For Donald Trump The 25 Million Souls Of Seoul Are Expendable In A North Korea Conflict

"There's gonna be a major, major conflict! And I'm sorry about Seoul! Tough luck there! But their sacrifice'll make me look more presidential!"

As The Financial Times reported yesterday, the bellicose Trump bunch wants Jimmy Carter to stay out of any peace -making deals with North Korea. This despite the war rhetoric reaching new heights. In a Reuters interview yesterday, the egomaniacal baboon- in- chief grunted, then growled: "We're heading for a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely!'

And as I posted earlier, this hotheaded maggot doesn't possess the skill, background historical knowledge or intelligence to steer clear of a conflagration with a nuclear state that would unleash a pitiless assault not on the U.S. (which is too far away to strike) but on its South Korean ally. Specifically, the 25 million citizens of Seoul, the "most densely populated city on Earth" according to one general reporting to the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

Does Trump care one whit about any of those innocent civilians when Kim Jung-Un unleashes a barrage of tens of thousands of shells from 4,000 artillery pieces? Of course not! For him, they are in part or all at once expendable pawns on the grand "chessboard" on which he's playing the mighty "sheriff" of the world. Having been stoked to the brim with his Syria cruise missile strike, he now believes he can unleash a more devastating one on North Korea. But he's a damned fool and idiot because it is the millions of Seoul who will pay.

Yes, the U.S. would ultimately come out ahead but it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Meaning the costs would exceed the brief moment of victory, mainly for the South Koreans who'd have to body bag the dead (what body parts they could find) and rebuild their devastated city. And I'm assuming here no nuclear weapons would be used which might be pie in the freaking sky.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the same group that operates the ‘doomsday clock’ and has now moved it two and a half minutes to midnight) estimates the North possesses twenty weapons in the 10 – 20 kiloton range or roughly the same magnitude of yield as the atomic bomb that reduced Hiroshima to ashes in 1945.

 Would they actually use it? 12 days ago in an interview with CBS’ Ben Stacy, the North Korean Defense minister when asked about any response if the U.S. made a pre-emptive strike didn’t bandy words: he said there would be a total nuclear retaliatory strike.  How serious should he be taken?

 First, they are estimated to be at the most primitive, early stages of A-bomb development. According to the most recent Physics Today (April issue) their existing weapons would deliver a yield of roughly 0.08 kt/ kilogram. That is yield per actual bomb mass.  This means they’d need to be able to launch or carry (via plane) at least 100 kg of bomb mass to get an 8 kiloton A -blast, or 200 kg to get a 16 kt yield.   This is feasible with their existing bombers and might also be with their most advanced (solid fuel) missile. However, none of these weapons could reach the U.S. presently – though they could wreak havoc on Seoul, South Korea – with the potential to obliterate over 20 million people as well as all U.S. troops stationed in S. Korea.

Clearly, this is a cost and risk no sane leader would visit on a vulnerable ally. And yet Trump, who fancies himself Dictator of the world, has no qualms about doing so - from his rhetoric- nor any sympathy for the South Koreans who will be caught in the line of fire as a possible mini nuclear holocaust plays out.

 Second, that they would make such a retaliatory strike is beyond question. As numerous commentators have pointed out – e.g. Sue Mi Terry - former CIA North Korean analyst, they’d regard it as a matter of survival. Much like Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962 who told former Kennedy Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1992 (during a 30 yr. reunion) he’d have launched 93 nuclear-armed IRBMs had the U.S. invaded. (JFK was being pushed at the time to bomb and invade Cuba by his Joint Chiefs of Staff).

 When asked in an MSNBC interview 2 weeks ago if Trump would actually attack North Korea, Sue Terry responded:

 “I can’t see him following through on 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 very 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 100 kilometers (60 miles) of the DMZ.  And there’s twenty thousand U.S. military in South Korea and twenty million people in Seoul”

 But if his words yesterday are taken seriously, and there's no reason to believe this insane maggot is bluffing - given his ego-- then the South can expect ferocious blowback and devastation. Trump then is not  a rational actor like JFK was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He’s an imperious,  impetuous braggart and clueless numbskull narcissist not even aware of recent history. He operates according to an unstable  “high conflict” personality which one psychologist (Bill Eddy) has said makes him a “more dangerous politician  than Adolf Hitler”.  In other words, unlike with JFK, we can only assume Trump will make exactly the opposite decision in a nuclear game of high stakes poker.

The sad and sorry Truth is that Donald Trump cares no more about the lives of those millions living in Seoul, than he did about the gassed kids in Syria prompting his cruise missile attack. Those kids were  merely transient blips on his cable TV screen arousing a transient emotion then a brief brain "rupture"  which saw that if he made a bold response he might profit. And profit he did! The media backed off its close scrutiny and criticism and suddenly saw this POS as "presidential" .

Expect him to play "double or nothing" with the Korean standoff, but we know already who the real losers of this charlatan's  game will be.
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To understand the full background, read this handy collection of some of the world's leading experts published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Feel free to forward links to others:

North Korea in the news again: a time to reflect, edited by Dan Drollette

Will South Korea go nuclear? Robert Einhorn, Duyeon Kim

North Korea's nuclear weapons: What now? Roundtable with Shen Dingli, Chung-in Moon, Andrei Lankov

Hecker assesses North Korean hydrogen bomb claims, Siegfried Hecker

The North Korea that can say no, Bruce Cumings

Getting North Korea wrong, Bruce Cumings

Jimmy Carter Is Right: America Is the World’s Biggest Warmonger

Jimmy Carter's depiction of the Amerikkan warmongers is correct.

Unlike a lot of pseudo-Democrats and paper (e.g. 'wine and brie')  liberals, I DO give lots of credit to former President Jimmy Carter – for at least being one of the few executives not to launch a war on his watch. That is something to be proud of, whether as a citizen or as another chief exec. But strangely enough, as comedian Bill Maher noted two weeks ago- few Dem candidates or actual presidents have given any acknowledgement to Carter for his accomplishments. They’d rather give them to an idiot like Reagan.

Now in a recent interview at salon.com Carter correctly provides his take on this country’s increasingly war mongering direction – since John Kennedy was slain in 1963.  Recall in his American University speech,  on June 10, 1963, JFK declared:


“Our primary long-range interest is general and complete disarmament- designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.”

Doubtless, most of the eyes and ears of the then U.S. military establishment either disbelieved Kennedy’s words or thought he was simply playing to the audience of young, graduating Catholic idealists. However, barely four months later their cynical clocks were cleaned when Kennedy announced the agreement on the Nuclear Test ban treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.  As author James Douglass aptly notes[1]:

The test ban treaty was JFK’s critically important way to initiate, with Khrushchev, the end of the Cold War and their joint leadership in the United Nations for the redemptive process of general and complete disarmament

Why would JFK risk all to push for changes he had to know would make the militarist establishment nervous? Why would JFK risk being branded a traitor or “appeaser” – the word used by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer  - when he adamantly refused to go all out and bomb, invade Cuba in the midst of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis? Probably because in that crisis Kennedy saw how very close human civilization came to incineration.

Jimmy Carter was much the same as forces within his own administration pushed him to reckless action in the wake of the taking of the American hostages in Iran, in 1979. But he resisted their siren call, and ended up losing the 1980 election because Reagan and pals conspired with the Iranians such that if they held up release of the hostages until after the election, they’d subsequently benefit from a huge arms deal. This later became the center point of the Iran Contra Conspiracy.  The basic nutshell version is that Reagan & Co. facilitated the shipping of  Israeli Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran to obtain the release of the American hostages.  The money from the sale of these arms was then funneled into Nicaragua to support the Rightist “Contras’, a violation of the then Boland Amendment.

In his salon.com interview Carter was queried about John Kerry’s response on ‘Meet the Press’ when he actually said (before the Russian occupation of Crimea):  “This is the 21^st century …you can’t just invade another country anymore.”

Carter’s response:

"Right. We did. We do it all the time. That’s Washington. Unfortunately. And we have for years"

When asked about the American exceptionalist bunkum and the “duty to bring democracy to the rest of the world” – and whether we in fact see ourselves accurately – and how that squares with how the rest of the world see us, Carter was blunt:

“The rest of the world, almost unanimously, looks at America as the No. 1 warmonger. That we revert to armed conflict almost at the drop of a hat — and quite often it’s not only desired by the leaders of our country, but it’s also supported by the people of America. We’ve also reverted back to a terrible degree of punishment of our people rather than the reinstitution of them back into life. And this means that we have 7.5 times as many people now in prison as when I left the governor’s mansion. We’re the only country that has the death penalty in NATO; we’re the only country in this hemisphere that has the death penalty, and this is another blight on our country as far as unwarranted, unnecessary and counterproductive violence are concerned.”

 

In other words, we’re a belligerent, mean-spirited lot that is often unthinking – and because we are- often provoked to either elect barbarians and warmongers (aka neocons, or neocon -lovers), or become passive so the other side is energized to do so while we stay home or vote ‘lesser of two evils.  We’re also a highly vengeful people, who manufacture laws that reflect this – accounting for why we have so many behind bars. We talk about “second chances”, but are merciless except to bankers and Wall Street criminals who get away with barely a slap on the wrist or less, as portrayed in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’

My biggest complaint, and I suspect Carter’s too, is that we are historically ignorant and under-educated, which is why we allow the perpetuation of a war-security state without making any headway.  We are played, or rather our fears are, to allow this war-security state to continue to garner power in our name and to do things we should all uniformly deplore – but don’t.

But how can we improve when our own elected leaders are even prepared to turn a blind eye to the miscreants, such as the ones in the CIA who conducted tortures and renditions in our name. We are told by these leaders to “look ahead, not backward” and yet the same leaders were prepared to throw the book at any and all whistle blowers – including Bradley Manning.

Incredibly, even as Jimmy Carter’s interview came online, a despicable essay “Why I Am Still a Neocon” is making the rounds.  This insane piece of offal actually proclaims the need to retain Amerikkan Military dominance in the world, despite the fact that is only guaranteed to earn us more enemies and ever more chances to see that power exposed and foiled for the paper tiger it is – especially when going up against a power of equal might. That the United States cannot maintain its status as unipolar power forever should be obvious to anyone who has studied history and anyone with a newspaper subscription. The rapidly developing economies and massive populations of countries like China and India make that plain enough, as does Russia’s newly retooled, modernized military and its retention of a "de-escalation" doctrine that allows it to employ nukes if its conventional forces are ever overwhelmed (say by NATO).

This is why the neocon mentality is like a dinosaur.  It is already  passé  and can’t be sustained – no matter how many neocon moles at the State Dept. desire it, or how many of their stupid essays demand it.  Sheesh, I mean  the author of the piece (Reihan Salam) even acknowledges that the military spending of the United States is insane, but waves that concern away by arguing that we’ll contain costs by lowering our personnel costs, which are “half of our military budget. “  It’s the personnel that are expendable!

In other words, this moron has actually pronounced the worst idea  for neo-conservatism- in fact, its total demise. Because while the warmongering mentality in neo-conservatism demands the hyperbolic valorization of the soldiers whom we send away to be killed- Salam is asserting we can convince the country to pay soldiers less though they will necessarily be killed more often.

Does he think  youthful volunteers are that stupid, that they will still sign up – presumably under the pseudo-Patriot banner-   under those conditions? And also with likely  benefits cuts?

In the end, left unsaid, is that any volunteer would be mad or delusional to fight for a nation in a major confrontation (with a major power) that is already at a vast disadvantage  in manpower. Hell, the Chinese already  enjoy a billion-person advantage over the U.S.. Start a ground war with them, and you think even one million volunteer ‘Muricans will stand a change against 25  million inducted Chinese? Give me a break. And don’t even think of talking nukes, you don’t want to go there.

The bottom line is that Jimmy Carter is correct, and our warmongering ways provide no insurance for the future – for ourselves or our vaunted “democracy”.  There is simply no way we can sustain the unipolar power hegemony indefinitely. We are already paying the price in massive decline at home, most visibly in our crumbling infrastructure and eroding middle class. It’s time now to put on the realist hat and stop playing the fanciful global "cop".  Instead,  we need to take care of our own and ensure our REAL domestic security.

As for the neocons, their hand is played out, they just don’t know it yet.

See also:
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-swanson/55305/rumsfeld-personifies-our-society

and:
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55303/as-for-ukraine-is-anyone-playing-this-crisis-straight

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[1] James Douglass: 2008, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Orbis Books, p. 329.