North Korea’s government is reacting with enormous hostility to a report last week from its neighbor to the south, a report which blamed them for the sinking of the Cheonan warship in March.
North Korea has insisted that the report is fabricated to falsely implicate them, and a spokesman today said that North Korea would sever all ties with South Korea and was abandoning “the agreement on non-aggression.”
South Korea’s own official statements on the sinking put it in something of a difficult position, as it angrily rejected reports that a North Korean torpedo was responsible at the time of the incident, only to eventually release a report claiming that was “obviously” what happened two months later.
But the Obama Administration has endorsed both South Korean positions and pledged its unequivocal support of the nation for whatever comes of the rising tensions, including the prospect of renewed fighting on the Korean Peninsula.
Though a half century under one of the most backwards governments on the planet has hardly stood the North Koreans in good stead for preparing the nation to fight the industrial juggernaut to its south, North Korea does have a limited nuclear arsenal, and with 28,500 US troops loitering along the border between the two the potential exists for an extremely ugly war.
Just makes you wonder what the real story is here.
Again the bottomline is mainland China.
Short of South Korea expelling the US and in effect making its peace with North Korea and the PRC, the Chinese are not going to allow the US to defang, occupy, or seriously destabilize North Korea.
US Walt Disney diplomacy, equally incompetent under Republicans and Democrats, continues its post-World II and post-Korean "Police Action" fantasies.
The curious aspect here is that the North Koreans are actively denying the kill, rather than remaining silent or simply saying that the South Korean ship strayed into North Korean waters, or initiated some other hostile action.
It is not a question of a declaration of war, in fact, since a state of war still exists, with only an Armistice in place.
One poses as no expert on either Korea, but one had an interesting discussion the other day about how ill-fitting the American myths about both the Koreans in general and North Korea in particular seem to be, especially culturally.
Here is North Korea, without many resources, isolated by the world at large, and presumably without a huge amount of technical aid from mainland China, and yet they have developed, mostly on their own, both nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them, as a well as a prosperous arms industry and a truly formidable military machine.
The US analysts have not been been plausible in explaining how this happened, or could happen, and seem on the subject as obscurantist as they are on the topic of how North Korea and Communist China fought the world's most technologically advanced military at the time, and its allies, to a draw in an intense and bloody war that the Americans were more eager to end than were the North Koreans and Chinese.
Interesting enough the same discussion, which was mainly cultural, strayed also into the mysteries of the Reverend Moon's peculiar Christianity and its magnetism, even for many westerners.
America should just withdraw from the Korean peninsula. Lets just bring our troops home.
I THINK NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA SHOULD TEAM UP TO ATTACK USA. US IS THE CULPRIT THAT WANTS WAR IN MANY PLACES IN THE WORLD BY IMPLICATING EVIDENCE.
Why are we in Korea? Why are we Aghanistan and Iraq? I wish the US government will explain the policy in terms that is understandable to us common folks. If they say we want to maintain a global empire that I can understand. But all the other excuses given to us just make no sense.
The lack of a public white paper from the South Korean government, outlining the evidence that it was a North Korean torpedo that sank the corvette, is highly suspicious. What exactly is the evidence? The story that it was a German-manufactured torpedo does not inspire confidence in Seoul's allegations, because the South Korean Navy uses German submarines of the Type 214 class.
When India accused Pakistan of the Mumbai attack, Pakistan asked to see evidence and access was provided. But North Korea's request has been rebuffed. No now Obama and Clinton and the UN consider NK guilty without any chance to face their accusers. And why not? They are only doing to NK what they now routinely do to human beings.
But, as we all know, no one should ever, ever EVER question the official story. So yeah, right, let's bomb the effing hell out of North Korea OFFICIAL STORY IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Anyone who questions the official story is always a nutball.
There, I said it for you.