Even South Korea, effectively a US colony since the end of World War II, has to be taken into consideration. Most South Koreans are aghast that the US would consider attacking the north. For one thing, the capital of South Korea, Seoul, is so close to North Korea that it is in range of thousands of large cannons, many of them well hidden and protected in tunnels in the north, which could rain down powerful shells on the city as devastating as any aerial bombardment
campaign, and the people of Seoul still recall how their city was destroyed during the back-and-forth battling of the Korean War in the 1950s. For another, many South Koreans have relatives in the north, and don't want to see them killed or injured in another round or war on the peninsula. Finally, South Korea itself has a long history of popular resistance to both the country's corrupt and often autocratic compradore government and to the US military's occupation of the country and its dominance over South Korea's sown military. How such a populace would react to a new war on the Korean people of the north would be hard to predict in advance.
Any way you look at it, a US-launched war against North Korea would be a very messy and probably long-running affair whose consequences could quickly include an armed conflict between US and Chinese troops, as happened the first time around with dreadful consequences, and that was before China had nuclear weapons and had far fewer ICBMs capable of putting them down on US cities from New York to Los Angeles.
So for all these reasons, I'm betting that what we're hearing and seeing from the Trump White House is only bluster. Perhaps President Trump will find some face-saving way to cut a deal with China in which he'll target some missile launching site in North Korea, which would be warned in advance of an attack so most people could clear out of the area, and then it would be hit by a barrage of Tomahawk missiles launched by the Carl Vinson battle group, should his naval "armada" ever reach its destination in the Yellow Sea or Sea of Japan. Those missiles that manage to reach their targets would wreak some photogenic damage he could distribute to the domestic media and his remaining supporters, much as he did with his pre-telegraphed airport raid in Syria.
I hope I'm right on this. If I'm wrong, it won't much matter though.
DAVE LINDORFF, fluent in Chinese, spent six years in China and Hong Kong reporting on Asian issues for Business Week magazine. He is a member of the ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on April 30, 2017 at 15:22)
(Article changed on April 30, 2017 at 15:45)
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