(7/28/03) If the timeline had not been altered and Gore had been
allowed to take the office to which the votes of the
African American voters of Duval County, Fraudida,
etc. elevated him, PEACE would be breaking out on the
Korean penninsula. Because Gore would not have
scuttled the negotiations, adopted a policy of
"pre-emptive war" or demonizes the psycho leader of
North Korea in the SOTU with the "axis of evil"
fantasy sound-byte. But in the Bizarro world of the
_resident's regime, everything is upside down and WAR
may well break out on the Korean penninsula, and if it
doesn't, the small-minded, mean-spirited little man
(the one in Waco) will have sent the developing powers
a message that the safest stance is to go nuclear as
fast as possible...When will the "US mainstream news
media" start talking about how the _resident and his
neo-con wet dreamers lost Korea? When will one of the
Democratic presidential candidates draw political
blood on this emerging debacle? Here is some excellent
analysis from a credible source...Vive Le France!
http://truthout.org/docs_03/072503I.shtml
Emergency in Korea
Le Monde | Editorial
Thursday 24 July 2003
In the dream world of American neo-conservatives,
crossing North Korea off the planet would be a
technically easy operation-the country is an economic
ruin-and morally tempting-there is nothing sympathetic
about the regime.
After having taken part in all kinds of
international terrorist and bandit operations over the
years, now Pyongyang offers itself the ultimate
luxury: trying to guarantee its perpetuity by
threatening to proclaim itself a nuclear power soon.
This unheard of blackmail legitimately gives the
shudders not only to South Korea, a prosperous
democracy, but also to the Japanese and Chinese
neighbors of the peninsula. Beyond that, it should
sound alarm bells for all powers responsible for
global security.
In place of which, the Korean nuclear crisis,
ongoing for a year, has left the American
administration torn, as in Iraq, between the
ideological desire to impose its will, by force if
necessary, and the necessity of acknowledging the
practical limits of that ambition.
Because, in the real world, Kim Jong-Il’s North
Korea is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Without an air
force or weapons of military projection, Baghdad’s
dictator was incapable of responding to America’s
ground invasion, as well as of leading an attack
against Israel, an idea that haunted all Washington
strategists. Kim Jong-Il, however, holds the capital
of the United States’ South Korean ally within range
of his old-fashioned artillery. Use of force against
North Korea for its nuclear adventures, whether
punitive or preventative, would set off carnage on the
peninsula.
Above all, the crisis results in part from a
strategic misdirection. However odious the North
Korean regime’s balance sheet, with its forced labor
camps, famines, foreign assassinations, the evil does
not come from the grotesque government swathed in its
half-Stalinist, half-sectarian propaganda alone. It is
the result of an extreme nationalism that follows its
own logic. Under his outrageous façade, Kim Jong-Il is
a cold calculator whose determination it would be very
dangerous to underestimate.
Pyongyang functions on a programmatic basis by which
the realities of the post-World War II world are
perceived in the reverse of Washington. For example,
the regime, which survived the Korean War only at the
cost of a terrible butchery, remains persuaded that it
won this conflict and they commemorate its
inconclusive end fifty years ago. If this logic is
false, it is, nonetheless, armed with a potential
nuclear capacity, which incites us not to neglect it
and to take all emergency measures to resolve the
crisis. Any error or delay now risks producing a
nuclear arms race across the region.
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Translation: TruthOut French language correspondent
Leslie Thatcher.