Talking but playing war drums softy in the background

The US wants a stable and denuclearised Korean peninsula. So do China, North Korea, and South Korea. This common 'desire' is an indication of how out of control US and South Korean policy towards North Korea looks right now.
Forced by the backfire of its policy to militarily intimidate North Korea, South Korea, with the bad grace of a sore loser, agreed to talks with senior North Korean officials to quiet tensions on the divided peninsula.
The toasting and expressions of 'peaceful coexistence' between China and America during Hu Jintao's red carpet visit to the US last week, Barack Obama, in private, continued to push a policy of 'rolling back' the DPRK unless China took control of its ally in Pyongyang. Yet, China continued to urge diplomacy to defang the fearful tiger of war. Obama, on the other hand, stuck to a policy which is propped up by the belief that Beijing can throw its weight around in Pyongyang.
The American president made no bones about his policy with Hu. If Beijing won't keep Kim Jong il & co. in check, he is willing to redeploy troops to Korea and heighten military pressure with its client South Korea on the North.
Behind the polite words, the US gives no ground in a mad policy of playing chicken. In other words, do our bidding or else. And in the background the drums of war continue to beat.
China is not impressed. It is, if past behaviour holds true, patient to a point.
North Korea, too, in spite of moments of braggadocio, prefer negotiations, no matter how many times signals to Washington for talks remain unanswered. However, one thing is clear, it will brook no foreign military to abuse its territorial integrity. The world has seen a clear example of its 'defence of the fatherland' in late November 2010 when it reacted to South Korea's shelling along the NLL [Northern Limit Line] in the Yellow Sea on the edge of its territorial waters. And the world held its breath lest renewed warfare breaks out for the first time in 47 years.
Two months later the expressed desire for stability [read peace] and denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula are the watchwords of the day.
It is hoped that the stalled six party talks will resume on North Korea's nuclear programme. No timetable, however, is set. And the continued low grade 'propaganda' warfare against the North by the US and ROK, has stirred the rumour pot that the North will test a third nuclear device.
The Obama administration has not lessened the weight of its intention to inflict 'pain' military, economically, or politically on the DPRK.
The media chorus and the US North Korean clerisy continue to sing the same old pious hymns of the present and imminent danger the North represents unless the US remains vigiliant and decisive in policy and action.
One way to think about how 'wired' is Washington's looney policy is to consider the following two examples: the reporting from South Korea by the PBS [Public Broadcasting Systems] NewsHour's recent reports on the danger Seoul faces from Pyongyang by its senior correspondent Margaret Warner. Warner has seen done her due diligence and spoken to the American ambassadrix and military and high South and ordinary Koreans. She has dutifully transmitted the message of the danger prosperous South Korea faces from the North. Her reporting is, more or less, an undigested account which the eye can find in US broadsheets and tabloids and in government press releases. When you try to peel the onion of propaganda down to its core, she alerts us to what we already know: things are not all that well on the divided Korean peninsula and we do not have to search further than our nose in order to sniff out the culprit--the North. Warner has not bothered to set the story in context nor look at the 'brave' Lee Myung bak's vindictive policy towards the North which almost exploded into war again in Korea.
Consider, too, the 'preaching' of Lee Song yoon, an adjunct assistant professor of international politics at Tufts' Fletcher school of law and diplomacy. A South Korean who has lectured at the department of state and West Point, and whose opinion is widely sought in print, on the radio and television. In an October speech at the ultra conservative Hillsdale College, he put his audience on alert that Kim Jong il & co. is still out to 'communise' the Korean peninsula. It's an old chestnut which has its occasional use albeit in reality hardly realisable.
Lee harped on the significance of 27 July 1953 - the date the Armistice Agreement was signed by the US, China, and North Korea. [South Korea refused to put its name to that document which froze the boundaries of North and South Korea]. For the North, that day is celebrated as 'victory in the war of liberation of the fatherland'. For him, that day is proof positive that the North has not given up its desire to impose its will on the South. [Today, North and South Korea express the long aching desire of reunification, more likely in spirit than in reality.]
You have to hand it to Lee, he throws out history and politics. It is significant to remember that during the Korean War, owing to the US' command of the air, the North had been reduced to ruin and rubble. And, in spite of the US UN led troops, the North Korean army with the help of Chinese volunteers 'rolled back' General Macarthur's forces to where they remain today at the 38 parallel. With this brief resume of events, it is very understandable why North Korea celebrates 27 July 1953: for the North Koreans, they 'liberated' their homeland. Lee may read into that moment what he will, but he misses the point completely. GuamDiary has more than once suggested to its readers Bruce Cumings' 'the Korean war: a history' [Random House]. His book provides an excellent brief history of the war and the utter destruction that it visited on the North.
For Lee and his fellow clercs, the Korean war is a mark of shame, for it failed to overthrow the regime of Kim Il Sung. It remains, to them, a badge of dishonour that Kim's son and soon his grandson will govern the North. For them, the war will never be over till the failed policy of 'rollback' will be completed.
And so we come back to our point that in spite of the promise of talks and restoring stability and it is hoped denuclearising the Korean peninsula, the dreams of a military solution remain ever alive among US policy makers and elite.
It seems the time has come for the US and ROK to put toys of war away, and get down to difficult job of negotiating with the North, in order to officially end the Korean war with a peace treaty and denuclearising the peninsula which the North has kept promising and saying should Washington recognise it as an equal.
As long as visions of 'rollback' [which is at heart the 'officious' policy of the Obama administration], nourish US policy, no peace is possible.

Palin's 'apologia pro sua vita': 'blood libel'

Sarah Palin's high public profile took a big hit. In her stab at taking the wind out of Barack Obama's sails at Tucon in the wake of the Arizona shootings,and in self defense of her call to 'reload' your guns to kill off political enemies by using 'crosshairs' on her website [now removed] she clothed her 'victimhood' in the term 'blood libel'.
Whoever suggested her use of 'blood libel' - a reference to the anti Semitic practice from the Middle ages of falsely accusing Jews of murdering Christian children whose blood was used in religious ceremonies - she should have fired on the spot.
Palin is not shrinking violet: she speaks in direct, blunt, and vigorous language. Her words lack nuance; they are like the sun at noon lacking any hint of shadows of meaning. Her use of 'blood libel' marginalised her. Her ratings in the polls sank like a setting sun.
Americans of all shades of opinion saw her words for what they were - insensitive and self serving. And perhaps her use of Facebook for her 'apologia pro sua vita' as a defense that her colourful and shocking military language was an example of 'free speech' without consequence, thereby distancing herself from the consequences of violent, hateful speech.
Palin put days after the tragedy in Tucson to express her sympathy with the victims, as well as to distance herself from her high profile, incendiary remarks, she chose 'Facebook'. And the public did not buy it.
In order to 'snatch her damaged reputation from the jaws of opprobrium', Palin went on television. Ever since her disastrous interview with Katie Couric, she takes refuge of her security blanket, otherwise known as Fox TV, where she is a highly paid commentator.
She appeared on Sean Hannity's programme. Tried as she might, she couldn't shake off the cheap use of 'blood libel' and the uproar it caused among Jews and non Jews. More telling is the fact that she has an inferiorty complex in defending her positions but only in the company of friends and sympathetic ears. Which doesn't speak well of her 'political courage'.
Has Palin overreached her grasp? Maybe yes, maybe no. Nonetheless, her use of 'blood libel' reveals how tone deaf she is and how out of the mainstream she is and what's more how extreme her readiness to embrace discredited ideas.

Will Israel go the way of France's 4 Republic?

Israel's defence minister Ehud Barak's has decided the political wilderness is not for him. He's tasted power, and he won't let it go.
Abandoning Labour, he's decided to form his own political party and remain in the Netenyahu government. It did not take much imagination to do this: the left and centre in Israel have whithered on the political vine for a long while now. Although Barak described his new party as centrist and Zionist, the operative word is 'Zionist', and the new party won't be centrist in the ordinary definition of the term.
The fracturing of the Israeli body politic has favoured the far right. Barak can and does argue that he is to the left of Avigdor Lieberman and 'Bibi' Netenyahu. Saying this may not mean alot, since he's in favour of the Zionist ideology which is moving to incorporate more and more of the Palestinian West Bank into a Greater Zionist Israel where Arab - those with Israeli passports or not - will be treated as 'sub citizen'.
Barak may mouth a more nuanced policy on a two states' solution, his drive to power will make him jockey for influence by objectively adopting first Netenyahu's than Lieberman's positions on leaving any Palestinian state behind.
What is becoming more and more noticeable is that the musical chair of the right and far right coalition of governance will end up as a fight for power within the Barack-Netenyahu-Lieberman trioka.
Already the infighting among these 3 is worthy of notice. The radical right government may hold but the splits and reformulation of fractions will intensify. It is in this sense that the rise of the radical right in Israel reflects the French 4 Republic.
Who will be the man in the white horse who ultimately seize power? Barak? Netenyahu? or Lieberman? Who will be the man to bury Israel's much touted 'democracy'? Barak? Netenyahu? or Lieberman? Who will put a feather in his hat and call it a copy of European fascism of the Spanish or Portugese or Hungarian kind? Barak? Netenyahu? or Lieberman?
There is little doubt that Israel has taken on the colours of religious extremism of its neighbours. Judith Miller observed this in the early 1990's when she was writing her book : 'God has 99 names'.
Israel slippage into the mould of clerico fascism will become more and more pronounced as the extreme right wing plants deeper its roots.

Blood libel

Sarah Palin pushes buttons. No doubt about it.
She and her handlers tried to anticipate president Barack Obama's speech in Tucon, Arizona. Their attempt to second guess him proved a failure. Obama's speech did not brand with the mark of Cain, which Palin feared she would be by allusion named as a purveyor of the lunatic fringe of politics.
After the shooting in Tucson, Palin, at first, kept a low profile. Then, she sent a message of sympathy to Glen Beck to air, and gritting her teeth, she quietly removed the 'crosshairs' on her website of her opponents, one of which was the seriously wounded Giffords.
Yet her message on YouTube to the shooting of congress woman Gaby Giffords, the killing of 6 and the wounding of 13 made matters more exasperating.
Palin uses violent language. If she's not a pitbull with lipstick, she has her targets in 'crosshairs' and urges her followers to reload guns. She is the poster girl of the Tea Party and the extreme right.
Suddenly she was the 'target', not Giffords nor anyone else Democrat or Republican. Palin clothed herself in the anti Semitic garb of 'blood libel'. Blood libel refers to the alleged practices of Jews who slaughter young Christians for blood for the Passover matzot. Her use of 'blood libel' is dismayingly improper, and Jewish rabbis and groups have denounced her for using it.
Nonetheless Palin has staunch defenders among high powered, right wing Jews. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, for one, rushed to defence, saying, broadly and metaphorically speaking, Palin's use of the phrase was 'on target': Palin used the term as a critique of 'Big Government', a watchword by Tea Baggers and the Republican right wing for the cancer that is eating the body America, the destroyer of 'the values of our founders', in order to support Democracy with Socialism. For the flamboyant lawyer who is the dragon slayer of any critic of his reputation or Israel, he even went so far as to argue that since the Middle Ages 'blood libel' has evolved in meaning. Has it? The Nazis used it!
Palin's use of 'blood libel' gives one to pause. Surrounded as she is by Jewish neo cons - among whom her cheer leader William Crystal - one has to wonder who suggested the mischevious and noxious use of 'blood libel' to Palin, with a view to wash her of the sins of encouraging violence.
Of course, under the First Amendment, she has the right to freedom of speech, but as Giffords presciently remarked, 'words have consequences'. And Palin cravenly refused to acknowledge effects her speech engenders. But the matter does not lie there. It is broader in scope and far more dangerous.
Palin and Beck & co. are introducing into the polarised mix and coarseness of the American political lexicon, expressions and writings of anti Semites, thereby sowing the seeds of right wing extremism. Suddenly excuses are being made for dusted off racial and political hatred, as though a page had been copied from the fascist days of the 1920's and the 1930's.
Palin's use of 'blood libel' is an expression of the dangerous times the US is weathering today. To excuse dusted off anti Semitism is unpardonable.

Who blinked first?

A reader or two of GuamDiary asked who did we think blinked first: North Korea? South Korea?
Common wisdom believed the North did. But did it?
Events do tell a different story.
South Korea fuming from the sinking of its corvette 'the Chenon' in March 2010, felt humiliated and insulted as its campaigned to blame the North for the ship's sinking and the loss of 46 crew. [As GuamDiary oft commented on the sunken 'Cheonan', there are too many loose ends to the South's brief. And branding the DPRK the culprit begs the following questions: why was the ship's officers drunk? why did the South refuse to publish the full report of its findings until August 2010, although it was ready earlier? why did Seoul hide behind 'national security' to hold up the report's finding? why did the South rejects the North's dossier and its request to send a delegation to Seoul? why did it reject out of hand Russia claim that the 'Chenon' churned up a torpedo lying dormant in the Yellow Sea close to the NLL [Northern Limit Line] which caused the explosion which sank the corvette? And the list continues...]
Having failed to bell the blame of the sinking on the North, South Korea embarked on provacative military exercises with the US used live fire along the NLL, as a warning to North Korea. The crunch came in November 2010 when after Pyongyang forewarned Seoul that should any shells fall into its territorial waters, the North would respond. And respond it did. The riposte blew out the legs from under ROK president Lee Myung bak's 'Drang nach Norden' policy of brinksmanship [which a released US cable released by Wikileaks revealed].
The fear of a third war on the Asian continent put the fear of God in the US and in South Korea. Yet Lee refused to stop the drills, the latest of which took place in the early days of 2011. In order to hold Lee's lunatic policy of provoking war with the North, the US blinked. Washington cooked up a new tack to deal with the DPRK: a dual prong approach: a desire to see North Korea back at the six party talks in Beijing, even though the Obama administration had done everything in its power not to talk to Kim Jong il & co. The other part of the rushed project was to cobble together an axis of the willing to thwart North Korea, composed of the US, South Korea, and Japan. Washington has continued its old policy to bait and switch, based as GuamDiary contends, on the faulty and false assumption that by delaying talks with North Korea and a sucker's bet that the transition of power in Pyongyang will fail. In other words, the US is buying time, and putting off any peaceful resolution of the Korean War and other serious problems festering for the last 60 years. The US is smarting at inability to stop the North nuclear programme. Well, we all know that if were not for George Bush's fantasies, the North might not have tested a nuclear device. If the US is hopping mad that the North is a member of the nuclear club Washington created in 1945, well the shame and blame falls squarely on its shoulders!
Who blinked first? South Korea and the US.

Hillary & Gates comedy show

Prim and proper like an old fashioned school ma'rm, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, index finger of blame pointed, lectured North Korea on proper comportment if the DPRK wanted the US to come back to the stalled party talks in Beijing...sometimes in the future. Taskmaster, she laid down the laws of do's and don't's to Kim Jong il & co. As Foggy Bottom [site of the department of state] headmistress delivered her long winded scold, her counterpart in the Pentagon, secretary of defence was fluttering around east Asia like wounded hawk, to cobble together an axis of the willing - South Korea and Japan - to shore up America's failed North Korea policy and make angry noises at Pyongyang that if the North does not behave it is going to have to contend with provocative joint military drills to keep it "honest".
The comedy team of Hillary and Gates are engaged in magical thinking. With much smoke and blue mirrors, they are projecting the aggressive and warlike behaviour of the US and South Korea on North Korea. You can criticise Pyongyang from noon to night, but recent events illustrate that the eager architects in the White House and the Blue House of a hostile North Korea policy, ignored the consequences of thoughtless cold war, based on the military, diplomacy, propaganda, and sanctions.
They, as GuamDiary suggested, had put all their eggs into a basket: inspite of danger signs, the US and South Korea were blindly confident that the sustained pressure they could exert on the DPRK -- a North Korea in crisis, owing to the ill health of Kim Jong il and a hastily arranged succession, let alone a poor economy and a population on the edge of starvation -- would result in the country's collapse.
Events in the last days of November 2010 when North Korea defended its territorial water along the NLL [Northern Limit Line] against South Korea's fire spelt the doom of such false reasoning based on romantic notions and an unreal justification of evidence and poor intelligence.
You would think that a renewed war in Korea would have thrown cold water on America's and South Korea's policy toward North Korea. The tragedy is that it did not. The Obama administration, on the eve of China's Hu Jintao's visit to Washington, sent Gates to argue that it is in China's interest to muzzle North Korea. Mme. Clinton sternly reminded the Chinese of their obligations to crack the whip with North Korea.
It is unlike China will follow America's instructions, the more especially since the very same Gates is throwing up a hostile alliance -- the US, South Korea, and
Japan -- which in the short and longer run challenges China's claims in the Yellow Sea and disputed islands, as well as fishing rights and oil & gas exploration claims.
What is and should be crystal clear in all this palavering and misleading promises of talks with North Korea is that the Hillary & Gates comedy show's message is that Washington and Seoul and Tokyo in tow do not want to talk to North Korea.
Have we here in all this hot air and puffery an exemple of what the Roman historian's pithy remark obtains: the US and South Korean North Korea policy is 'what they [made] a desert, they call it peace'!
Ultimately the US and its acolytes will have to come back kicking and screaming to the six party talks and treat North Korea as an equal - not a school boy - to calm the tensions on the divided Korean peninsula. Still the not so skilful mix of diplomacy and military threats show that the US is buying time, and yet in the end it will have to talks to North Korea, like it or not!

More on North Korea as an imminent danger to the US

US secretary of defence Robert Gates warning that North Korea represent an imminent and ready danger to America's more than 300 million citizens has not alarmed the ordinary man or woman on Main Street, USA.
Gates is skilful in the use of misleading statements.
Had the US public better access to diplomatic cables Wikileaks is in the process of making more widely known, it would quickly learn that the US government is not so completely bewildered at the giant steps made by North Korea in the field of rocket science. It is unlikely that a feckless and tamed US mainstream media won't challenge the US government's right to censor thereby violating its own much proclaimed First Amendment guaranteeing the right to free speech.
'Far Eastern Economics' editor Bertil Linter published in 'Asian Times Online' a revealing article on the level of sophistication of the DPRK's rocketry. He carefully documents from the leaked cables from as early as 2004 that US was well aware of the range and scope of North Korea's advanced rockets, many of which are in Iran's hands. You may quibble about Linter's inferences and conclusions, but if one thing is clear, his information is based on official US sources.
Now the question arises as to why Gates issued his warning about yet another instance of why North Korea is a danger to US interests.
The answer is not hard to tease out: in his talks with the Chinese leaders, the secretary of defence failed to 'sign on' the Chinese to Washington's view of North Korea, nor was it -- and still is -- unwilling to act as the Obama administration's policeman on bring Kim Jong il & co. to heel.