Tag: peace

1780OCT – War Amongst Us, What is that Like?

I do believe it is easy for those insulated from war to have no clue as to the short and long term impact of war on people and society. Many of the politicians, generals and admirals remain out of harms way while giving orders to troops on the ground, in the air and on the oceans treating all of this like a video game. At the end of the day they return to their suburban Northern Virginia homes have been able to compartmentalize their day’s decisions that negatively impacted hundreds if not thousands of men and women not counting tens of thousands innocent men, women and children and the lands and societies they have to deal with on a daily basis. American foreign policy is the root negative issue in most parts of this globe while free market forces are solving poverty and other societal issues worldwide in a positive light.

Returning to the 1780 South Carolina colony that is seeking independence in federation with 12 other American colonies from British rule, if one only reads and understands the dates, stats and facts of the various expeditions the British regulars, American Continentals, and militias on both sides accomplished, one misses understanding what it was like for the average family that endured this 7 or 8 year war that was not regulated to far away fields of battle but took place ‘amongst’ us [movie “The Patriot” clip]:

To learn a “Tier 1” only history about a regional conflict only exposes the tip of the iceberg.  Tier 1, if done right should tease readers and listeners to ask questions about Tier 2, a deeper insight into the daily life of the people involved and how it changed the communities involved.

Americans learn Tier 1 in this history classes in schools, Tier 2 requires one to invest the time to seek out deeper understanding, the ability to enter that period of time IN CONTEXT to fully adsorb what was won and what was lost. In the movie “The Patriot”, only the positives were communicated:

The feel good ending to this movie can only allow reality to counterbalance this by investigating, CSI if you will, how free American colonists were before and after the war. While Benjamin Martin (fictitious character that was the combination of three South Carolina militia leaders Pickens, Sumter and Marion) seems to be doing much better, Francis Marion would tell you differently, and that would be even BEFORE the end of this war!

One of the richest insights can be gained by a read of John Oller’s 2016 book “The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution“.  I have included a few clips below that related directly to the posts I have had about October 1780 recently (here, here and here):

With the quieting of the Tory threat east of Camden, Marion sat at Ami’s Mill pondering his next move. On October 4 he confessed to Gates that he had suffered many fatigues over the previous few weeks but had managed to surmount them. He had never had more than sixty or seventy men with him of all ranks, and sometimes as few as a dozen. In some cases he had been forced to fight against men who had left him to join the enemy; he regretted that he had no authority to punish them. If he had a hundred men from Gates’s army, he thought, he could “certainly pay a visit to Georgetown” and attack the British garrison there. But Gates had answered none of his letters—

So early in October, Marion felt very alone after the three wins his militia had in late September that kept the British distracted from rolling up the colonies towards Virginia and eventually toward Washington’s Continentals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey while British General Clinton totally controlled the port of New York with his troops. It had been a stalemate in the north for months now.

Marion also felt the shift in what his leadership skills had to adjust to in commanding Continental regulars who obey verses volunteer militia that could quit at anytime ESPECIALLY if a command was given that the men did not agree with. I contend that this keeps leadership personnel honest and weeds out “management” personnel who are only worried about the status quo and their own position in the politics of things.

Brilliantly, Marion makes yet another bold move ..

Marion decided to make a little probing incursion against Georgetown anyway. He heard that Micajah Ganey, the Tory whose force he had bested at the Blue Savannah, was in Georgetown to reinforce the British garrison there. On October 9 Marion entered the city unmolested with forty men on horse and, once inside, issued a rather audacious demand to the garrison commander to surrender.

So if you have been reading my Tier 1 posts, you thought that Francis Marion and the men that remained with him took three week off from the conflict when in fact, they did venture into “British occupied territory” to harass the Redcoats!

While the British did not surrender …

Before leaving, however, and to show the enemy he was a force to be reckoned with—or just to show off—he took his men on a little parade through the town. They made off with a few horses and some of the enemy’s equipment and captured several notable Tory military men whom Marion immediately paroled to their homes. If nothing else, Marion served notice that if the British wanted to hold the second-largest population center in South Carolina, they would need to keep men and resources tied down there. “This damned Georgetown business,” as the British called it, would prove an unwelcome distraction for months to come.

Marion again attempts communication in his chain of command:

Marion reported to Gates on his little foray, saying he wished to hear from him as soon as possible, for he had received no word from him in a month. As Marion explained, this lack of information forced him to act with extreme caution lest he fall into the enemy’s hands. He closed by asking Gates to excuse his “scrawl,” as he had no table to write on in “this wild woods.” (Sometimes he lacked even paper to write on, which placed a premium on brevity.)

So here you get a little insight into JUST Marion’s world (Tier 2), not even his neighbors miles away near the St. Mark’s district closer to Kingstree, the shopkeepers in Georgetown or anywhere else in South Carolina.

If you wonder why Marion might have targeted Georgetown, you do know that as a teenager he attempted being a sailor and sailed out of Georgetown decades before right? Oh that Tier 2 knowledge sure does help with the context of things. You will find that Marion has a heart for the strategic importance of this port and what it would mean to the patriot cause. However, he was well aware of his limits and would not place his few men in harms way for his dream.

I do hope you are now even more curious about what made this militia leader tick .. if so, welcome aboard!

-SF1

Calm and Peace in Syria: No Thanks to the US Empire

Syrian/Russian controlled territory in Syria (pink) ISIS/Extremists/Turkish territory in Syria (green) Kurdish territory in Syria (yellow)

This is not a Russian spin zone, this is just the truth. There is calm and peace holding its own around Idlib where ISIS and other radical elements remain but are in the processes of moving out with the protection of the Turkey military presence. This arrangement was accomplished with Russian and Syrian efforts in building a buffer zone to diffuse conflicts between forces that have been at war with each other for over 7 years.

The Moon of Alabama article makes it clear that finally the Arab nations in the region that had supported these extremists have now given up on their plan to overthrow Assad.

The Gulf Arabs, except Qatar which is allied with Turkey, have given up on removing President Assad and are making nice:

“In one of the more surprising developments amid a flurry of diplomatic meetings surrounding the U.N. General Assembly, Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmad al-Khalifa was seen greeting Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem with hugs and kisses at a pan-Arab meeting last week. Bahrain, a close ally of Saudi Arabia, has been a vocal critic of Assad and other regional allies of Iran, but the top diplomat said: “the Syrian government is the ruler in Syria and we work with countries even if we disagree with them.” Days later, Assad conducted his first interview with an Arabian Peninsula newspaper since 2011, telling Kuwait’s Al-Shahed that he had reached a “major understanding” with a number of Arab states and that “Western and Arab delegations have already begun to come to Syria to arrange their return, whether diplomatic, economic or industrial.”..”

Assad in Syria has been patient with the process and personally I think that the resignation of the US Empire’s UN Representative Haley is linked to to the closing of this front in the empire’s war on sovereign countries that desire to remain independent from the US. Eyes are now turning toward the Ukraine (which has been the plan B to bug the Russians) and the South China Sea.

Assad has certainly done his part to start the healing process in Syria:

The Syrian president Bashar al Assad just issued a decree that grants amnesty to those who deserted the army or ran away from serving their conscription time. If the deserters and draft dodgers turn themselves in within the next six month to fulfill their service they will escape all punishment.

I do hope that US/Israel/SaudiArabia/UK take the hint and know that they need to take their war making plans elsewhere. This region of the world has born the brunt of this criminal activity and need decades to recover.

The blowback to the US foreign policy I see is that now Russia has a trusted ally in the region and now has a Mediterranean Naval port to boot. The US can no longer do what it wants in Syria and get away with it.

It looks like Africa is now seeing an uptick in US armed forces and CIA/FBI activity as another place to “play” with people’s lives. It is sad that a majority of Americans who pay for all this global gallivanting are clueless to what its government is all about.

Dysfunctional empires will have sick agendas, this ain’t no exceptional nation no sir, no ma’am ..

-SF1

Did Israel (France, UK, US) Just Overplay Their Hand in Syria?

17SEP2018 Russian MOD Map – Syrian coastline (Red) Russian IL-20 AWACS Surveillance Plane Route (Blue) Israeli F-16 and French naval ship actions

To understand the chess match (yes, leaders of the “free” world are sociopaths who love this “game” that involves other people’s lives) that is being played out on the world’s stage I will be drawing from various sources for this post:

  • Pat Buchanan’s article from Lew Rockwell
  • Moon of Alabama’s article
  • Robert Bridge article from Strategic Culture share on Lew Rockwell

[NOTE: A good researcher pulls from various sources and also thinks critically about the situation at hand before sharing their own thoughts]

From a high level view a few days later it becomes clear that Putin took a lot of heat from those in Syria as well in his own country in not retaliating against the actions of the west in the Mediterranean Sea near Syria this past week. I think of the mechanical operation of a ratchet, using rather small moves one can over time place a lot of torque on a situation IF one is patient and in the end have the upper hand.

Moon of Alabama, who follows the events in the Middle East so very well (I highly recommend a site visit there and IF you feel inclined, please do considering supporting that site) has a great overview of the political milestones that led up to this moment where a Russian propeller plane is accidentally shot down by a Syrian S-200 missile site that was focused on an Israeli F-16 that was shadowing the Russian IL-20 AWACS-like plane. Less than 24 hours prior to this setup:

Turkey and Russia agreed on a further de-escalation in Idelb province in Syria (see the update here). This agreement takes away the chance of an imminent wider war in which the U.S. and some of its allies would use a fake ‘chemical attack’ as a pretext to launch missiles against a large number of Syrian government targets and military positions.

.. peace was about to break out in Syria. However:

A peaceful solution of the Idleb situation is unsatisfying for Israel. The successful Syrian defeat of the Jihadi enemy inside the country would allow Syria and its allies to concentrate their forces against Israel. Israel wants the Syrian government destroyed and the country in chaos.

On Sunday September 16 Israel tried to hit an Iranian Boeing 747 freight plane at Damascus airport. The plane allegedly carried an Iranian copy of the Russian S-300 long range air defense System for the Syrian army.

Imagine any country in this world that can get away with attacking INSIDE another sovereign country and getting away with it. I can only think of two countries, Israel and the United States of America.

On Monday around 10:00pm local time 4 F-16 jets of the Israeli airforce, coming from the sea, launched missiles against at least three targets on Syria’s coast. The strike came only hours after Israel released satellite images of what it called “strategic targets” in Syria. The integrated Syrian and Russian air-defenses responded.

The Israeli air force had warned the Russian forces in Syria only one minute before the strike. A Russian IL-20 electronic warfare airplane (red line) was preparing to land at the Russian airport near Latakia just as the Israeli attack (blue) happened.

Israel chose to give a 60 second warning that could never be enough time for the IL-20 propeller plane to clear out of an area to a safer zone. Israel knew this but wanted to provoke the “Bear” so as not to loose even more strategic ground in the Middle East for their “defense”. Israel has chosen this path, and there will be blowback.

The IL-20 was hit 35 kilometers off the coast by a S-200 air-defense missile fired by the Syrian military towards the Israeli attack. There were 15 Russian soldiers on board of the plane which were likely all killed.

The Israeli attack came out of the same direction as the Russian IL-20. The large 4 propeller plane creates a much bigger radar reflection than the small F-16s fighter jets. The S-200 missiles have a semi-active radar homing seeker. These are passive detectors of a radar signal which is provided by an external source, in this case the Syrian and Russian radars on the ground. While the missile was aimed at the F-16 its seeker likely mistook the larger radar reflection of IL-20 for the intended target.

At the same time as the Israeli air force attacked, a Russian frigate (red) near the coast detected missile launches from the French Frigate Auvergne (blue) nearby. The French frigate carries air, ship and land attack missiles.

With so many Russian ships in the area plus Russian and Syrian radar sites on the mainland in Syria, there is plenty of evidence untainted by spin by Western powers to twist. Similar to Lincoln’s provocation at Ft. Sumter and FDR’s provocation of the Japanese before Pearl Harbor and even Bush I’s green light to Saddam in Kuwait at the start of Gulf War I, this was a blatant attempt at provoking conflict in the midst of the last two years of Russian accusations (election meddling) and US sanctions.

Sure the bully (Israel) “apologized” but said “it was not our missile”. Whatever. There is ZERO honor in that and there was no US response that indicated any kind of remorse at all.

The honor (again) came from “Cool Hand” Putin. As Robert Bridge points out:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, took admirable efforts to prevent the blame game from reaching the boiling point, telling reporters that the downing of the Russian aircraft was the result of “a chain of tragic circumstances, because the Israeli plane didn’t shoot down our jet.”

Nevertheless, following this extremely tempered and reserved remark, Putin vowed that Russia would take extra precautions to protect its troops in Syria, saying these will be “the steps that everyone will notice.”

Now there is much consternation in Israel that the IDF will soon find its freedom to conduct operations against targets in Syria greatly impaired. That’s because Russia, having just suffered a ‘friendly-fire’ incident from its own antiquated S-200 system, may now be more open to the idea of providing Syria with the more advanced S-300 air-defense system.

.. or even the highly advanced S-400 systems:

The Israeli gamble did NOT pay off. Their reputation as a greedy neighbor who steals and maims others in the ‘hood all the while not adhering to international law that it demands others to follow. (While having 200+ nukes in their back pocket) The Russians know this and are being very patient in protecting a friend that asked for assistance back in 2015.

In summary, Pat Buchanan does a masterful job at giving a grand overview that spans decades of political ebb and flow on a global scale when he states:

By the end of his second term, President Ronald Reagan, who had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” was strolling through Red Square with Russians slapping him on the back.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And how have we husbanded the fruits of our Cold War triumph?

This month, China’s leader-for-life Xi Jinping stood beside Vladimir Putin as 3,000 Chinese troops maneuvered with 300,000 Russians, 1,000 planes and 900 tanks in Moscow’s largest military exercise in 40 years.

An uncoded message to the West from the East. Richard Nixon’s great achievement in bringing Peking in from the cold, and Reagan’s great achievement of ending the Cold War, are history.

Squandered. The “shining city on a hill” and “American Exceptionalism” are but a myth. The real DNA of our government along with that of Israel and NATO aligned countries are bent on war. Pat continues:

.. Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO’s quick march to Russia’s ancient frontiers, is alive and well. Russia appears to have given up on the West and accepted that its hopes for better times with President Donald Trump are not to be.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is berating Russia for secretly trading with North Korea in violation of U.N. sanctions, saying, “Lying, cheating, and rogue behavior have become the new norm of the Russian culture.” Cold wars don’t get much colder than defaming another country’s culture as morally debased.

The U.S. has also signaled that it may start supplying naval and anti-aircraft weaponry to Ukraine, as Russia is being warned to cease its inspections of ships passing from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait into the Sea of Azov. The three-mile-wide strait lies between Crimea and Kerch Peninsula. In Russia’s eyes, both banks of the strait are Russian national territory.

With U.S. backing, Ukraine has decided to build a naval base on the Sea of Azov to “create conditions for rebuffing the aggressive actions of the Russian Federation in this region.”

Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be transferred there in coming months. Russia’s navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base in minutes. Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine’s naval rights inside a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American? ..

This is the height of American Empire stupidity. It is what Thomas Jefferson feared centuries ago that the United States arrogance may lead to:

Trade is honorable. Political solutions that promote peace is honorable.

The American Empire is not (nor has it been since the end of WWII) honorable. You can’t fix this, you can’t drain the swamp enough BUT you can research for yourself the reality of today’s political world and it does impact you, indirectly maybe, but it will eventually touch you or your kid’s lives. Not unlike the Roman Empire, this empire is entering its last days and only God knows the months or years this will take.

Be prepared

-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