Hurtling Toward ‘Fire and Fury’
Under congressional and media pressure to
confront U.S. “adversaries,” President Trump
alarmed the world with rash rhetoric about
inflicting “fire and fury” on North Korea, a
frightening prospect, says Jonathan Marshall.
By Jonathan Marshall
August 11,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- “Be prepared, there is a small chance that our
horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us
into World War III.” –
Donald Trump, August 31, 2013
Like
some demonic Hollywood director, President Trump
keeps finding new ways to make us jump out of
our seats, just when we think we’ve seen
everything. On Tuesday, he outdid himself by
twice pledging to meet any further North Korean
threats to the United States “with fire and fury
like the world has never seen.”
His headline-grabbing comments were sufficiently
incendiary that White House staffers
rushed to reassure reporters
(and the public) that the President was just
improvising, not speaking from an approved
script. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
insisted that
the President simply meant to say that “the
United States has the capability to fully defend
itself from any attack . . . So the American
people should sleep well at night.”
People at home and around the world were rattled
but not too alarmed, judging by the
modest drop in stock prices
on U.S. and foreign exchanges. North Korea
responded to
Trump’s threat with a threat of its own to
vaporize Guam, yet no war broke out. So far,
leaders of both countries, like taunting
schoolboys, seem content to lob only harsh
rhetoric across the ocean, not fully armed
missiles.
It’s easy to discount Trump’s bluster, based on
his
long history of practicing the art of “bullshit.”
Maybe he’s just trying to make Chinese leaders
nervous about his intentions, so they try a
little harder to rein in Pyongyang. Surely he
understands by now just how devastating a war
with North Korea would be, right?
I’m not so sure. What increasingly keep me up at
night are the
uncontradicted claims
of one of the GOP’s leading foreign policy
spokesmen, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina, that Trump is ready and willing to
launch a preemptive war “if [North Korea tries]
to keep developing an ICBM with a nuclear weapon
on top to hit the [U.S.] homeland.”
North Korea isn’t quite there yet, but some U.S.
intelligence officials claim that Pyongyang has
already produced
a miniature nuclear warhead suitable for
delivery by missile, and its accelerated testing
of long-range ballistic missiles means that the
time is quickly drawing near when Kim Jong Un’s
regime will be able to put the United States at
risk.
Tough-Guy
Senators
Early
in Trump’s presidency, the influential
Republican senator went to the President with a
powerful message. Graham asked Trump, “Do you
want on your resumé that during your presidency
the North Koreans developed a missile that could
hit the American homeland with a nuclear weapon
on top of it?” Trump replied, according to
Graham, “Absolutely not.”
Graham advised President Trump that if all else
failed, he must order a military strike.
As Graham put it,
“It would be terrible but the war would be over
here (there), wouldn’t be here. It would be bad
for the Korean Peninsula. It would be bad for
China. It would be bad for Japan, be bad for
South Korea. It would be the end of North Korea.
But what it would not do is hit America and the
only way it could ever come to America is with a
missile.”
Speaking to NBC’s “Today” show this month,
Graham reiterated
that Trump isn’t bluffing about preparing an
all-out strike against North Korea’s nuclear
program. “He has told me that. I believe him,”
Graham said. “If there’s going to be a war to
stop [Kim Jong Un], it will be over there. If
thousands die, they’re going to die over there.
They’re not going to die here. And he has told
me that to my face.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John
McCain, R-Arizona, was with Graham for the
private meeting with Trump in April, and did not
dispute his colleague’s description of the
conversation. He added only that a preemptive
strike would be a “last”
option.
Trump has said nothing to call Graham’s account
into question, either. Indeed, one of his first
tweets of 2017 was a flat-out
declaration,
“North Korea just stated that it is in the final
stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of
reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!”
Trump’s national security adviser, H. R.
McMaster,
confirmed just
this month that allowing North Korea to acquire
functional nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be
“intolerable, from the President’s perspective.”
The
Trump-Graham doctrine recalls the George W. Bush
administration’s justification for preemptive
war against Iraq in 2003 — with the key
difference that North Korea’s weapons of mass
destruction are real, not mythical. Contrary to
all evidence, Trump appears to believe that
America’s immense nuclear arsenal will be
insufficient to deter North Korea from attacking
the United States or its allies.
North
Korean Fears
North Korean leaders have consistently
maintained that they want and need nuclear
weapons only to deter a U.S. attack, not to
start a war against the world’s only superpower.
Most experts on Korea agree. Former Secretary of
Defense William Perry, who actually negotiated
with Kim’s predecessor in 2000,
asserts that
while the risks of inadvertent war are growing,
North Korea has no intention of launching a
surprise nuclear attack:
|
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
“I have
studied North Korea for several decades and have
had serious talks with many of their military
and political leaders. . . . They are not crazy,
as some people believe. North Korea is a pariah
state and nearly alone in the world, but there
is logic to the actions of its leadership.
Fundamental to that logic is an overriding
commitment to keeping their regime in power, to
sustain the Kim dynasty. . . . and they
understand that if they launch a nuclear attack,
their country will be destroyed, and . . . it
would end the Kim dynasty.”
Experts also reject
the Graham/Trump assumption that preemptive war
with North Korea would be merely “bad” but
manageable. Pyongyang has thousands of artillery
aimed at Seoul, hundreds of rocket launchers,
vast stocks of deadly chemical weapons, and as
many as 60 nuclear warheads, which could render
much of South Korea and Japan uninhabitable and
rock the world’s economy.
Defense Secretary James Mattis’s gloomy
warning that
any conflict with North Korea would be “probably
the worst kind of fighting in most people’s
lifetime,” was almost certainly an
understatement.
As I have discussed previously,
even without functioning ICBMs, Kim’s regime
already has the ability to wipe out major U.S.
coastal cities simply by floating nuclear bombs
into our harbors, hidden in container vessels.
President Trump’s views on preemptive war are
rejected not only by the experts, but by the
majority of Americans. Fewer than a third of
U.S. adults believe the situation in North Korea
requires a military response,
according to a new CBS poll,
and 61 percent are rightfully uneasy about
Trump’s ability to handle the situation.
But what experts and most Americans think
doesn’t really matter. The U.S. military is
undoubtedly ready to carry out an order from its
commander-in-chief to attack North Korea. It
holds
massive training exercises
every year for just such an eventuality. And the
commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral
Scott Swift,
answered unequivocally “yes”
when asked whether he would follow an order by
President Trump to launch a nuclear attack
against China, a vastly more dangerous foe than
North Korea.
So how,
under these circumstances, do I get any sleep at
all? Deep down, I suspect that Trump is too
gutless to start an unnecessary war that will
kill millions of people. I also have faith that
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, a former
human rights lawyer, will refuse to cooperate
with a preemptive attack, making it difficult
for U.S. forces to go it alone. I hope and pray
that I’m right.
This article was first published by
Consortium News
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
