President Donald Trump said this to say in his address to the United Nations yesterday—
We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions or even systems of government. But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.
He went on to say—
Rogue regimes represented in this body not only support terrorists but threaten other nations and their own people with the most destructive weapons known to humanity.
I think these would be excellent points, if only he had applied them to the United States as well as the rest of the world.
He called for an intensification of economic and diplomatic warfare against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, his new axis of evil.
How is this in the interest of the American people? How is this consistent with respecting national sovereignty? Are not North Korea, Iran and Venezuela sovereign nations?
The United States has paid radical jihadist terrorists to overthrow the government of Libya and is attempting to use them to overthrow the government of Syria—two sovereign states that never have threatened the United States. The result has been to reduce these two countries to chaos and misery, as the cost of thousands of innocent lives.
President Trump in that very speech threatened another nation with the most destructive weapons known to humanity—
The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.
He accused the North Korean government of starving and torturing its own people, and variousothercrimes, which were real though not necessarily current. But then he threatened an even worse atrocity.
To be fair, it is not clear whether he is threatening North Korea with attack merely if it fails to disarm or whether he is threatening retaliation in the event of an attack, which is different.
This ambiguity may be deliberate on President Trump’s part; he may think keeping others guessing is a good negotiating strategy. Where nuclear weapons are concerned, this is dangerous. It may lead the other person to think he has nothing to lose by launching an attack.
North Korea has the world’s fourth largest army. It has nearly 1.2 million troops under arms, slightly less than the USA and behind India and China.
South Korea has about 655,000 active duty troops, more than Britain, France and Germany combined. A war between North and South Korea would be catastrophic, even if the USA, China and Russia were not involved.
Click to enlarge
Some observers claim that South Korea is the stronger of the two, because, they say, North Korean troops are malnourished and South Korean troops are better trained and have better equipment. I wouldn’t know.
We Americans remember and memorialize the Vietnam Conflict, and tend to forget the equally savage and lethal Korean Conflict. I’m not sure why that is—maybe because the Vietnam fighting was stretched out over more years, maybe because Vietnam was the experience of the Baby Boom generation.
Be that as it may, the Korean War is not forgotten in Korea, and especially not in North Korea. The North Koreans remember that they have endured the worst the United States and its allies could throw at them, short of attacks with nuclear weapons. I think that if you remember this, it goes a long way to explaining why Kim Jong-un defies the United States.
For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book The Korean War: A History, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”
How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?
How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?
Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”
Every. Town. More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.
Almost all of my liberal Democratic friends think the United States would have avoided the Iraq War if Al Gore had been elected President in 2000. I’m not certain that is so.
Gore voted in favor of the 1991 authorization to use military force in Iraq. Bill Clinton chose him as vice president partly because he had a reputation as a war hawk and had served honorably in Vietnam. Gore chose another war hawk, Joe Lieberman, to be his running mate.
He and John Kerry criticized George W. Bush not on the grounds that the war was wrong, but that the war effort was being bungled. The timing was wrong, more effort should have been made to get UN support, more should have been done to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Later on there was an argument that the U.S. should have focused more on Afghanistan rather than Iraq, or Afghanistan first and Iraq later.
But the argument for invading so-called rogue states was not questioned. I don’t criticize them so much for that because that is what I, too, thought at the time. I think that I, unlike them, have learned better now.
North Korea is ruled by a murderous totalitariangovernment that has committed acts of terrorism. But that government has been willing to make arms agreements with the United States in the past, and it is the U.S. government that has broken these agreements.
The first agreement was the 1953 Armistice that ended the Korean Conflict. Under this agreement, the two sides agreed to stop fighting, pull back, respect and demilitarized zone and not introduce any new weapons into the Korean peninsula, pending signing of a peace treaty.
That is, each side could replace weapons, rifle for rifle and tank for tank, but they couldn’t increase the total number of weapons or introduce new weapons. The U.S. renounced that part of the treaty in 1958 by bringing atomic weapons to South Korea.
Now, you can make the argument that this action was necessary to preserve the balance of power. And later on, the North Koreans were discovered to have dug tunnels under the DMZ for the purpose of sending spies and agents into South Korea. But still: It was the United States, not North Korea, that broke the terms of the Armistice.
Sometime in the 1980s, North Korea began work on a nuclear bomb. In 1994, President Bill Clinton sent ex-President Jimmy Carter to North Korea, where he persuaded the North Korean government to shut down its plutonium test reactor and put it under the control of international inspectors. In return, the North Koreans got shipments of oil for its power grid and two light water reactors built by an international consortium. All this was supposed to lead to normal relations between the two countries—which didn’t happen.
In 2002, President George W. Bush canceled the agreement. His administration claimed the North Koreans were cheating, by working on a uranium bomb. The evidence for this is unclear, and the North Koreans claimed that the U.S. hadn’t fulfilled its part of the agreement.
Be that as it may, the North Koreans sent the inspectors home and resumed their work on a plutonium bomb. By 2007, they exploded their first nuclear device. Ending the agreement accomplished nothing.
The Bush administration resumed negotiations and arrived at a new tentative agreement to freeze nuclear weapons development at the new level. But President Barack Obama didn’t follow through. Maybe he thought that he didn’t have enough political capital to try to make peace with Iran, Cuba and North Korea, too.
Instead the U.S. government tried to pressure North Korea by means of economic sanctions. North Korea responded by doubling down on its nuclear weapons program.
Now President Donald Trump threatens “fire and fury”. The government of North Korea says that it will never give up its nuclear weapons so long as the United States is hostile and threatens North Korea with its own nuclear weapons. Which is a way of saying it might give up its nuclear weapons if the U.S. was genuinely willing to make peace.
Kim Jong-un tells the people of North Korea that they live in the most advanced and admired nation in the world, but that they are under threat by the United States.
Threatening North Korea reinforces the message that they have to unify behind their Supreme Leader.
Isolating North Korea helps shut out the knowledge that not everybody in the world is as regimented and poor as they area.
Recent history shows Kim that there is no safety in renouncing nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein renounced nuclear weapons, Muammar Qaddafi renounced nuclear weapons. That didn’t save them from being killed like animals following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and proxy invasion of Libya.
Kim Jong-un surely knows that a nuclear attack on the United States would be suicidal. His nuclear weapons tests and missile demonstrations make sense as an attempt to deter attack. Bear in mind that the United States conducts military exercises in South Korea as if rehearsing for an attack on North Kora.
The real danger is if Kim Jong-un comes to believe that his country is going to be attacked, and that he has nothing to lose by firing nuclear missiles (assuming he actually has nuclear missiles).
Ben Mauk wrote a good article for Granta on how bombing from the air has changed the law of war.
There is a law of ground warfare, which treats targeting of civilians as terrorism, and a law of air warfare, which treats killing of civilians at worst as a purpose and at best as unavoidable collateral damage.
The Nanking Massacre of 1937 is considered one of history’s greatest atrocities. As many as 200,000 or 300,000 Chinese civilians were bayoneted or machine-gunned by Japanese troops.
An estimated 100,000 Japanese civilians died in a single fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in 1945, which was one of many. But, aside from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. bombing of Japan is not widely considered to be a war crime. One you decide on a bombing strategy, civilian deaths are inevitable.
General William T. Sherman’s 1864 march through Georgia during the Civil War was regarded at the time as an atrocity. He ordered the indiscriminate destruction of civilian property in order to break the Confederacy’s means and will to resist. But he only destroyed property. He didn’t massacre civilians.
Now imagine a Sherman not on horseback, but in the cockpit of an aircraft. How could he have carried out his policy without large-scale killing of civilians?
You might think Congress would try to rein in President Trump’s war-making powers, considering his lack of judgment and self-control.
You might think Congress would have second-thoughts about giving Trump authority to engage in acts of war, order assassinations and engage in economic warfare, strictly on his own say-so.
You might thank that, and so might I.
But what Congress has done is to let all of Donald Trump’s war-making powers stand, while limiting his power to make peace.
The new sanctions legislation writes existing sanctions against Russia into law, enacts new sanctions and forbids the President to lift sanctions without consent of Congress.
This is a bad idea because it puts the USA in a permanent state of cold war with the world’s second largest nuclear weapons power.
This is a bad idea because it sets the United States against its European allies, who see their oil and gas prices go up.
This is a bad idea because President Putin is likely to retaliate by ending U.S.-Russian co-operation in the space program.
All this is to punish the Russian government for interfering in the 2017 U.S. election, even though such interference has never been proved.
The charge that Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign computers is treated by Congress and most of the Washington press as a proved fact, but the FBI has never been allowed access to those computers, and has never demanded access to those computers.
Memorial Day was originally a holiday to honor the Union dead in the Civil War. They should not be forgotten. The painting below illustrates the Battle of Gettysburg, with Union defenders on the left, Confederate attackers on the right.
My sixth most-viewed post is about a warning in 2011 by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to European allies to pay their proportionate share of the cost of the NATO military alliance.
This is much the same as what President Trump is saying now.
I thought then, and I still think, that members of the European Union are strong enough and wealthy enough to protect themselves without relying on the USA. I thought then, and I still think, that this would be a good thing.
But if the Europeans paid for their own defense, they might be less willing to follow the U.S. lead in military policy. And, maybe more importantly, they might be less willing to buy their weapons from American manufacturers.
The advantage of paying the piper means that you get to call the tune.
The young new ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Salman bin Mohammad, is trying to organize an alliance of Sunni Muslim nations against Shiite Iran.
And President Donald Trump is expected to endorse an anti-Iranian “Arab NATO” during his forthcoming visit to Saudi Arabia.
This is a terrible idea. It doesn’t benefit Americans and it risks a war that would be disastrous for both Americans and people in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is an enormously wealthy nation, but it is thinly populated and militarily weak. It depends on the United States for its defense. In return, the Saudis buy billions of dollars in armaments from American companies and pump oil in sufficient quantities to keep world oil prices low.
So the United States since the 1970s has sided with Saudi Arabia and also Israel against their geopolitical rivals in the region. Once Saudi Arabia’s chief rival and threat was Iraq. Now it is Iran.
This has nothing to do with making Americans safe from terrorism, and everything to do with promoting the strategic and economic interests of Saudi Arabia.
President Donald Trump has called for a military buildup, which would mean more aircraft carriers, more nuclear submarines, more high-tech weapons of all kinds.
A military analyst named Daniel Gouré wondered whether the United States has the industrial base needed for such a buildup.
For the Army, this means moving forward with near-term modernization and improvements to its existing fleets of tanks, fighting vehicles, artillery, rotorcraft, and rockets. For the Air Force, it is reaching an economic rate of F-35 production as soon as possible. For the Navy, it is all about the numbers of Virginia-class SSNs, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, Ford-class aircraft carriers, LX(R) amphibious warfare ships, and small combatants (Littoral Combat Ship or new Small Surface Combatant). Without question, a military buildup will require lots of dollars for defense.
But unless the industrial base is prepared to accelerate production, all the money in the world will not produce the desired results.
Do we have the industrial base? U.S. military power depends on U.S. high-tech manufacturing, and the U.S. manufacturing base is declining and dependent on foreign imports. The U.S. depends on China and other foreign countries for many key electronic components. The U.S. depends on imports even for basic raw materials such as steel.
We have had two contradictory policies—a industrial policy that accepts U.S. dependence on global supply chains, and a military interventionist policy that depends on U.S. technological superiority.
This contradiction did not originate with President Trump, but it is now his responsibility to deal with it.
High tariffs on imports, as proposed by Trump, won’t solve this problem—at least not overnight. The hollowing out of the U.S. manufacturing base has been going on for years, and rebuilding it won’t be accomplished overnight.
President Trump reportedly hopes that cruise missile attack Syria and the 11-ton MOAB bomb dropped on Afghanistan will make American threats more credible when he deals with North Korea and other hostile countries.
But it is not enough for a leader of a great nation to be able to make credible threats. He also has to be able to make credible promises.
It is not enough for foreign heads of state to feel in danger if they oppose the United States. They have to be able to feel safe from U.S. wrath if they cooperate with the United States.
Otherwise the threats will make them redouble their efforts to be able to strike back.
Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad all found that appeasing the United States was more dangerous than defiance.
Unfortunately for President Trump, he—for reasons not of his own making—is in a situation in which neither his threats nor his promises are credible.
Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a series of reports that convincingly debunk the claim that the Syrian government attacked civilians with sarin two weeks ago.
He said, among other things, that—
The video evidence shows workers at the site roughly 30 hours after the alleged attack that were wearing clothing with the logo “Idlib Health Directorate.”
These individuals were photographed putting dead birds from a birdcage into plastic bags. The implication of these actions was that the birds had died after being placed in the alleged sarin crater.
However, the video also shows the same workers inside and around the same crater with no protection of any kind against sarin poisoning. These individuals were wearing honeycomb face masks and medical exam gloves. They were otherwise dressed in normal streetwear and had no protective clothing of any kind.
The honeycomb face masks would provide absolutely no protection against either sarin vapors or sarin aerosols. The masks are only designed to filter small particles from the air. If there were sarin vapor, it would be inhaled without attenuation by these individuals. If the sarin were in an aerosol form, the aerosol would have condensed into the pours in the masks, and would have evaporated into a highly lethal gas as the individuals inhaled through the mask. It is difficult to believe that such health workers, if they were health workers, would be so ignorant of these basic facts.
In addition, other people dressed as health workers were standing around the crater without any protection at all.
I don’t know for sure what happened. What Prof. Postol’s report proves is that President Trump committed an act of war against a sovereign nation for reasons not supported by evidence. Although the attack resulted in relatively few casualties and little damage, it may well have destroyed the possibility of peace with Syria and Russia.
We Americans like the spectacle of war, but, since the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam Conflict, only a small minority of us has had an appetite for actual fighting.
President Donald Trump’s attack on Syria shows that he understands this. It was a kind of minimalist attack. The Syrian government was given a general notice that an attack was coming, and the Russian government a specific attack, so that casualties and damage were minimal.
Except for the unfortunate Syrian troops who were killed, this was war theater, not war.
Yet he got credit for acting decisively. Deeply unpopular before, he has been applauded by the press, Congress and even Hillary Clinton, while even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren equivocated. All the speculative news about Trump conspiring with Putin has vanished from the front pages.
I fear Trump has learned a bad lesson. When unpopular, rally Americans by attacking a designated foreign enemy. But since these attacks won’t change anything, he’ll have do something each time that is more impressive than what he did the time before, which means a higher risk of sliding from token war into general war.
I don’t think that Trump scared Bashar al Assad, Hassan Rouhani, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-on. I think they understand what is going on very well. I don’t think they can be bluffed or intimidated. As my father said, never start a fight you are not prepared to finish.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon and a self-described expert on persuasion, thinks that the best way for President Trump to respond to fake news about Syrian gas attacks is by means of a fake response—
The reason the Assad government would bomb its own people with a nerve agent right now is obvious. Syrian President Assad – who has been fighting for his life for several years, and is only lately feeling safer – suddenly decided to commit suicide-by-Trump.
Scott Adams
Because the best way to make that happen is to commit a war crime against your own people in exactly the way that would force President Trump to respond or else suffer humiliation at the hands of the mainstream media.
And how about those pictures coming in about the tragedy. Lots of visual imagery. Dead babies.
It is almost as if someone designed this “tragedy” to be camera-ready for President Trump’s consumption. It pushed every one of his buttons. Hard. And right when things in Syria were heading in a positive direction.
Interesting timing.
Super-powerful visual persuasion designed for Trump in particular.
Suspiciously well-documented event for a place with no real press.
No motive for Assad to use gas to kill a few dozen people at the cost of his entire regime. It wouldn’t be a popular move with Putin either.
The type of attack no U.S. president can ignore and come away intact.
A setup that looks suspiciously similar to the false WMD stories that sparked the Iraq war.
I’m going to call bullshit on the gas attack. It’s too “on-the-nose,” as Hollywood script-writers sometimes say, meaning a little too perfect to be natural. This has the look of a manufactured event.
My guess is that President Trump knows this smells fishy, but he has to talk tough anyway. However, keep in mind that he has made a brand out of not discussing military options. He likes to keep people guessing. He reminded us of that again yesterday, in case we forgot.
So how does a Master Persuader respond to a fake war crime?
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
Back in 2003, I thought the U.S. invasion of Iraq might be a good idea.
I thought we Americans could atone for all the suffering we had caused the Iraqi people by the low-level war by the Clinton administration by overthrowing the evil tyrant Saddam—and, yes, he really was evil and a tyrant—and allowing the Iraqis to choose their own government.
The United States would then, so I thought, have a democratic ally in the Middle East whose people were genuinely pro-American, and would free ourselves from dependence on the Saudi monarchy.
The U.S. invasion made things worse, both from the standpoint of the Iraqi people and of us Americans. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, hundreds of thousands became refugees.
Maybe there would have been a different result if the U.S. occupation authorities’ priorities had not been to get control of Iraqi oil and create money-making opportunities for American contractors.
We have to recognize that policy is going to be carried out by the government we’ve got, not the government we wish we had.
I think an invasion of Syria would have the same bad result as the invasion of Iraq.
I think a stepped-up bombing campaign in Syria would increase the suffering of the Syrian people, but would not punish the individuals responsible for the gas attacks—if such attacks occurred.
[Correction 4/8/2017: Sarin, as peteybee of Spread an Idea pointed out, is a liquid, not a gas.]
U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley states as a fact that the Syrian government used poison gas (probably sarin) against civilians in its fight against rebels. I question this because: —
It doesn’t make sense that Bashar al-Assad would risk turning the world against him and his regime when he and his Russian allies are on the verge of victory against ISIS and other jihadist rebels.
No news account that I have read states unequivocally that such attacks have occurred. They all use words such as “allegedly” and “reportedly” and then go on as if the fact was proven.
Haley’s speech reminds me of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations back in 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. We now know that this was just an excuse to invade Iraq, a nation that never threatened the United States but was feared by the leaders of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Iraq war united most of us Americans behind President George W. Bush, at least for a time, but in the end it helped create the backlash that led to the election of Barack Obama.
Donald Trump was one who came to understand what big mistake it was to invade Iraq. He also said it would be a big mistake to intervene in Syria in 2013. He was right both times. Those are two reasons I thought he might be less of a war hawk than Hillary Clinton.
Now he seems eager to go to war. He now criticizes the Obama administration from holding back on going to war in 2013 in similar circumstances.
During the election campaign, I wrote that Donald Trump is intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit to be President of the United States. Nothing since then has changed my mind.
But it is not as if Trump overturned a well-functioning system. The United States was already committed to perpetual war and rule by Wall Street.
My friend Bill Elwell called my attention to an article by Tom Engelhardt, who wrote in part:
Odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump’s presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.
Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history. He’s unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics and governance.
In that sense, to generalize (if you’ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise.
After all, it’s clearly a government of, by and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we’ve been heading for the last decade and a half anyway.
Let’s start with those generals. In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business and Congress (in that descending order). […]
The following is an open letter to Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, signed by David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and others. The Bertrand Russell Society, of which I am a member, endorses it.
This may be the most dangerous time in human history.
In a dramatic recent decision, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its iconic Doomsday Clock ahead from three minutes to only two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.
Humankind faces two existential challenges of global and potentially apocalyptic scope: nuclear weapons and climate change.
Our focus here is on nuclear dangers, but we strongly encourage you, Presidents Trump and Putin, to undertake in a spirit of urgency all necessary steps to avert further global warming.
As the leaders of the United States and Russia, the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals, you have the grave responsibility of assuring that nuclear weapons are not used — or their use overtly threatened — during your period of leadership.
The most certain and reliable way to fulfill this responsibility is to negotiate with each other, and the other governments of nuclear-armed states, for their total elimination.
The U.S. and Russia are both obligated under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to engage in such negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for complete nuclear disarmament. Your success in this endeavor would make you heroes of the Nuclear Age.
The darker the red, the greater the willingness to fight.
Only 44 percent of adult Americans are willing to tell pollsters they’d fight for their country.
The percentage is even less for some U.S. allies, such as Canada (30%), France (29%), the United Kingdom (27%), Italy (30%), Germany (18%) and Japan (11%).
In contrast, 71 percent of Chinese and 59 percent of Russians say they’d fight for their countries.
This is the result of a public opinion poll of more than 1,000 people in each of 64 countries in late 2014 by WIN / Gallup International. The complete results are below.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I think it partly depends on people mean by “fight for country”.
I think almost all Americans would be willing to fight to defend our nation from an invader. I think only a minority are willing to go to some foreign country to fight to increase U.S. geopolitical power.
The problem for us Americans is that someday U.S. power will begin to slip, and countries that now fear to go against the United States will become our enemies.
When that backlash comes, our nation will need the patriotism that our leaders now exploit and abuse.
