Trump's Power Gone To His Head As He Squares Off Against A Nuclear North Korea

"The press loves me again! If I blow up the world with all the bad guys in it  I'll be the biggest, baddest president ever! And the most popular!"

Believe it or not I have really tried to be relatively patient with Trump, to allow him to try to settle in without making a total ass or imbecile of himself every other day. Hell, even over most of the last week I have posted on a number of decidedly "off-Trump" topics to take the spot light off him while also giving him a chance to at least appear to have a grain of sense. But it's to no avail, especially after a series of halfwit pundits and poltroons (like Chuck Schumer and Pelosi) have gone and applauded his cruise missile stunt - inflating his pseudo president ego to gigantic proportions.

Now this fool actually believes he can take on the whole world, at least the world of "bad guys"  he sees through the prism of endless phantasmagorias erupting within assorted psychotic embolisms within his amygdala.

So having blown a few dozen Isis rats to bits with his "mother of all bombs" he now is considering facing off against North Korea. Can we all agree right now, given the total lack of any intelligence of this fool - plus his lack of discernment and temperance - this is a god-awful idea?

For those who need to be filled in, in the past several days North Korea has held a vast military parade to celebrate the birth of its founding father, Kim Il-sung, and  has warned that it is prepared to take the “toughest” action unless the US ended its “military hysteria”, as speculation grows that the regime is preparing to conduct a nuclear test.

Interviewed two days ago, the North Korean Defense Minister, when asked by CBS' Ben Stacy what would happen if the U.S. attacked the hermit state, replied "nuclear war".  He meant that there's be immediate nuclear retaliation and serious people (not Trump) should take him at his word.  Now, to be sure, that doesn't meant the North Koreans can hit the U.S. No, not yet. But they do have the ability to deliver nuclear bombs on Seoul, South Korea as well as Japan - also, annihilate the U.S. base in South Korea. The U.S., of course, would launch a full on decapitation and annihilation strike on North Korea, but then China as a key ally would enter with its own retaliation - and over 200 H-bombs - that can reach the U.S.

Is this a scenario the Trumpites really want? It appears they do given the level of saber rattling rhetoric, Trump's bellicose tweets and even dispatching an aircraft carrier attack group to be within 900 miles of North Korea have ramped up the brinksmanship to new levels..   The drunkenness of power and brinkmanship has also been fed by a Beltway media besotted with the spectacle of military attack (with the Tomahawk strike and now MOAB) - whose critiques of Trump have now been revealed as paper thin.  All of which is extremely concerning or should be to every sentient being on the planet.

A senior North Korean official ( Choe Ryong-hae) used the parade to accuse the US of “creating a war situation” with the recent dispatch of warships to the region. After Trump's latest fulminations he barked:

“We will respond to an all-out war with an all-out war and a nuclear war with our style of a nuclear attack,” .

Even as I write this, military vehicles and tens of thousands of soldiers have filled Kim Il-sung square and  taken oaths of loyalty to the country’s leader, Kim Jong-in.  Experts agree the array of military hardware on parade  includes what appeared to be a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being carried along the streets on a huge truck.  South Korean military officials have been quoted as saying they had not seen the missile before and that it appeared to be a new type of ICBM.

North Korean state television showed what appeared to be several KN-08 and KN-14 missiles. Although they have yet to be tested, analysts say the missiles could one day be capable of hitting targets as far away as the continental United States.  Michael Morrell, former deputy director of the CIA interviewed yesterday on CBS, affirmed that this capability is a lot closer in time than many believe - probably 1 or 2 years.

Is this worrisome? Yes, but a preemptive attack is not the way to respond as  Morrell agreed. He acknowledged one could not count on Kim Jong -in to back off, or portray a submissive stance to the U.S. So, any military action at all, including firing ordnance from fighter jets on the aircraft carrier -will likely incept a small scale nuclear attack on the North's neighbors that could escalate. So it is not without basis that many have compared our current condition to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.

As the USS aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its strike group sailed towards the peninsula in a show of force, North Korea’s official KCNA news agency, citing a spokesman for the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army, warned of “merciless” retaliation against any US provocation.  Trump’s decision to send an “armada” of warships to waters off the tense peninsula, coupled with recent US strikes in Syria and Afghanistan, were proof that Washington had chosen the path of “open threat and blackmail”, KCNA said.

“Our toughest counteraction against the US and its vassal forces will be taken in such a merciless manner as not to allow the aggressors to survive,” it added.

It said the Trump administration’s “serious military hysteria” had reached a “dangerous phase that can no longer be overlooked”.

It added: “Under the prevailing grave situation, the United States has to come to its senses and make a proper option for the solution of the problem.”

Meanwhile, China’s state-run media warned that the US president was mistaken if he believed that piling military pressure on North Korea would resolve the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The Global Times said Trump’s decision to drop the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan was clearly “a new gimmick in US military deterrence” designed to intimidate Kim Jong-un.   “North Korea must have felt the shock wave travelling all the way from Afghanistan,” the Communist party-controlled newspaper said in an editorial.

However, the Global Times, which sometimes reflects government views, said the use of such a “vicious weapon” was in fact likely to make Pyongyang even more determined to upgrade its own arsenal.

On Friday, China again called for talks to defuse the crisis. “We call on all parties to refrain from provoking and threatening each other, whether in words or actions, and not let the situation get to an irreversible and unmanageable stage,” the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, told reporters in Beijing.

Speaking to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on Friday night, Wang said steps were needed to prevent “war and chaos” on the Korean peninsula.

As for any Trump military actions being touted currently against North Korea, former CIA North Korea analyst Sue Mi Terry made it clear last night these would not work. She cited one of the possible options as striking a nuclear test site, maybe with a MOAB,  but warned:

"I can't see him following through with this and that is the problem with the brinksmanship policy.Because you're putting yourself in a bind. You will either have to back down and lose credibility or you are stuck on a ledge with a military option which is very, very risky.

North Korea is not Syria, it's not Afghanistan. It's going to have devastating consequences. North Korea will retaliate to any kind of military option. They will retaliate against South Korea given seventy percent of its ground forces are deployed within one hundred kilometers from the DMZ. That's sixty miles....and there's twenty thousand U.S. military in Korea and twenty million people in Seoul"

She added that this is why she doesn't think Trump will take any precipitous action which would be a "gross miscalculation".  She also pointed out the North is unlikely to launch any missiles - or test any bombs - now with the whole world watching. "They will do it on their own time", she stated, "and besides, they want to be the ones with the surprises."

What about her words of advice against brinksmanship and aggressive actions by the U.S.?

The trouble is this is Trump, the man-boy who lives the delusions of absolute power from a brain addled by egomaniacal self-regard and narcissism. And hence who feeds off the adulation such as he's now getting from the Beltway press in the wake of his cruise missile and MOAB attacks. Ironically then, we may have to depend on that media - which originally criticized him - to back off from its jingoistic gushing and hold him to account once more but in the military response sphere.

Millions of lives may depend on such a sober, rational re-assessment of Trump's recent actions. What we don't need is more brainless media pandering to this psycho every time he unleashes a bomb or new cruise missile - on whatever pretext or excuse. That blind media adulation is like crack cocaine to him and renders his 'trigger' finger even itchier.

See also:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2017/03/07/north-koreas-peculiar-brand-of-rationality/#6b915f9b5021

And:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/medea-benjamin/72189/the-mother-of-all-bombs-is-big-deadly-and-wont-lead-to-peace