Leaked story, classified intelligence assessment, anonymous sources inside the administration, bring on the prosecutions? Don't hold your breath. The leak pattern here is all too convenient to an administration that appears hungry for war, and especially this war. The leak pattern here is all too reminiscent of all those weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that didn't exist in Iraq.
If you read beyond the scary hype of the Post's opening, you'll learn that the certainty of the headline is not certain at all and might well be yet another government fantasy scare tactic. The Post admits it has not actually seen the Defense Intelligence Agency report. Somebody unnamed read an excerpt to the Post and two "US officials familiar with the assessment" verified its broad conclusions. One of those conclusions, it turns out, is that no one is sure whether North Korea has even tested the warhead that the Post headline claims "North Korea now making."
Better still, and deeper in the story, other anonymous analysts say that North Korea's ICBM burned on re-entry in last month's test, which would mean that North Korea does not yet have a missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead. Maybe they'll have one in a year. Nobody's talking about how many years it will take for North Korea to have anything like a deterrent threat to counter the US nuclear arsenal of roughly 6,800 nuclear warheads and multiple delivery systems.
This is the arsenal that the US has been threatening the world with since it was much smaller in 1945. The US arsenal is the main reason Russia has an arsenal of equal size and other countries (France, China, Britain, Pakistan, India, and Israel at a minimum) have their own nuclear arsenals to provide some sense of safety that vanishes as soon as the arsenal is used. So North Korea is a rogue state only in the sense that all other nuclear powers are rogue states. The world could live with that; the US could live with that. But if the US chooses, out of pure self-involved tunnel vision, not to live with that, the question then becomes how much of the rest of the world will end up not living with that?
"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States," President Trump told reporters gathered at his New Jersey golf club. Speaking with his arms crossed on his chest, and using an unpersuasively tough tone of voice, he added: "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you."
Oh no, thank YOU, Mr. President, for the perfect remarks to commemorate the anniversaries of the fire and fury the world saw destroy the defenseless civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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