Did you know that Obama fully intended to "take out" the entire rulership of North Korea? Neither did I, until I came across this tidbit hidden in a New York Times article from March, moaning about the North Korean "threat" to the U.S.
Get a load of this paragraph, buried way down in a lengthy article, the 39th paragraph of a 47 paragraph long story, interspersed with charts, photos, and captions:
"With only a few months left in office, he [Obama] pushed aides for new approaches [to cripple North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs]. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea’s leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula." [My emphasis.] [1]
Incredibly, yet not surprisingly, the U.S. media ignored this. Apparently it was too insignificant to them to spread the news around.
Nor is it surprising, even if it's shocking, that Obama had such a determined intent to assassinate the rulers of a foreign nation. Obama proved himself a cold-blooded, ruthless killer, personally reviewing a "kill list" of people to be assassinated, every week. He murdered teenagers, children, old women. He gave the Saudi regime the weapons and intelligence it needed (and the assistance of the aerial refueling tanker planes of the U.S. Air Force to enable the jets the Saudis purchased from the U.S. to fly their missions) to reduce Yemen to a state of starvation, with a raging cholera epidemic. Unless Putin can add to Russia's body count in Syria, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama will go down in history as bloodier than the Russian autocrat that American media and the blaterariat elite like to call a "murderer." Certainly in terms of specific individuals targeted for assassination, Obama is leagues above Putin.
But what's more significant is the fact that North Korea really IS at risk from the U.S. It is NOT paranoid for the North Korean regime to feel great danger from the U.S. The U.S. is constantly practicing nuclear war attacks on North Korea. It just did it again, flying B-1 strategic bombers from Guam (a weapon originally designed to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons) right up to North Korea's coast, escorted by U.S. fighter jets from Japan. So why isn't it defensive for North Korea to develop the means to strike those U.S. bases in japan and Guam? In fact, it was after an earlier U.S. "exercise" practicing nuking North Korea from Guan that NK "threatened" to fire a test missile in the vicinity of Guam, which it backed down from after Trump expectorated yet another of his blood-curdling threats to annihilate NK.
I'm no sympathizer of the North Korean regime, as should be clear to regular readers of this site. It is a hellish place to live, a nightmare of totalitarian regimentation, a hereditary oppressive cult system. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have the right of self-defense. It is obvious that the North Korean rulers are not suicidal. Vicious and malign, certainly. But not insane. They would never out of the blue initiate a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies, and it is completely dishonest of the U.S. government and media to pretend otherwise, which is the assumption underlying all the propaganda about the NK nuclear "threat."
Hereditary NK dictator Kim Jon-un just stated that the goal of their nuclear and missile programs is "equilibrium" with the U.S., that is, having enough of a balance in terms of destructive potential that the U.S. could no longer attack NK and not suffer unacceptable damage in return. In other words, deterrence. But that is unacceptable to the U.S. And the U.S. has gotten the UN Security Council to go along with that. Of the five permanent members of that body, the UK and France would follow U.S. wishes. Russia and China have no interest in a nuclear-armed North Korea, especially since it could prompt other nations in the region to acquire nuclear weapons (especially Japan and South Korea). Those with nuclear arms like their privilege, and the leverage it gives them. They all share an interest in keeping the nuclear "club" small.
So the U.S. has gotten the UN to impose 9 sets of sanctions on NK in 11 years. And it has sabotaged the North's missile and nuclear programs through various covert means, some of which is reported in the aforementioned NY Times article. With Trump, the U.S. stance has become openly belligerent and threatening. (And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's recent assertion that the U.S. has no desire for "regime change" in NK was a smarmy lie.) But the fact of the matter is, North Korea has shown over the years that it cannot be intimidated. Which means that ratcheting up threats to annihilate it (Trump just did it again) will only escalate tensions and create a more dangerous situation. Kim Jon-un's regime has just stated that it will launch an attack if the U.S. is preparing to attack it!
There are two lines the U.S. government and media put out on negotiations, First is that the North Koreans are unreasonably refusing "to come to the negotiating table," All they have to do is show a "willingness" to negotiate. How? By completely halting their weapons development programs in advance of any negotiations! Well no wonder they aren't "willing to negotiate"! Surrender in advance, then we'll talk to you. I know what I would say to that, and it would involve salty language!
The other line is that past negotiations "didn't work" because the North Koreans never honored the deals. That is false, as Tim Shorrock of The Nation magazine has documented in a series of articles. The agreement the Clinton regime negotiated held for almost a decade. It broke down after the U.S. reneged on its part of the bargain, not delivering the agree amounts of fuel oil and failing to come through with the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in NK. So the North Koreans restarted work on nuclear weapons development. [2]
What NK wants, as it has repeatedly stated, is a cessation of hostilities with the U.S. (a formal end to the Korean War, which has never been legally ended), an end to threatening U.S. military maneuvers, and more normal relations. Russia and China some months back proposed that the North freeze its weapons testing and the U.S. stop its practice attacks on North Korea to start negotiations. The U.S. brushed them off with contempt. Trump's hand-picked UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, the former GOP governor of the Confederate state of South Caroline, spat on the proposal as "insulting." This after the U.S. ignored the Chinese-Russian repeated suggestion for 6 months. (By the way, South Carolina started the American Civil War. It was the first state to secede to form the Confederate States of America, and it initiated hostilities by laying siege to Fort Sumter, a U.S. military base in South Carolina. Haley is a hard-rightwing GOP politician from one of the most racist and reactionary states in the U.S.)
The U.S. hates to compromise just on principle- namely the principle that the strong shouldn't have to make any concessions to the weak. And its elites equate that principle with morality. Thus their genuine outrage when any weaker nation defies them. (Although when it comes to China, a nation almost as strong as the U.S. and on which much U.S. corporate profit depends as a source of cheaply-manufactured good, the U.S. isn't so brave.)
1] "Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles," New York Times, March 4, 2017.
2] See Shorrock's articles at The Nation.
Get a load of this paragraph, buried way down in a lengthy article, the 39th paragraph of a 47 paragraph long story, interspersed with charts, photos, and captions:
"With only a few months left in office, he [Obama] pushed aides for new approaches [to cripple North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs]. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea’s leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula." [My emphasis.] [1]
Incredibly, yet not surprisingly, the U.S. media ignored this. Apparently it was too insignificant to them to spread the news around.
Nor is it surprising, even if it's shocking, that Obama had such a determined intent to assassinate the rulers of a foreign nation. Obama proved himself a cold-blooded, ruthless killer, personally reviewing a "kill list" of people to be assassinated, every week. He murdered teenagers, children, old women. He gave the Saudi regime the weapons and intelligence it needed (and the assistance of the aerial refueling tanker planes of the U.S. Air Force to enable the jets the Saudis purchased from the U.S. to fly their missions) to reduce Yemen to a state of starvation, with a raging cholera epidemic. Unless Putin can add to Russia's body count in Syria, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama will go down in history as bloodier than the Russian autocrat that American media and the blaterariat elite like to call a "murderer." Certainly in terms of specific individuals targeted for assassination, Obama is leagues above Putin.
But what's more significant is the fact that North Korea really IS at risk from the U.S. It is NOT paranoid for the North Korean regime to feel great danger from the U.S. The U.S. is constantly practicing nuclear war attacks on North Korea. It just did it again, flying B-1 strategic bombers from Guam (a weapon originally designed to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons) right up to North Korea's coast, escorted by U.S. fighter jets from Japan. So why isn't it defensive for North Korea to develop the means to strike those U.S. bases in japan and Guam? In fact, it was after an earlier U.S. "exercise" practicing nuking North Korea from Guan that NK "threatened" to fire a test missile in the vicinity of Guam, which it backed down from after Trump expectorated yet another of his blood-curdling threats to annihilate NK.
I'm no sympathizer of the North Korean regime, as should be clear to regular readers of this site. It is a hellish place to live, a nightmare of totalitarian regimentation, a hereditary oppressive cult system. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have the right of self-defense. It is obvious that the North Korean rulers are not suicidal. Vicious and malign, certainly. But not insane. They would never out of the blue initiate a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies, and it is completely dishonest of the U.S. government and media to pretend otherwise, which is the assumption underlying all the propaganda about the NK nuclear "threat."
Hereditary NK dictator Kim Jon-un just stated that the goal of their nuclear and missile programs is "equilibrium" with the U.S., that is, having enough of a balance in terms of destructive potential that the U.S. could no longer attack NK and not suffer unacceptable damage in return. In other words, deterrence. But that is unacceptable to the U.S. And the U.S. has gotten the UN Security Council to go along with that. Of the five permanent members of that body, the UK and France would follow U.S. wishes. Russia and China have no interest in a nuclear-armed North Korea, especially since it could prompt other nations in the region to acquire nuclear weapons (especially Japan and South Korea). Those with nuclear arms like their privilege, and the leverage it gives them. They all share an interest in keeping the nuclear "club" small.
So the U.S. has gotten the UN to impose 9 sets of sanctions on NK in 11 years. And it has sabotaged the North's missile and nuclear programs through various covert means, some of which is reported in the aforementioned NY Times article. With Trump, the U.S. stance has become openly belligerent and threatening. (And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's recent assertion that the U.S. has no desire for "regime change" in NK was a smarmy lie.) But the fact of the matter is, North Korea has shown over the years that it cannot be intimidated. Which means that ratcheting up threats to annihilate it (Trump just did it again) will only escalate tensions and create a more dangerous situation. Kim Jon-un's regime has just stated that it will launch an attack if the U.S. is preparing to attack it!
There are two lines the U.S. government and media put out on negotiations, First is that the North Koreans are unreasonably refusing "to come to the negotiating table," All they have to do is show a "willingness" to negotiate. How? By completely halting their weapons development programs in advance of any negotiations! Well no wonder they aren't "willing to negotiate"! Surrender in advance, then we'll talk to you. I know what I would say to that, and it would involve salty language!
The other line is that past negotiations "didn't work" because the North Koreans never honored the deals. That is false, as Tim Shorrock of The Nation magazine has documented in a series of articles. The agreement the Clinton regime negotiated held for almost a decade. It broke down after the U.S. reneged on its part of the bargain, not delivering the agree amounts of fuel oil and failing to come through with the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in NK. So the North Koreans restarted work on nuclear weapons development. [2]
What NK wants, as it has repeatedly stated, is a cessation of hostilities with the U.S. (a formal end to the Korean War, which has never been legally ended), an end to threatening U.S. military maneuvers, and more normal relations. Russia and China some months back proposed that the North freeze its weapons testing and the U.S. stop its practice attacks on North Korea to start negotiations. The U.S. brushed them off with contempt. Trump's hand-picked UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, the former GOP governor of the Confederate state of South Caroline, spat on the proposal as "insulting." This after the U.S. ignored the Chinese-Russian repeated suggestion for 6 months. (By the way, South Carolina started the American Civil War. It was the first state to secede to form the Confederate States of America, and it initiated hostilities by laying siege to Fort Sumter, a U.S. military base in South Carolina. Haley is a hard-rightwing GOP politician from one of the most racist and reactionary states in the U.S.)
The U.S. hates to compromise just on principle- namely the principle that the strong shouldn't have to make any concessions to the weak. And its elites equate that principle with morality. Thus their genuine outrage when any weaker nation defies them. (Although when it comes to China, a nation almost as strong as the U.S. and on which much U.S. corporate profit depends as a source of cheaply-manufactured good, the U.S. isn't so brave.)
1] "Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles," New York Times, March 4, 2017.
2] See Shorrock's articles at The Nation.
Yeah, so I killed some folks. Wanna make something out of it?
