This Would Work - Wouldn't It?

Donald Trump is going ahead with a planned meeting with Rocket Man, North Korea's Kim Jong Un. Trump wants Kim to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Kim wants to avoid ending up like Muammar Gadaffi. Point well taken.

Trump, being Trump, needs Kim to throw him a bone - something, anything, he can proclaim an outstanding victory when he returns to his base. Here's an idea.

Why doesn't Trump offer Kim a little something, maybe state recognition, in exchange for Kim offering to dismantle his country's longest range missile, the one everyone is afraid could hit Hawaii or even the US mainland.

Kim's long range missile is basically a waste of time. He could launch a couple. Maybe one might get through to some worthwhile target but, before it landed, dozens of proven and very reliable US missiles with their multiple but independently targeted warheads would be enroute to turn North Korea into glass.

It's enough that Kim can maintain a credible threat to South Korea and Japan. That's all he needs for nuclear diplomacy. And Trump gets to come home claiming that he has tamed the monster.

America's Enemy-Industrial Complex

You can own all the locomotives and all the rolling stock in the world but they're useless without tracks.   The same logic holds true for the world's largest, most fearsome military.   What good is it without an ample supply of enemies?

Just as General Motors needs people to buy Chevys, the U.S. military/industrial/commercial warfighting complex needs a world full of potential enemies and, when it runs short, it has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with some imminent threat, no matter how implausible.   Tom Englehardt of Tom Dispatch says the villain of last resort at the moment is some pudgy weirdo from North Korea.

In the previous century, there were two devastating global wars, which left significant parts of the planet in ruins.  There was also a "cold war" between two superpowers locked in a system of mutual assured destruction (aptly acronymed as MAD) whose nuclear arsenals were capable of destroying the planet many times over.  Had you woken up any morning in the years between December 7, 1941, and December 26, 1991, and been told that the leading international candidate for America's Public Enemy Number One was Kim Jong-un’s ramshackle, comic-opera regime in North Korea, you might have gotten down on your hands and knees and sent thanks to pagan gods.

The same would be true for the other candidates for that number one position since September 11, 2001: the original al-Qaeda (largely decimated), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula located in poverty-stricken areas of poverty-stricken Yemen, the Taliban in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, unnamed jihadis scattered across poverty-stricken areas of North Africa, or Iran, another rickety regional power run by not particularly adept theocrats.

...We constantly hear about “threats” to us and to the “homeland.”  And yet, when you knock on the door marked “Enemy,” there’s seldom anyone home.

Few in this country have found this striking.  Few seem to notice any disjuncture between the enemy-ridden, threatening, and deeply dangerous world we have been preparing ourselves for (and fighting in) this last decade-plus and the world as it actually is, even those who lived through significant parts of the last anxiety-producing, bloody century.

Let’s admit it: enemies can have their uses.  And let’s admit as well that it’s in the interest of some in our country that we be seen as surrounded by constant and imminent dangers on an enemy-filled planet.  Let’s also admit that the world is and always will be a dangerous place in all sorts of ways.

 ...And let’s admit as well that, in the wake of [America's recent] wars and operations, Americans now have more enemies, more angry, embittered people who would like to do us harm than on September 10, 2001.  Let’s accept that somewhere out there are people who, as George W. Bush once liked to say, “hate us" and what we stand for.  (I leave just what we actually stand for to you, for the moment.)

...The U.S. ...is probably in less danger from external enemies than at any moment in the last century.  There is no other imperial power on the planet capable of, or desirous of, taking on American power directly, including China.  It’s true that, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers with box cutters produced a remarkable, apocalyptic, and devastating TV show in which almost 3,000 people died.  When those giant towers in downtown New York collapsed, it certainly had the look of nuclear disaster (and in those first days, the media was filled was nuclear-style references), but it wasn’t actually an apocalyptic event.

Creating an Enemy-Industrial Complex

Without an enemy of commensurate size and threat, so much that was done in Washington in these years might have been unattainable.  The vast national security building and spending spree -- stretching from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency erected its new $1.8 billion headquarters, to Bluffdale, Utah, where the National Security Agency is still constructing a $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center for storing the world’s intercepted communications -- would have been unlikely.

Without the fear of an enemy capable of doing anything, money at ever escalating levels would never have poured into homeland security, or the Pentagon, or a growing complex of crony corporations associated with our weaponized safety.  The exponential growth of the national security complex, as well as of the powers of the executive branch when it comes to national security matters, would have far been less likely.

Englehardt has written a compelling and timely article and it's well worth checking out in its entirety.  Even for Canadians it serves as a cautionary tale of what lies in store for nations who sign on as America's Foreign Legion which is pretty much what the F-35 is all about.

Forget about the cost of that goddamned airplane or all of its delays and shortcomings - forget about all the crap you hear from the opposition parties in Ottawa.   They haven't got the guts to talk about what's really important in the F-35 debate, the outsourcing of Canada's military and foreign policy.   And even the Australians have figured out that's a dangerous and high-risk gambit.

Did a Human Torpedo Sink a South Korean Ship?

The Associated Press is reporting that a warning was issued earlier this year that North Korea was planning a suicide submarine attack on a South Korean naval vessel in retaliation for an earlier naval engagement which the north lost.

On Thursday, the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported the Korea Defense Intelligence Command alerted the navy weeks ahead of the ship sinking that North Korea was preparing underwater suicide teams in mini-submarines to attack the South.

These "human torpedo" squads were said to involve small submarines navigated so close to the target that their torpedoes or explosives blow up both target and the attackers, or are timed to explode while the attackers escape from the vehicle, the report said.

The attack preparations were aimed at retaliating against the South over its defeat in a naval skirmish in November, the paper said. The site of the sinking is near where the rival Koreas fought three times since 1999, most recently a November clash that left one North Korean soldier dead and three others wounded.

It Doesn't Add Up

If we've learned one thing from that gang of right-wing mongrels in the White House, it's that we ought to take their claims with a truckload of salt. How can I put this respectfully? Oh yeah, they're a pack of manipulative frauds and liars (no wonder Harper adores them so).

So where is the healthy skepticism toward the latest White House claim that Syria, aided by North Korea, was building a nuclear reactor for the production of weapons of mass destruction until it was - blessedly - destroyed by the Israeli Air Force last year? The western media are swallowing this one quite happily, like trusting little children. No one is stepping back from this narrative, taking a careful look and asking just why it doesn't add up?

It doesn't add up.

The story is that Syria, with North Korean collusion, was constructing a secret weapons reactor in the middle of the desert. There's your first clue that this doesn't add up. A "secret" reactor in the midst of a "desert"?

How does any nation do anything secretly in a desert? If there's one place you can't hide anything of any size it's a desert. Now, unless the Syrians are complete morons they would know that their region is under constant satellite surveillance. They would have to know their every move would be observed, tracked and analyzed.

A nuclear reactor requires a building with unique design and construction. It's the sort of thing the computers that digest satellite imagery can spot instantly. A nuclear reactor doesn't look anything like the new 7-11 they built down the street last year. A nuclear reactor looks like - why it looks just like a nuclear reactor!

A nuclear reactor requires a lot of infrastructure - massive amounts of electricity, water, etc. Those aren't the sorts of things you'll readily find in the middle of a barren desert. That means you would have to build roads and power lines and water lines that would stand out in a desert and would lead the observer to ask, "hey, what are these for?" You can also follow them right to this big structure in the middle of the desert and say "hey, what is this?"

With satellite imagery capable of reading licence plates from space, concealing anything - any equipment, any structure, any activity - at a place of interest is extremely difficult even if it's not in the middle of a barren desert. In a desert, however, that goes from "extremely difficult" to "damned nigh impossible."

Another wee problem with building such an obvious target in the middle of the desert is that it makes targeting it a snap. There are no box canyons, no sheltering mountain slopes, just wide open spaces that allow an attacker to come from anywhere and make the target easy to locate and attack and difficult, if not impossible, to defend.

Okay, so maybe the Syrians are dumb as mules but the North Koreans sure aren't. They know a thing or nine about American satellite imagery and they've had decades to learn how to get around it. They also know that getting caught building a weapons reactor abroad would have enormous consequences for them.

So, take all these things together. You can't disguise what you're building, you can't hide it, you can't defend it, you know you're going to be watched and under constant surveillance and yet, poor as you may be, you're going to build a very expensive weapons reactor in this most unlikely of places knowing full well it's going to be destroyed and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.

And that's the narrative Washington has sold to the western media. Dumb, dumber and dumbest.

Here's something else to dwell on. Just what is Washington up to? Why are Bush/Cheney running this particular scam at this particular time? These things do happen for a reason but the recesses of the mind of Dick Cheney are a damned dark place to go looking for one.

p.s. The pic above is Israel's Dimona weapons reactor.