Bush, Blair and Howard set a bad example... They were bullies. They were not grown men. They were brats in nappies, armed with baseball bats. So none of these idiots can go and preach some behaviour tutorials to North Korea... They muffed it... They made it more difficult to deal with the problem child. They were problem children themselves. The only figure who can intervene is big brother, China... Please China, help North Korea away from its sense of defeat and revenge, into a glorious future of peace, relationships and harmony...

If you want to know what’s going through the mind of the North Korean regime, go back to the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. The way the North Koreans look at it, Gaddafi gave up his nuclear bomb, and lost his head. The lesson of Saddam Hussein’s end is another cautionary tale for the North Koreans. If Saddam had held onto his weapons of mass destruction–and lots of them–the Obama [the author means "the Bush Administration"] Administration would have had second thoughts about invading his [Saddam's] country. Or so I’m told by a former CIA colleague, and one of the best-informed North Korean watchers around.

North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, like his father and his grandfather, exists in a rococo fantasy. He truly believes that North Korea possesses an invincible military, that his generals are brilliant, that he could take Seoul in a matter of days. As a superpower, he also believes that North Korea deserves a nuclear arsenal. There can’t be any other avenue to the international respect North Korea deserves.

It’s in this context, as delusional as it may be, that it’s close to certain that Kim Jong Un has no intention of backing down in the current confrontation with the U.S. While it’s unlikely his intention is to start a war with the United States, he also doesn’t intend to give up an inch to cool things down. And superpowers don’t submit at the sound of a little saber rattling.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/04/05/viewpoint-north-koreas-gaddafi-nightmare/#ixzz2Pej0JN31

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A better analysis of the problem has been provided by Peter Hartcher at the SMH:

''To normalise relations with the US and work in concert with the West would be the equivalent of putting a gun to our heads,'' the regime representative told the American.

''Our system is about being against you - if we accept working with you, we would be destroyed,'' the North Korean said during a conversation on the sidelines of the negotiations, the so-called six-party talks.

He wasn't talking about destruction at the hands of the US or any foreign foe, but at the hands of the North Koreans themselves. Because it would be an admission of profound national failure. This is a central insight.

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8133#comment-27217

some things never change Gus ....

In an April 3 Wall Street Journal article, “U.S. dials back on Korean show of force,” reporters Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes revealed that the White House approved a detailed plan, called ‘the playbook,’ to ratchet up tension with North Korea during the Pentagon’s war games with South Korea.

The war games, which are still in progress, and involve the deployment of a considerable amount of sophisticated US military hardware to within striking distance of North Korea, are already a source of considerable tension in Pyongyang, and represent what Korean specialist Tim Beal dubs “sub-critical” warfare.

The two-month-long war games, directed at and carried out in proximity to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, force the North Korean military onto high alert, an exhausting and cripplingly expensive state of affairs for a small country whose economy has already been crippled by wide-ranging sanctions. North Korea estimates that sanctions and US military aggression have taken an incalculable toll on its economy. [1]

The playbook was developed by the Pentagon’s Pacific Command, to augment the war games that began in early March, and was discussed at several high-level White House meetings, according to the Wall Street Journal reporters.

The plan called for low-altitude B-52 bomber flights over the Korean peninsula, which happened on March 8. A few weeks later, two nuclear-capable B-2 bombers dropped dummy payloads on a South Korean missile range. The flights were deliberately carried out in broad daylight at low altitude, according to a U.S. defense official, to produce the intended minatory effect. “We could fly it at night, but the point was for them to see it.” [2]

A few days ago, the Pentagon deployed two advanced F-22 warplanes to South Korea, also part of the ‘play-book’ plan to intimidate Pyongyang.

According to Entous and Barnes, the White House knew that the North Koreans would react by threatening to retaliate against the United States and South Korea.

In a March 29 article, Barnes wrote that “Defense officials acknowledged that North Korean military officers are particularly agitated by bomber flights because of memories of the destruction wrought from the air during the Korean War.” [3] During the war, the United States Air Force demolished every target over one story. It also dropped more napalm than it did later in Vietnam. [4]

The reality, then, is exactly opposite of the narrative formulated in the Western mass media. Washington hasn’t responded to North Korean belligerence and provocations with a show of force. On the contrary, Washington deliberately planned a show of force in order to elicit an angry North Korean reaction, which was then labelled “belligerence” and “provocation.” The provocations, coldly and calculating planned, have come from Washington. North Korea’s reactions have been defensive.

Pressed to explain why North Korea, a military pipsqueak in comparison to the United States, would deliberately provoke a military colossus, Western journalists, citing unnamed analysts, have concocted a risible fiction about Pyongyang using military threats as a bargaining chip to wheedle aid from the West, as a prop to its faltering “mismanaged” economy. The role of sanctions and the unceasing threat of US military intervention are swept aside as explanations for North Korea’s economic travails.

However, Entous’s and Barnes’s revelations now make the story harder to stick. The North Koreans haven’t developed a nuclear program, poured money into their military, and made firm their resolve to meet US and South Korean aggression head-on, in order to inveigle aid from Washington. They’ve done so to defend themselves against coldly calculated provocations.

According to the Wall Street Journal staffers, the White House has dialled back its provocations for now, for fear they could lead to a North Korean “miscalculation.” In street language, Washington challenged the DPRK to a game of chicken, and broke it off, when it became clear the game might not unfold as planned.

Notes

1. According to the Korean Central News Agency, March 26, 2013, “The amount of human and material damage done to the DPRK till 2005 totaled at least 64,959 854 million U.S. dollars.”

2. Jay Solomon, Julian E. Barnes and Alastair Gale, “North Korea warned”, The Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013

3. Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. pledges further show of force in Korea”, The Wall Street journal, March 29, 2013

4. Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: A History. Modern Library. 2010.

Washington's Palybook On Provoking North Korea 

Yes John, plus ça change, plus ça don't change much... More binocular jokes:

And I like the cartoon from our own Pal Oliphant:

Patrick Bruce "Pat" Oliphant (b. 24 July 1935 in Adelaide, Australia) is described by the New York Times as "the most influential editorial cartoonist now working".[1] His trademark is a small penguin character named Punk, who is often seen making a comment about the subject of the panel.

The sanest thing anyone said in Washington this week was a reminder, on the Friday before Christmas, when Barack Obama took a break from oscillating between reassuring rationality and understated fear to make an accidental joke:

It says something about North Korea that it decided to mount an all-out attack about a satirical movie … starring Seth Rogen.

It also says something about the over-the-top rhetoric of United States cybersecurity paranoia that it took the President of the United States to remind us to take a deep breath and exhale, even if Sony abruptly scrapped its poorly reviewed Hollywood blockbuster after nebulous threats from alleged North Korean hackers.

Unfortunately, acting rational seems out of the question at this point. In between making a lot of sense about Sony’s cowardly “mistake” to pull a film based on a childish, unsubstantiated threat, Obama indicated the US planned to respond in some as-yet-unknown way, which sounds a lot like a cyberattack of our own.

“We will respond, we will respond proportionally, and in a place and time that we choose,” Obama said at his year-end news conference. Why should we be responding offensively at all? As the Wall Street Journal’s Danny Yadron reported, a movie studio doesn’t reach the US government’s definition of “critical infrastructure” that would allow its military to respond under existing rules, but that didn’t stop the White House from calling the Sony hack a “national security issue” just a day later.

...

This is also critical moment to take another look at the FBI’s proposal to force tech companies to install an insecure backdoor in all communications systems that use encryption, and the NSA’s own aggressive hacking of companies and governments overseas – both policies that would make attacks like the Sony hack more likely in the future. Shouldn’t we be asking why America is purposefully degrading its own cybersecurity in an attempt to make sure we keep our vast surveillance capabilities on everyone else in the world?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/sony-hack-cyberwar-north-korea-the-interview-seth-rogen-privacy

See toon at top...

North Korea says US accusations that it was involved in a cyber attack on Sony Pictures are "groundless slander" and has demanded a joint investigation into the incident.

An unnamed spokesman of the North's foreign ministry also said there would be "grave consequences" if Washington refused to agree to the joint probe and continued to accuse the North of the attack, the country's official KCNA news agency reported.

"As the United States is spreading groundless allegations and slandering us, we propose a joint investigation with it into this incident," the spokesman was quoted by KCNA as saying.

"Without resorting to such tortures as were used by the US CIA, we have means to prove that this incident has nothing to do with us."

The cyber attack prompted Sony Pictures to cancel the Christmas Day release of The Interview, a madcap satire about a fictional CIA plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-20/korea-calls-for-joint-probe-with-us-into-sony-hack/5981488

Why not make a comedic movie about US torture around the world and Guantanamo bay?... That would be a riot, no?

The Pentagon’s Unholy Alliance with Missionaries

With apologies to Cole for any omissions or misunderstandings on my part, the story goes something like this: in 2004 the Pentagon, fired up by the need to “protect the country” post 9/11, was keen on muscling in on the CIA’s virtual monopoly on strategic intelligence collection. Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, former head of the counter-terrorist Delta Force and at that time deputy in the Pentagon’s office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, was tasked with improving collection for the military consumers in key crisis areas, including Iran and North Korea. He turned to the task of creating cover mechanisms to be used by his new corps of clandestine warriors.

Boykin, supported by his boss Stephen Cambone and also by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, soon came up with a scheme to smuggle electronic monitoring equipment and other spyware into top priority target North Korea. In intelligence jargon, North Korea was (and still is) the ultimate “denied area,” a society and government difficult or even nearly impossible to penetrate because of strict population control and a high level of security. At that time the United States had no spies inside the secretive nuclear-armed country telling Washington what was going on. What little information was available on North Korea came primarily from surveillance satellites, from South Korea’s own spy services, and from the very limited intelligence that was being shared by China.

read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-pentagons-unholy-alliance-with-missionaries/

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