The US ran war games on the Korean Peninsula during the entire month of March, and they were not defensive, but rather a practice of “pre-emptive” war. Part of the drill included flying stealth B52’s from Missouri to Korea. Those aircraft are capable of nuclear delivery.
The entire operation is a massive provocation, and North Korea, which has no way of knowing the intent of US war planners, did what any rational actor would do – it responded in kind. They ramped up rhetoric, went into high defense posture, and explained what they were capable of doing at this point – dropping a bomb on Tokyo.
In the US state-controlled media, this is “provocation” by those crazy nuts in the DPRK. We’re rational, they’re not. I’ve looked through the first three pages of Bing search results on the B52 incident, and found that it was reported by two American sources – US News, and Yahoo. In each it was described as a warning in the wake of North Korea’s provocations.
North Korea is an enclave of Stalinism, not that anyone’s ideology is an American concern. State planners can accommodate any form of government as long as it is subservient to American financial interests. That is DPRK’s only crime – they exist outside the neoliberal Wall Street/London financial axis. As with the other remaining outclaves, they are under siege. The US military is a gangster, a racketeer for capitalism.
In the wake of the Korean War, South Korea was preserved as a fascist enclave, not opening up for free elections until 2003. Russian troops left North Korea, as agreed in the post-war armistice, in 1948. The US violated that agreement, occupied the South, and has troops and bases there to this day. The North Korean “invasion” of the South was merely an attempt to achieve what had been agreed to – a unified peninsula under one government.
But the US had known that Kim Il-sung would win should an election be held, and instead declared South Korea an independent country, although occupied and non-democratic. The Korean War, which mostly devastated the South, was fought by Koreans on both sides of the demarcation to drive the Americans out, nothing more. Korea lost.
That is pretty much the Cold War in a nutshell. American planners were frantic that communist propaganda was far more effective than American in former colonies. They felt they had no choice but to resort to violence, to eliminate disease by killing its host organisms. Korea and Vietnam witnessed two of the most brutal bloodbaths of the Post-War era, with perhaps eight million native casualties. Vietnam was Korea, Part II, with a lesser massacre in Indonesia done by proxy.
Historically, North Korea, a rational actor, as always responded in kind to US behaviors. During the Clinton Administration, a near peace was achieved by diplomacy, with the Koreans anxious to cooperate. As soon as Bush II took office, that was trashed and the US went back to threat posture. It has not changed under Bush III.
The object, as with Vietnam, is encirclement of China, perhaps nearly half of the Greatest Game, encirclement of Russia another factor. While Bush III holds symbolic office, the War Department has redeployed global American forces to threaten China, and the last set of provocations need to be seen in that larger picture. Korea is but a pawn.
Will the US sacrifice the Korean Peninsula in the Greater Game? That part of the world is on the rise and is a significant economic threat to Western hegemony.
All that can be said, from a historical perspective, is that the bastards will do anything.
Piece of Mindful 
Perhaps you should have called your rant: Bush N or Truman N because the
piecepeace you seek will come only after you’ve completely lost yourmind</strike pulse.LikeLike
A this point I need a poet to step in and give us a pithy description of stupidity, as my literal interpretations cannot adequately describe it. Say hi to the gang at Cowgirl.
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Induced (Cold War) symptoms keep the system well-lubed, running smoothly. A case of state-sponsored Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy perhaps?
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They were B-2s not B-52s. Perhpas if you search for B-2 and not B-52 you might get better results. And the exercise did not precede the ramp up in clownish smack talking over the last 30-60 days it was ostensibly in response to it. And North Korea did not raise their rhetoric as a direct real time “response” to the exercise “because they did not know the intent” of the US…they did not know the exercise took place until it was over and the US told them about it. They cant detect the B-2 with their radar and would not have known about it unless we told them…and that’s why they were told. They know the exact intent of it…if the intent were to launch a surprise attack (as the North Koreans did in 1950) Pyong Yang would have been a flaming holocaust before they would even know what happened. That is scary.
Nothing is going to happen here. The North Koreans shoot off a rocket, test a nuclear bomb, make some empty threats. We run some military exercises, put on a new round of sanctions, call them crazy. Same old story different day. Both sides benefit.
It is interesting how because of your anti American bias you can so easily justify the DPRK aggression and invasion of the South in 1950, the killing of thousands and thousands of people. It was nothing but a proxy war between the Chinese/Soviet Union and the US/West, neither side more moral than the other. Neither side held anything like a fair election to take power and the very idea of a ‘fair election’ in Korea at the time was joke. They had been dominated and raped as colony of Japan for over five decades. There was nothing like a civil society or an educational system that would support a ‘fair’ election. There was never any promise by the US to abandon the southern peninsula to the communists. The very difference between the quality of life of those in the South and those who reside in the North would seem to support the notion to me that the US actually did the moral thing in refusing to cede the place.
The Chinese had raised a conscript army of over 30,000 koreans to fight Chiang Kai Shek. When that war was over this army was sent to North Korea and with thousands of tons of soviet military equipment formed a quite formidable army. In the South the US military had all but withdrawn leaving a skeleton crew. They thought a quick invasion to take over the place would work, round up anyone who resists, put a bullet in their head and its done. It almost worked. Study the history of the war a little more in depth than reading a few articles on RT.com. They almost won. The US almost decided it wasn’t worth it. Ask yourself if it would be “moral” if we hadn’t and if everyone in South Korea lived in the Stalinist state of the DPRK.
The DPRK are the ones who started the war. They were the aggressors. You brush that aside. But if the South had invaded the North, by God that would have been the crime of the century on this blog. Self reflect on this contradiction in your analysis.
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Let’s break it down:
For my Korean history, I am not relying on any source other than my collected reading over the years. For China, I admire John King Fairbanks. I could be wrong about anything and everything, but find that once I lose Americentrism, contradictions evaporate, and it all makes sense.
Regarding the current situation, ask yourself why a small and weak country deliberately provokes a regional crisis, risking its own survival. If the best you can do is “We’re rational, they are not,” then you have not thought it through. Every country has titular leaders and cadres of advisers and military people that migrate through the ranks to advise them. They make mistakes, of course. JFK and his whiz kids damn near blew up the world. But North Vietnam did not attack the US, nor did Iraq, and DPRK has played a shrewd game for 60 years now. It survived pre-nuke because it had batteries of missiles aimed at Seoul. Any US aggression would have resulted in destruction of that city. Countries do not commit suicide. Credible deterrence is what it is all about, which is why it is perfectly rational for DPRK to want a nuclear arsenal.
And there is a bigger picture – the US will soon bomb Syria, I suppose, and it will be another human catastrophe. Libya is a human catastrophe, and that conflict is spreading now to Mali and Algeria. The BRICS are threatening to supersede the with their own monetary fund. The Euro teeters on the brink. The dollar is heavily reliant on oil. Banks have been injected with free money but still sit atop toxic debris. The world teeters on another downturn as austerity takes hold.
Such situations often result in war. Weak countries do not attack strong ones, but strong ones know how to make it appear so. These are dangerous times, and I assure you, DPRK is not the problem.
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