Trump Threatens Nuclear Obliteration of North Korea If It Makes More Threats: NK Immediately Makes A Threat, Calling Trump's Bluff

President Bluster still hasn't gotten the hang of this presidency thing, it would seem.

Donald Trump took time out from his 17-day vacation at one of his golf resorts to threaten the nuclear obliteration of North Korea if they so much as make more threats against the U.S.- not if they actually attack the U.S.

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like, the world has never seen." And he said it twice, to make sure it's clear he was being deliberate and he meant it: "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said, they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before." (Well maybe some other world has, eh?) [1]

So, did that fearsome warning of U.S. fire and brimstone stop the North Korean threats? Within an hour, NK responded with a threat to nuke Guam, a Pacific island and site of important U.S. military bases.

After the North Korean threat to blow up Guam, U.S. Secretary of State Rex "Big Oil" Tillerson rushed forth to make reassuring noises. He reinterpreted and distorted what Trump had actually said to pretend all Trump said was that the U.S. could defend itself. He told Americans they could "sleep well at night," meaning no danger here. And the governor of Guam, a U.S. colony (the U.S. calls its colonies "territories," to pretend it isn't imperialist), advised his subjects that they were in no "immediate" danger. (Like, there's no chance they'll die in the next 15 minutes.)  [2]

But Tillerson's clean-up efforts were immediately undercut by "Defense" Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis, a former general, who immediately made another nuclear threat and sternly instructed North Korea not to try anything and to stop what it's doing, because that could "lead to the end of the regime and the destruction of its people."

In fact, for weeks Trump's "national security team" has been using threatening language against North Korea. Given the paranoid and fanatical and ultimately insecure nature of the regime, this is completely counterproductive. And since an actual attack on North Korea would be catastrophic for U.S. client South Korea, and very risky for the U.S., and sure to turn most of the world's population against the U.S., and create extreme hostility from China, it seems that the only sensible route is to try to calm North Korea, and strive for a reasonable goal like a freeze in North Korea's nuclear weapons program rather than abolition, in return for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war and dialing down of U.S. military activity on the peninsula.

But that would be "weak." The U.S. is positively neurotic about "weakness." The most powerful nation in human history is actually quite pathetic in this regard. Instead of being confident in its strength, it feels that making any concession to an adversary is a gross humiliation. (Lyndon Johnson once referred to Vietnam as a dwarf with a knife which it would be shameful to not crush. The rhetoric is telling.)

What tripped off Trump's latest intemperate fulmination? Apparently an "analysis" from the DIA ("Defense Intelligence" Agency- now there's an oxymoron) that was planted in the Washington Post claiming that North Korea now had miniaturized a nuclear bomb so it could be put on a missile as a warhead, thus enabling it to actually attack U.S. territory with a nuclear weapon.

A word is in order here about the DIA's reliability. It stinks. One example should suffice to prove that the DIA can never be trusted:

During Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran in the 1980s during the Reagan regime, the U.S. sided with Iraq because Iran had been taken over by Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs after overthrowing the U.S.-installed tyrant the Shah. Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi Kurdish villages. The DIA put out a report claiming Iran did it- a pure, conscious lie. In other words, the DIA put out what purported to be an objective, scientific analysis that was pure disinformation serving a hidden U.S. political agenda. And of course, when later Saddam was converted into an enemy, the gassing of the Kurds was hammered over and over as part of the indictment of how evil he was. (The U.S., both government and media, are nothing if not supremely cynical.) Naturally, the fraudulent DIA report was never mentioned again.

And generally, secret police agencies like the DIA are composed of manipulative liars and cynical power mongers, fanatical nationalists and ideologues whose objectivity is, shall we say, somewhat impaired.

As for the current DIA claim that North Korea has already miniaturized atomic bombs, something it was supposedly several years away from doing: Could it be that this is more DIA disinformation, designed to cause trouble? It wouldn't be the first time the U.S. military worked to provoke war. Ever hear of the Tonkin Gulf incident? ("Hoax" would be a more accurate term.) And the DIA is an extremely reactionary organ of the U.S. military. The fanatical Islam-hater Michael Flynn, briefly Trump's "National Security" advisor and now a target for allegedly playing footsie with Russia, was made head of the DIA by Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.

The Deep State, after all, considers itself the True Guardian of the National Interest. Presidents who don't go along with it are either manipulated to get in line, maneuvered around, painted into a corner, or neutralized. So who knows what byzantine plot the DIA may be up to?

Currently the U.S. Congress has been busily tying Trump's hands, forcing him to sign a law imposing additional punitive sanctions on Russia, barring him from firing the special counsel, grand inquisitor Robert Mueller III, and threatening to refuse to allow him to replace the Confederate racist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III as Attorney General. And the Deep State secret police agencies FBI, CIA, and the NSA, a military agency, have been planting damaging "information" against Trump, his family, and his minions, almost daily, in the media.

We just don't know if the DIA report is accurate or not. But the DIA is not trustworthy, so we can't assume one way or the other at this point. [3]

It would be worse than ironic if a nuclear war resulted from the U.S.' own disinformation. But then, the U.S. blew up the Twin Towers plus number 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and ever since has reacted to its own self-provocation with a global jihad against jihadism and the perfection of the world's most complete surveillance state ever.

                                                                               Oooh, scary!

1]  Trump later added a false boast via Twitter, his favorite communication medium, that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is "more powerful than ever." (He does epitomize the unhealthy American obsession with power.) Actually the U.S. nuclear arsenal at its peak numbered 30,000 weapons, consisting of 20,000 strategic weapons and 10,000 "tactical" or "battlefield" nukes, such as atomic land mines, atomic artillery shells, atomic bombs carried in backpacks. The U.S. arsenal has been reduced to around 4,000 strategic weapons- still enough to destroy the world. Typically the atomic bombs are around 300 kilotons each- a kiloton denoting an explosive force equal to a thousand tons of TNT. A megaton is a million tons of TNT- the U.S. used to have megaton-range bombs, but with more accurate delivery systems and multiple bombs per missile warhead and bomber, the greater power was superfluous.

For comparison, the atomic bombs that destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, had estimated yields around 13 and 18 kilotons, respectively. The man who ordered those attacks on a defenseless, defeated nation, Harry S Truman (no period after the S, S wasn't a middle initial, S was the man's middle name, a fact that U.S. propagandists insist on obfuscating by putting an incorrect period where it doesn't belong) announced in part after obliterating Hiroshima, "If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth." How very Trumpian. Or Trump is Trumanesque.

2]  Guam is the site of U.S. military bases that are key to U.S. dominance over the vast Pacific Ocean. Its native inhabitants, ignorant simpletons, join the U.S. military, their conquerors, in large numbers. At some point they were made U.S. citizens, like Puerto Ricans, another U.S. island conquest and colony. Puerto Ricans have been used as U.S. cannon fodder since World War I.

3]  The DIA is the creation of Robert S. McNamara. McNamara, the notorious Vietnam War criminal and Secretary of "Defense" (War) during the regimes of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was jealous of the CIA, and decided to create his own CIA inside the Pentagon, the DIA. (As if the U.S. needed yet another malign secret police organ.) McNamara was supposedly a real intellectual whiz, who headed Ford Motor Company prior to his government "service."

McNamara had experience as a war criminal long before the U.S. destruction of Vietnam, it turned out. We only learned this when McNamara spoke relatively candidly to documentarian Errol Morris. McNamara reminisced about his time as right hand man to general Curtis LeMay, the psychopathic mad bomber, during World War II. LeMay commanded a fleet of giant B-29 bombers (much larger planes than the famous B-17s) which he used to burn 67 Japanese cities to the ground prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (His predecessor resigned the position as he couldn't stomach the requirement to slaughter civilians on a mass scale.) McNamara's role was to calculate the most effective way to torch the cities and immolate their inhabitants.

McNamara relates a particularly damning episode when LeMay said to him that if the U.S. loses the war, he and McNamara would be tried as war criminals.

According to Noam Chomsky, on the day Japan surrendered, LeMay launched a final 1,000 bomber raid on Japan, a particularly vindictive act.

LeMay went on to head the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, the nuclear attack forces of the U.S. Air Force. He was an ardent advocate for nuking the Soviet Union, and later Vietnam. The fact that such psychopaths routinely rise to the top levels of U.S. power is quite revelatory about the nature of the U.S. system.

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.


The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.