Tag: North Korea

SpinDown: How Russia Does It and How the US Empire Does It

Russian Military Police – Observation Post in Syria

The process of spinning down a conflict is a lot harder than spinning it up. It seems that after years of destabilizing various areas of the world, the US has no patience for the spin-down process.

Notice how Russia patiently waited for Syria’s request for assistance, and once expectations were matched (as peers would do), the process would evolve in a strategy that maximizes stability throughout the spin-down process. This is basic project management.

Russia was aware that Syria was battling terrorism in their country starting in 2011 and was supporting Syria behind the scenes (while the US/Israel/Saudi Arabia/UK was supporting ISIS behind the scenes) for FOUR years until Assad requested direct Russian military assistance in 2015. Here we are three years later and without carpet bombing or napalm, Syria with Russia’s and Iran’s assistance have throttled back the terror impact inside Syria methodically. This is a five year plan that differs from the US approach in that Russia does not intend to stay past its welcome. This is what friends do, we don’t perpetually parent our friends for 20, 40 or 60 years or more!

The US was heavily involved in spinning up the North Korean conflict in 1950 through 1953 when a cease-fire was agreed on. The US has done nothing but exploit the situation with the North Koreans over the past 65 years. Through this process, South Korea has totally depended on the US military like welfare recipients depend on Uncle Sam, they might be grateful but they will never respect the entity/empire. All it takes is for the gravy train to end and the relationship goes south in a hurry. Does the same hold true in Japan, Germany, and Taiwan? You bet it does. It seems that the US Empire needs a strong military at all costs, because a bully doesn’t have any friends if he doesn’t have any fists! We have long ago overstayed our welcome as we are that enabler parent that will not let the kid grow up!

I was hopeful that President Trump, having accomplished a visit to North Korea in the spring of 2018 might have broken out of the dysfunctional funk that has plagued US negotiations and treaty performance (the American Indians know real well how that goes). Whether it is Trump’s inability at guiding his staff to build on his goodwill OR it is just part of the “art of negotiations”, Moon of Alabama gets to the core of the issue in this article:

Now Pompeo came to Pyongyang and asked for details about North Korea’s nuclear program and how it plans to abandon it. As far as we know he did not talk about point 1, the “establishment of new US-DPRK relations” which would include the opening of embassies and economic engagement. He did not talk about point 2, “a lasting and stable peace regime” i.e. a peace treaty. He did not talk about 3a, the “security guarantees to the DPRK”. The only item he talked about was 3b, the last item on the list.

Really? Is this the best that Team Trump can offer? I have to give it to North Korea for their part in some truth-telling to the US bully empire:

As for the issue of announcing the declaration of the end of war at an early date, it is the first process of defusing tension and establishing a lasting peace regime on the Korean peninsula, and at the same time, it constitutes a first factor in creating trust between the DPRK and the U.S. This issue was also stipulated in Panmunjom Declaration as a historical task to terminate the war status on the Korean peninsula which continues for nearly 70 years. President Trump, too, was more enthusiastic about this issue at the DPRK-U.S. summit talks.

That is mature, that is the ability to be critical of the staff that was supposed to follow through on his boss’ success while still giving the boss credit for what he started to accomplish.

Valuable agreement was reached in such a short time at the Singapore summit talks first ever in the history of the DPRK-U.S. relations. This is attributable to the fact that President Trump himself said he would move towards resolving the DPRK-U.S. relations and the issue of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a new way.
If both sides at the working level reneged on the new way agreed at the summit and returned to the old way, the epoch-making Singapore summit would be meaningless … We still cherish our good faith in President Trump.

The U.S. should make a serious consideration of whether the toleration of the headwind against the wills of the two top leaders would meet the aspirations and expectations of the world people as well as the interests of its country.

Wow. Has the US ever responded this way? The Golden Rule as Ron Paul would say, would go a long ways in sustaining peaceful and respectable relationships with other countries. I think there is more money to be made in war however:

Beyond this July 2018 dialog, it seems that the US Media has joined in following in the footsteps that the Trump administration left off, further criticizing of the North Koreans. I honestly think they believe that they don’t have a chance in getting their war in Syria liked they wanted and since much of the US naval fleet is in the Western Pacific anyway, why not just rattle some cages on that side of the world for a while. Sick!

Moon of Alabama in this recent article shares how the US Media / US Government Propaganda Machine is selling its fake news:

A Washington Post editorial today laments that the Singapore negotiations have given North Korea too much. It urges Trump further into the blind alley he already finds himself in:

The administration’s best hope of rescuing the situation is to return to talking with North Korea about an equitable tradeoff. To start the process of denuclearization, U.S. officials say the Kim regime must provide a complete inventory of its assets — warheads, production facilities and other nuclear infrastructure — and agree to inspections to verify it. Previous negotiations have broken down because of Pyongyang’s refusal to take this step, so a full disclosure would provide the first clear signal that Mr. Kim was serious about denuclearization. That, along with a freeze in the production of missiles and fissile materials, could justify U.S. participation in the end-of-conflict declaration the two Koreas are seeking.

This is exactly what Trump and his water carrier Pompeo are doing. They demand that North Korea bows to whatever the U.S. wishes without assuring it of a significant quid pro quo. If the U.S. can not even stick to simple agreements, like the Singapore Statement, why should North Korea believe any verbal assurance of vague steps the U.S. might take after it disarms?

The only way out of this is for the U.S. to offer and sign a peace treaty that finally brings the Korea War to an official end. There is only one alternatives to that. A return U.S. strategic maneuvers, which Defense Secretary Mattis just now announced, followed up by North Korea with new nuclear and missile tests, possibly combined in a launch towards Guam.

This is a bi-polar dysfunctional American empire that is “high” on itself, the old “American Exceptionalism” disease. Our kids and grand-kids will not benefit from this type of behavior in future generations.

If we even think about some of the more US’s recent interventions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the attempt in Syria and elsewhere to lesser degrees), one has to wonder how long can this go on? Is this dysfunctional empire going to be able to “spin-down” any country where it is better off for the process of being led to “democracy”?

Unlike Russia, it seems that the US planning is only one step deep, intervene in a big way, and then let the chips fall where they may, so that in the destabilized environment Uncle Sam’s services will be needed for generations. Job security.

Uncle Sam needs an “intervention”!

-SF1

North Korea: Another Country Misunderstood? (Do You Still Listen to US Govt/Media?)

I do hope that this is what you picture when you hear “North Korea”. The darkness on the Korean peninsula is in fact the country of North Korea, and we (USA) helped.

You might think “they deserve it”, that they are “evil” (as if you believe George W. Bush when he said):

… but he also said Iraq had WMDs (of course what he didn’t say is that we GAVE Iraq these in the 1980s and expected that they were still there).

What if what you know about North Korea has been mainly a government/media spin that didn’t just start in 2017 when North Korea toyed with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It didn’t start in 2002 either when President Bush lumped them in with Iran and Iran. So what did North Korea do?

Like in my previous post about Iran, we need to go back a few years, a few decades actually to really get a big picture of how North Korea has actually behaved or misbehaved.

One year ago in this Anti-Media article, Darius Shahtahmasebi shared in part:

In the early 1950s, the U.S. bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and eventually killing off perhaps 20 percent of the country’s population. As noted by the Asia Pacific Journal, the U.S. dropped so many bombs that they eventually ran out of targets to hit:

“By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.”

While “technically” a United Nations action, the US Congress never declared war on North Korea, and yet technically, North Korea is still at war. Once a cease-fire was agreed to, North Korea faded into the “dark” (see picture at the top of this post) not unlike Cuba.

Going back even farther, you will better understand the real tragedy as Eric Margolis points out in this Lew Rockwell article:

In 1950, at the time of the Korean War, North Korea’s economy was larger than that of South Korea thanks to Japan’s colonial industrial policies. Korea’s Communists, like their allies in China, took the lead in fighting Japanese occupation. America suffered heavy casualties fighting North Korean forces.

To many Koreans, particularly young ones, North Korea is the authentic Korea while South Korea remains a well-off but politically powerless American semi-protectorate. The humiliating collapse and impeachment of South Korea’s first female president, scandal-ridden Park Geun-hye, only reinforces the South’s image as a rudderless ship in stormy seas.

Wow, so who is the “grown-up” now? South Korea with all the lights is but an obedient kid to the American Empire while North Korea attempts to almost go it alone. Its 60 warheads (only one-fourth of what Israel has) are its only asset (i.e. gun) in negotiating anything in this world these days.

The US Empire in typical fashion can’t seem to let this chapter go as the US is passionate about proving itself as the world’s policeman. Eric Margolis share from this Lew Rockwell article some tough truth about the US “mismanagement” of past “regimes” that do not want to play “ball” with the American Empire:

After Washington overthrew the rulers of Iraq and Libya, it became painfully apparent that small nations without nuclear weapons were vulnerable to US ‘regime change’ operations. The North Koreans, who are very eccentric but not stupid, rushed to accelerate their nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Almost equally important, North Korea boasts one of the word’s biggest armies – 1,020,000 men, 88,000 crack special forces, and an trained militia of over 5 million. The North’s weapons are obsolescent; its small air forces and navy will be vaporized by US power but its troops are deeply dug into the mountainous terrain and would be fighting from prepared positions. War against North Korea would be a slow and bloody slog– even a repeat of the bloody, stalemated 1950-52 Korean War in which 39,000 Americans and at least 2.5 million Koreans died. I’ve been in the deep North Korean-dug tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone. A full division can be moved through in only 60 minutes.

Ever since being soundly beaten in Vietnam and fought to a draw in Afghanistan, the US military has preferred to attack small countries like Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon is not eager to tangle with the tough North Koreans. Estimates of the cost of a US invasion of North Korea have run as high as 250,000 US casualties and tens of billions of dollars.

So now what? Why can’t we leave North and South Korea alone to resolve their differences and maybe capitalize on their similarities? Well how about pure economics, the true source of peaceful relations in the long haul as outlined in this Russia Today article:

The project to unite the Korean Peninsula with a gas pipeline has been discussed for a long time, but official talks started in 2011. The negotiations were frozen after relations between Seoul and Pyongyang deteriorated.

In March, Seoul announced that it is ready to resume the project. According to South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha “if the North participates in talks on Northeast Asia energy cooperation, it would serve as a catalyst that helps ease geopolitical tensions in the region.”

It is things like that that give me hope that cooler heads will prevail and that the true free market could improve the lives of some many people all around the globe. Just LEAD US Empire .. or get out of the way!

-SF1

Lookin’ for War in All the Wrong Places ..

OK, I guess that was off by one word .. right? I would much rather have love and peace, however, this is a very broken world where Jesus promised (Matthew 24 in The Message – a paraphrase):

When reports come in of wars and rumored wars, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history; this is no sign of the end. Nation will fight nation and ruler fight ruler, over and over. Famines and earthquakes will occur in various places. This is nothing compared to what is coming.

“They are going to throw you to the wolves and kill you, everyone hating you because you carry my name. And then, going from bad to worse, it will be dog-eat-dog, everyone at each other’s throat, everyone hating each other.

“In the confusion, lying preachers will come forward and deceive a lot of people. For many others, the overwhelming spread of evil will do them in—nothing left of their love but a mound of ashes.

“Staying with it—that’s what God requires. Stay with it to the end. You won’t be sorry, and you’ll be saved. All during this time, the good news—the Message of the kingdom—will be preached all over the world, a witness staked out in every country. And then the end will come.

So while my mission is to let you in on what might really be happening in this world using the ability to enter “a place to entertain a thought without accepting it”. There is no need to panic, but instead consider these events in context and in your own time consider what type of planning is appropriate for yourself, your family and your friends.

Today, I am looking at a very macro picture of where the United States is at this point of an “empire’s life”. With recent ramp-up in the accusations against Iran and North Korea initially as early as Bush II declaring them part of the “Axis of Evil” it is Trump now that is expanding this to include Russia and China.

So what happened? Why is having enemies (totally fabricated, as neither Iran nor North Korea EVER attacked the United States) like tier 2 like Iran and NK not enough? Maybe because they have the military strength below that of Iraq, Libya and Syria and Trump wants to take it up a notch. Actually, maybe yet again (just like FDR in the late 1930s), frustration with domestic programs leads to a desire for war which causes everyone to think like Bush II “you are either for us or against us”. Then we can wave the flag and be happy when we entice either China or Russia to “surprise” attack the US. This is as old as Fort Sumter and Abe Lincoln, ala, let THEM fire the first shot!

So the nitty-gritty comes this time from Moon of Alabama in this article where Trump has now linked a Chinese trade agreement with some treaty with North Korea.  I call b*lls**t on this, since when does a leader have to re-define some potential treaty, except from a point of weakness. I believe that the Chinese were willing to trade more with BRICS:

… than with the US/NATO nations. We have effectively gone back to the 1960s in world affairs probably because the MIC wants a guarantee of much more military spending globally to solidify their stocks in the impending economic storm.

Here is some of what Moon of Alabama is seeing:

Pompeo was in Trump’s office when Trump tweeted the above. Staff in the State Department was briefing foreign ambassadors on Pompeo’s upcoming talks, planned for next week, when Trump stepped in. The decision was clearly a surprise.

Trump is suddenly binding the continuation of Korea talks to a trade deal with China. Such a deal is unlikely to happen anytime soon as China is convinced that it can win a tariff war, while the Trump administration overestimates the economic pressure it can create. That Trump now connects these two issues might mean that he has given up the “denuclearization” game.

In this global chess match, the people “on the ground” suffer. Peace in the Korean Peninsula might cause unification which does not play into the American Empire’s narrative. Washington DC thrives on wars and rumors of wars and has its CIA embedded around the world just to make sure the pot continues to be stirred.

Peter Lee, aka Chinahand, sees a larger plan behind the latest Trumping: to demonstrate to Kim Jong-un that China is hindering Kim’s plans for a peace agreement and for economic development; then, when China will finally be pushed into open adversary status to the U.S., Kim Jong-un will have to chose and will end up in the U.S. camp. If that is really Trump’s plan, which I doubt, then it is clearly bound to fail. North Korea would never end the relations with its long-term strategic partner for the dangerous vagueness of a nuclear treaty relations with the U.S. (see Iran, Libya).

It is true that the US character is known around the world as BOT, the Breaker of Treaties .. something the Native Americans know all too well.

Despite the evident agreement in the Statement to follow a sequence of several steps, the Trump administration has been deceptive about it. After the Singapore Statement it again demanded from North Korea to take step 3 before the U.S. takes step 1 and 2. The administration also continues to falsely claim that North Korea agreed to “denuclearization”. On August 28, when Secretary of State introduced a new special representative for North Korea, he said:

“Steve [Biegun] will direct U.S. policy towards North Korea and lead our efforts to achieve President Trump’s goal of the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea, as agreed to by Chairman Kim Jong-un.”

Chairman Kim Jong-un never agreed to such a thing.

The U.S. media, even those outlets which oppose the Trump regime, support the falsehoods the administration is spreading. They fail to point out the obvious sequencing agreed to in the Singapore Statement and they fail to point out the aspirational character of the disarmament point. Instead of holding Trump’s feet to the fire for breaking an agreement he himself signed just a few month ago, the New York Times, Washington Post and others seem to support his stand.

The Trump negotiations with North Korea were in the end probably just an attempt to get some fast success before the big clash with China over global supremacy finally enters a more serious stage.

Moon of Alabama hits the nail on the head with this. In fact, in spite of sanctions and tariffs, both China and Russia are stronger every day economically, and both governments spend MUCH less in military spending and yet have a lot more to show for it. The American Empire is hoping that either China or Russia will react to this bully-prodding for a fight but I do believe they have learned from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria what Washington DC is up to as it is mired in epic debt up to its eyeballs.

In summary, MoA writes:

Who in the White House is making these policies? Trump’s tweets yesterday seem spontaneous, but are carefully formulated and obviously part of some larger plans. Are these Trump’s plans? Or have the hawks -Bolton, Mattis, Pompeo- written these up to push Trump along their lines?

We may never know, but now YOU know, probably more than you wanted to know.

Research it yourself, or as Royal Caribbean might say, “get out there!”

SF1

More On US Sanctions – Will This Knee-Jerk Reaction Lead toward USD/Empire Demise?

From Iceland (where it is much safer to say the truth), The Saker article “Sanctions, Sanctions, Sanctions – the Final Demise of the Dollar Hegemony?” by Peter Koenig takes on this trend from all angles and states the obvious:

They [sanctions] are made to punish countries, nations, that refuse to bend to a world dictatorship.

Even ZeroHedge said back ten days ago:

… the relative surge in China’s ‘petroyuan’ futures contract overnight could suggest a shift away from the petrodollar to avoid US sanctions on Iranian oil..

A picture of USD hegemony:

.. and a picture of a significant shift:

So what is Peter Koenig saying? Here are a few interesting clips:

… Looks like everybody accepts this new economic warfare as the new normal. Nobody objects. And the United Nations, the body created to maintain Peace, to protect our globe from other wars, to uphold human rights – this very body is silent – out of fear? Out of fear that it might be ‘sanctioned’ into oblivion by the dying empire? – Why cannot the vast majority of countries – often it is a ratio of 191 to 2 (Israel and the US) – reign-in the criminals?  ..

You see, sanctions ARE effectively the first strike in most every war, from Gulf War I and II back to WWII with both Germany and Japan. It is rare when sanctions do not result in war because of the stress it brings on a nation’s people that causes politicians to panic into “doing something”.

Now doing something might not mean specific military actions, but maybe just imprisoning some criminals (US’s CIA) that are in various countries:

What if Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China – and many more countries not ready to bow to the empire, would jail all those spies embedded in the US Embassies or camouflaged in these countries’ national (financial) institutions, acting as Fifth Columns, undermining their host countries’ national and economic policies? – Entire cities of new jails would have to be built to accommodate the empire’s army of criminals.

Interesting times ahead for sure. But when a bully empire operates on lies, the patience of these nations will be tested. What of the American people? Well, the last line of this paragraph shows what we have become:

Imagine Russia – more sanctions were just imposed for alleged and totally unproven (to the contrary: disproven) Russian poisoning of four UK citizens with the deadly nerve agent, Novichok – and for not admitting it. This is a total farce, a flagrant lie, that has become so ridiculous, most thinking people, even in the UK, just laugh about it. Yet, Trump and his minions in Europe and many parts of the world succumb to this lie – and out of fear of being sanctions, they also sanction Russia. What has the world become? – Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, would be proud for having taught the important lesson to the liars of the universe: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of Pigs”. That’s what we have become – a herd of pigs.

Actually, I have known pigs, and they are even smarter than dogs. Suffice it to say, the American people in general are sheep .. stupid and aimless, scared to be without someone telling them what to do every day or every hour (daddy / mommy government and its media).

So if the American people are dumb, what about its leaders? Well, there is a history there .. and if you knew it all you would NEVER trust the US government again. Consider just one parallel, Venezuela = Chile:

… Venezuela is struggling to get out of this dilemma which has people suffering, by de-dollarizing her economy, partly through a newly created cryptocurrency, the Petro, based on Venezuela’s huge oil reserves and also through a new Bolivar – in the hope of putting the breaks on the spiraling bursts of inflation. This scenario reminds so much of Chile in 1973, when Henry Kissinger was Foreign Secretary (1973-1977), and inspired the CIA coup, by “disappearing” food and other goods from Chilean markets, killing legitimately elected President Allende, bringing Augusto Pinochet, a horrendous murderer and despot to power. The military dictatorship regime brought the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of people and lasted until 1990…

I think the CIA would love to get back into South America this way .. as they are getting back into Africa after too much attention has been drawn to its Middle East collusion with Israel, Saudi Arabia and UK with ISIS. Peter Koenig goes on to state the facts about Iran, North Korea and China and the inability for the US to ever abide by treaties it is involved with for any real length of time .. just ask the American Indians:

The bottom line is a rot that is the swamp:

… What is really transpiring is that Washington is isolating itself, that the one-polar world is moving towards a multipolar world, one that increasingly disregards and disrespects the United States, despises her bullying and warmongering – killing and shedding misery over hundreds of millions of people, most of them defenseless children, women and elderly, by direct military force or by proxy-led conflicts – Yemen is just one recent examples, causing endless human suffering to people who have never done any harm to their neighbors, let alone to Americans. Who could have any respect left for such a nation, called the United States of America, for the people behind such lying monsters? ..

Our national character is mud. Our legacy means once the empire starts dying there will be a piling on of other countries demanding revenge on this nation who by then will be led by our kids and grand-kids. We will not have followed Thomas Paine’s advice:

SF1