
when it does, the long relative peace that the
US and Europe have enjoyed (even as they’ve
visited a lot of death and destruction
elsewhere) will be shattered.
As I’ve
written extensively in the past, as was the case
with Russia last fall, this push to war includes
a series of carefully-crafted talking points
being endlessly repeated over the print and
airwaves. It’s an ever-present condition of
living in our manufactured reality, where what
we are told to care about is beamed at us around
the clock in a rather tediously but
emotionally-manipulative way on the “news.”
For a
short historical review, recall that it wasn’t
that long ago that we were asked to be in a near
state of panic about:
-
Ebola
-
Iran’s nuclear capabilities
-
Libya’s terrible strongman (who turned out
to be way better than the thugs who replaced
him)
-
Terrorists
-
Russia
How
many of those are now ‘front and center' in your
concerns? Probably none. Today's big
‘bogeyman’ is North Korea. Have you wondered
why?
The
news about North Korea is at a fever pitch.
Again, we have to ask, why now?
Trump
says 'major, major' conflict with North
Korea possible, but seeks diplomacy
Apr
28, 2017
The Trump administration on
Wednesday declared North Korea "an urgent
national security threat and top foreign
policy priority."
It said it was focusing on economic and
diplomatic pressure, including Chinese
cooperation in containing its defiant
neighbor and ally, and remained open to
negotiations.
U.S. President Donald Trump
said on Thursday a major conflict with North
Korea is possible
in the standoff over its nuclear and missile
programs, but he would prefer a diplomatic
outcome to the dispute.
"There is a chance that we
could end up having a major, major conflict
with North Korea. Absolutely,"
Trump told Reuters
in an Oval Office interview ahead of his
100th day in office on Saturday.
Nonetheless, Trump said he wanted to
peacefully resolve a crisis that has
bedeviled multiple U.S. presidents, a path
that he and his administration are
emphasizing by preparing a variety of new
economic sanctions while not taking the
military option off the table.
"We'd love to solve things diplomatically
but it's very difficult," he said.
In
other highlights of the 42-minute interview,
Trump was cool to speaking again with
Taiwan's president after an earlier
telephone call with her angered China.
He also said he wants South
Korea to pay the cost of the U.S. THAAD
anti-missile defense system, which he
estimated at $1 billion,
and intends to
renegotiate or terminate a U.S. free trade
pact with South Korea because of a deep
trade deficit with Seoul.
U.S. officials said military
strikes remained an option but played down
the prospect, though
the administration has sent
an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered
submarine to the region in a show of force.
Any
direct U.S. military action would run the
risk of massive North Korean retaliation and
huge casualties in Japan and South Korea and
among U.S. forces in both countries.
(Source)
Okay,
let’s parse all that out:
-
There are no direct negotiations between the
US and North Korea
-
Trump is talking tough
-
Kim Jong Un is insane
-
Trump wants South Korea to pay for a $1
billion US piece of hardware
-
Trump wants to renegotiate or terminate the
trade pact with South Korea
- If
things ‘go hot’, a lot of casualties are
expected
-
Both China and North Korea are very alarmed
by the THAAD anti-missile system the US has
installed in South Korea
-
The US is maneuvering military assets into
the region, including an aircraft carrier
and sub, among other displays of suggested
force
Let’s
see here…what could possibly go wrong?
How
about everything?
Here’s
some more on the THAAD anti-missile defense
system, which wasn't well received by the locals
in South Korea who, for some reason, have no
interest in being dragged into a war with their
immediate and heavily-militarized neighbors by a
careless US administration:
US
sets up missile defense in S. Korea as North
shows power
Apr
26, 2017
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)
— In a defiant
bit of timing, South Korea announced
Wednesday that key parts of a contentious
U.S. missile defense system had been
installed a day after rival North Korea
showed off its military power.
The
South's trumpeting of progress on setting up
the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense
system, or THAAD, comes as high-powered U.S.
military assets converge on the Korean
Peninsula and as a combative North Korea
signals possible nuclear and missile
testing.
About 8,000 police officers
were mobilized,
and the main road leading up to the site in
the country's southeast was blocked earlier
Wednesday, Yonhap reported. About 200
residents and protesters rallied against
THAAD in front of a local community center,
some hurling plastic water bottles.
North Korea conducted
live-fire artillery drills on Tuesday,
the 85th anniversary of the founding of its
million-person strong Korean People's Army.
On the same day, a U.S.
guided-missile submarine docked in South
Korea. And the USS Carl Vinson aircraft
carrier is also headed toward the peninsula
for a joint exercise with South Korea.
The moves to set up THAAD
within this year have angered not only North
Korea, but also China,
the country that the Trump administration
hopes to work with to rid the North of
nuclear weapons. China, which has grown
increasingly frustrated with its ally
Pyongyang, and Russia see the system's
powerful radars as a security threat.
(Source)
I
consider having to deploy 8,000 police officers
to deter possible protestors as a strong sign of
just how unpopular a move it is for the THAAD
system to be installed. North Korea is rattling
its sabers, the US is moving assets in, China is
both alarmed and trying to be helpful at the
same time, probably preferring to let a sleeping
dog lie.
This is
an incredibly volatile moment, especially
considering that Kim Jong Un has been anything
but rational his entire life. So, again, we have
to ask: Why now? Why has beating North
Korea into submission become such a sudden
national priority?
Before
address that, it bears repeating that most of
what passes for “news” in the West is actually
well-crafted talking points put out by
self-interested people who have discovered a
fantastic way to remain in power and accumulate
wealth. Read more about this in our prior
report: We
Are Being Played.
Well,
that's true at least as long as we consent to
follow along and dutifully remain ignorant of
these tricks of persuasion by propaganda.
There’s really no good excuse for being fooled,
except mental laziness. The tricks of this
trade are neither subtle nor difficult to spot.
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Meanwhile, the actual things that are
deteriorating alarmingly are not even talked
about -- ever -- in the main news outfits.
Alarming species extinction rates, the loss of
phytoplankton in the oceans, the loss of
terrestrial soil fertility into oceanic dead
zones, and the largest wealth gap in all of
history created on purpose by central banks --
very real crises like this are nearly completely
ignored.
These
are all very dangerous to our future, but they
aren't talked about because doing so won't sell
more weapons. Nor will it advance any political
careers, or goose banking profits next quarter.
So for
a system that demands continuous conflict in
order to function, to manufacture a new war you
need a good sales agent, and none are so closely
tied to that racket than the New York Times.
Here they are recently using the same dumb
tricks that worked the last time, and the time
before that…and so on:
NYT’s
‘Impossible to Verify’ North Korea Nuke
Claim Spreads Unchecked by Media
Apr
26, 2017
Buoyed by a
total of 18 speculative verb forms—five
“mays,” eight “woulds” and five “coulds”—New
York Times reporters David E. Sanger and
William J. Broad (4/24/17)
painted a dire picture of a Trump
administration forced to react to the
growing and impending doom of North Korea
nuclear weapons.
“As
North Korea Speeds Its Nuclear Program, US
Fears Time Will Run Out” opens by
breathlessly establishing the stakes and the
limited time for the US to “deal with” the
North Korean nuclear “crisis”:
Behind
the Trump administration’s sudden urgency in
dealing with the North Korean nuclear crisis
lies a stark calculus: A growing body of
expert studies and classified intelligence
reports that conclude the country is capable
of producing a nuclear bomb every six or
seven weeks.
That
acceleration in pace—impossible to verify
until experts get beyond the limited access
to North Korean facilities that ended years
ago—explains why President Trump and his
aides fear they are running out of time.
The
front-page summary was even more harrowing,
with the editors asserting there’s
“dwindling time” for “US action” to stop
North Korea from assembling hundreds of
nukes:
From the beginning, the Times frames any
potential bombing by Trump as the product of
a “stark calculus” coldly and objectively
arrived at by a “growing body of expert[s].”
The idea that elements within the US
intelligence community may actually desire a
war—or at least limited airstrikes—and thus
may have an interest in presenting conflict
as inevitable, is never addressed, much less
accounted for.
The
most spectacular claim—that North Korea
is, at present, “capable of producing a
nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks”—is
backed up entirely by an anonymous blob of
“expert studies and classified intelligence
reports.” To add another red flag, Sanger
and Broad qualify it in the very next
sentence as a figure that is “impossible to
verify.” Which is another way of saying it’s
an unverified claim.
(Source)
Unverifiable “evidence,” anonymous sources, and
the broad appeal of “many experts.” Sound
familiar? It should, it’s the exact same
playbook used by the war machine to bomb and
invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and, someday
soon, Iran and Russia.
It
brings to mind this quote by Arundhati Roy:
What
I’m saying is that it’s the exact same trick
used over and over again. Either the New York
Times is the stupidest crew of reporters and
editors ever with completely flat learning
curves, or they are in on the racket. More
likely the latter than the former, I'm
convinced. The New York Times hasn't seen a war
it couldn’t support (especially in the oil-rich
Middle East).
Why Now?
So the
big question is ‘why now?’ Why is North Korea
suddenly such a concern? They’ve been peskily
doing what they do for a very long time;
developing crude nuclear devices and lobbing
test missiles into the sea.
If you
happen to be the ocean around North Korea, you
have to absorb a wayward rocket now and then.
But there’s not much of a threat beyond that at
the moment.
None of
the articles I’ve read have given any credible
insight into why North Korea is considered a
clear and present danger to US interests at the
moment. More than that, no analysis has been
proffered to explain how any potential military
action doesn’t just end in a bloodbath for the
poor people of South and North Korea.
The
conventional military capabilities of North
Korea are pretty staggering if you live in Seoul
South Korea, at least:
When it comes to soldiers based on the North
Korean border, the US only has about 20,000
troops permanently stationed in South Korea,
as well as about 8000 air force personnel
and other special forces. There were also
about 50,000 military personnel based in
Japan.
Compare this to
North Korea, which
has 700,000 active soldiers, but a whopping
4.5 million reserves.
Prof Blaxland said North Korea had
also massed about 20,000 rockets and
missiles on the border with South Korea,
and when you are playing a numbers game,
technology doesn’t always win.
“There’s a saying ‘quantity
has a quality all of its own’,”
he said.
“North
Korea has massed artillery and missile
capability adjacent to the demilitarised
zone, close to Seoul, which puts it in range
of a population about the size of Australia
— it’s pretty scary.”
(Source
news.com.au)
As a
reminder, Trump campaigned on a peace platform.
So this sudden belligerence has to be coming
form some heavy internal pressure; or he’s
simply flip-flopped (or wasn’t honest) on a very
important matter.
He’s
done so much flip-flopping that this tweet
struck me as funny:
Continuing with the mystery of Why now?,
we note that the potential consequences of a
kinectic conflict for South Korea are
staggering. The simple fact is that, no matter
how many jets and cruise missiles a carrier
group launches, or what countermeasures South
Korea and embedded US military bring to bear,
there’s little chance of them wiping out
anything but a very small percentage of North
Korea’s conventional artillery and rocket
capabilities.
Think
of 500,000 rounds of artillery landing in a
major, packed capitol city that has the
population of Australia and you can begin to
appreciate the scale of the catastrophe that
could ensue:
Trump, who
clearly and unequivocally campaigned on a
peace platform, is now sending a “very
powerful armada”
to the coast of the DPRK. Powerful as this
armada might be, it can do absolutely
nothing to prevent the DPRK artillery from
smashing Seoul into smithereens. You think
that I am exaggerating? Business Insider
estimated in 2010 that it
would take the DPRK 2 hours to completely
obliterate Seoul.
Why? Because the
DPRK has enough artillery pieces to fire
500,000 rounds of artillery on Seoul in the
first hour of a conflict,
that’s why. Here we are talking about old
fashioned, conventional, artillery pieces. Wikipedia
says that
the DPRK has 8,600 artillery pieces and
4,800 multiple rocket launcher systems. Two
days ago a Russian expert said that the real
figure was just under 20,000 artillery
pieces. Whatever the exact figure, suffice
to say that it is “a lot”.
The DPRK
also has some more modern but equally
dangerous capabilities.
Of special importance here are the roughly
200’000 North Korean special forces. Oh
sure, these 200,000 are not US Green Beret
or Russian Spetsnaz, but they are adequate
for their task: to operate deep behind enemy
lies and create chaos and destroy key
objectives. You tell me – what can the USS
Carl Vinson carrier strike group deploy
against these well hidden and dispersed
10’000+ artillery pieces and 200,000 special
forces? Exactly, nothing at all.
(Source)
Clearly
that’s a very unsettling prospect for South
Korea. Just imagine a favorite major city of
yours with a completely unstable leader within
artillery range just to its immediate north.
It’s a frightening prospect.
Again,
I cannot find a single credible reason for
Why now?. And so, we have to simply
speculate.
Possible reasons range from an itchy military
industrial complex that is disappointed that it
cannot seem to goad the US into war with Russia
and North Korea just happened to be next on the
list, to the idea that Trump is really seeking
trade deal concessions from South Korea and is
using the North Korean situation as leverage.
The
latter is not out of the realm of the possible,
with Trump having said he wants South Korea to
pay for the THAAD system being installed and
that he wants to renegotiate our balance of
trade with them, too.
Who
says stuff like that at a time when war might
break out? Someone who doesn’t really
appreciate the gravity of the situation, I'd
suggest. I mean, if it’s a negotiating tactic,
it’s one that could end up with a lot of people
losing their lives and a ruined economy. If it’s
a negotiating tactic stapled to a crisis, it’s
still an odd thing.
Conclusion
Tensions with North Korea are about as tight as
can be right now. And the wild card is the
apparent instability of Kin Jong Un. Who knows
what he might do?
Any
equally-perplexing mystery, which for now I'll
have to file under “central banks control the
markets” is why the KOSPI (South Korea's stock
index) is up so much on the outbreak of these
very serious tensions?
Either
the central banks are propping it up here to
keep the masses calm, or the central banks are
to blame for pouring so much liquidity into
world markets that even the risk of obliteration
is insufficient cause for a stock market to go
down. So take your pick: either it’s a
controlled market or it’s a sign of just how
outrageous the bubble mentality across the world
has become.
One
feature of bubbles is the inability to entertain
the idea of an asset ever going down in price.
So they go up; news and data be damned.
I just
find it extremely strange that the South Korean
stock index is powering higher through all of
these tensions. It's very, very strange. Stocks
are not supposed to like uncertainty. The
post-French election stock buying spree was
explained on that very basis: the French
elections removed uncertainty and therefore
stocks went up.
But now
we're being forced to accept how stocks are
going up as uncertainty increases.
Since
it really makes no sense, other ‘reasons’ are
being given. But it’s just too strange for the
rational mind to believe them. It’s just not
normal; and therefore we don’t live in a normal
world anymore.
If a
full shooting war breaks out with North Korea,
there will be massive casualties on all sides.
To think that peace depends on Trump negotiating
with Kim Jong Un is a particularly
comic-book-worthy plot line. It seems absurd.
But here we are.
If you
live in Seoul, you should consider getting out
for a while. Take a vacation, or work remotely,
and bring your family. Just for a while -- maybe
a couple of weeks.
If you
can’t do that, then be sure all of your loved
ones know the rally points and basement shelters
that apply. Review your basic contingency plans
and then hope that they won't be required.
Remember, any outbreak of war is going to be a
very bad thing for the globe at this particular
moment in history. Debt levels are stretched to
the limit, GDP is weak, and it won’t take much
to upset the economic and financial market apple
carts.
For everyone else, read our report
How To Prepare For War
that was prepared for the possibility of a war
with Russia.
It’s
not a pleasant topic, nor one I like to keep
raising. But there’s a crew in charge in DC that
is intent on starting wars, and they are not
about to stop now. I believe they span
administrations and they are very influential.
I also
happen to believe that they will eventually pick
a fight we all regret very much.
So be
prepared.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.