Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
The North Korea situation is up front and fluid, and I am no expert on the area. I think it is not a country, not a sovereign nation state, and I am no expert on the situation. I am a student of strategic facets of the Korean War up until the time GOA MacArthur was relieved of command as SCAP by President Truman.
North Korea, so-called, is a fiefdom of the Kim family maintained, originally, by the Soviet and later by the ChiComs. It is not a sovereign nation state and should not be thought of as such. The Kim family was defeated by SCAP GOA MacArthur and saved temporarily by the Chinese Red Army, whom SCAP GOA MacArthur also defeated. However, for achieving that victory, which Dean Rusk at the Far East Desk at the US State Department did not want, SCAP GOA MacArthur was relieved of command of SCAP by POTUS Truman, who gave the execution to George C. Marshall, who discharged the relief insultingly to fulfill a personal vendetta he nursed against GOA MacArthur since WWI.
POTUS Harry Truman was an ignorant, egotistical small-town politician under a cloud of Leftist advisers. Dean Rusk was a Leftist ChiCom supporter. He drew the 38th Parallel line in Korea and later, as SecState, its correlate in Vietnam: the DMZ.
So I will assemble here thinking — mine and others’ — and data points regarding North Korea which strike me as signs and portents as of this date
I think a step towards quieting the Korean Peninsula is taking North Korea as the Kim family rather than as a sovereign nation state.
The Left wants to accept North Korea armed with nuclear weapons: Mark Bowden: How To Deal With North Korea.
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I read Bowden’s paper carefully start to finish. I cannot find anything nice to say about it.
It says to me: Team D.C. has failed their responsibility to protect the nation. They think NK is an unresolvable military problem. That’s where Bowden comes out, says to just wait and ***hope*** for the best. Yeah, right!. NK is a resolvable diplomatic, financial/economic and military problem. Heavy on the financial/economics, which has never been done until now ….
Sundance watches that — economics — aspect:
Trump Doesn’t Bluff – Observers, Writ Large, Continue To Find Emphasis on the Wrong Syllable …
BOOM – U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley Delivers Economic MOAB With Trade Warning to China …
President Trump Prepares Economic Team For Upcoming Challenge – Generational Trade Geography …
Transcript of Mnuchin and Tillerson Press Briefing – G20 and Beyond …
Trump on North Korea: “I have some pretty severe things we’re thinking about” …
Sundance, the economics road to defeating the Kim family is in fact classical military doctrine: pinch off an enemy’s supply lines, don’t attack them directly, hold them in front but attack their war-making capacity, their rear, and that means everything that comes to make up their economy. Hold them by the nose and kick them in the pants. Ancient doctrine.
China deserves to get hurt badly in this affray. She killed a lot of American Soldiers in an unannounced attack on victorious American forces at the Yalu and farther south.
A prediction: at the end of this, GOA MacArthur will be vindicated: you cannot contain an enemy, you have to defeat him by receiving his unconditional surrender.
Containment doctrine, even aggressively as Kennan meant it — and as was NOT in fact executed — does not solve the problem posed by a belligerent. GOA MacArthur was right all along and in everything he did and advocated. Truman was wrong and left us with this headache on the Korean Peninsula. Talk about kicking cans down the road!
In military terms: pinch off their supply lines, every last one of them. Eminently doable. And who are they going to attack in response … and get annihilated if they do (at least Bowden got that right).
All Bowden’s USA sources are men and women of The Fraud’s admin or anonymous. None of them has a solution. After years in D.C.! None of them wants one. They say Trump has to find a way. Why didn’t they? And Bowden flits over that reality. They are losers as persons, intellectuals and public servants (if that is what they ever intended on being, which I doubt). And Bowden calls POTUS Trump morally challenged! Yeah, right.
Mush heads. And they think they are smart, know more and better than anyone else does.
Meanwhile, things are moving in directions of which they never thought, or were too frightened to contemplate:
I would not like to be a country supplying NK with anything after hearing Nikki there. This policy she announces — but will not specify now — will ensnare Pakistan and Iran, BTW. Maybe also Qatar. Definitely and most intentionally, China. POTUS recently tweeted that China had her chance to help us and did not, so ….
In lieu of Bowden’s and his interviewees’ intellectual impotence and strategic stupidity — and those of the D.C. elites at schools, think tanks and USG bureaucracies — there is this from Sundance at The Conservative Tree House: Trump Doesn’t Bluff – Observers, Writ Large, Continue To Find Emphasis on the Wrong Syllable …
Yeah, MacArthur will be vindicated, in re China, too. You just can’t hold bad actors at bay. You have to join them or kill them, and only killing them quietens the times.
You know, the theological component — the difference between religion and idolatry — advanced for annihilating Salafi Jihad is also the theological component for annihilating the NK leading families.
Which reminds me I forgot to mention the most fundamental weakness of Bowden’s essay: that NKers are true believers in the Kim/Korea family-god myth.
They have lived under it. They have no illusions in that regard. Bowden gives the myth’s formative/restrictive power too much credence. Nobody is as stupid or far-gone nutritionally en mass as Bowden’s representation of Koreans’ racism makes them out to be.
Racism is always only something you can get away with easily. Without the easily part, it evaporates because people know better, especially in the hot comms of electronic envelopment and personal experience. Parents trying to prevent their children from miscegenation is a sign that racism is safe only in private and that everyone knows there is one race.
The assumption that all the LTs, CPTs and MAJs with their artillery tubes above the DMZ will use them, etc., etc., is weak. First, those are Western formation ranks and unit designations and therefore bear elements of Western military practice and civil considerations. Second, leafleting front-line troops is SOP and not ineffective, especially against brutal dictatorships. Third, except under very unusual and emotionally powerful circumstances, the finitude of personalities disinclines them to accept or execute orders that contravene their manifest self-interest in re survival. And at the small unit level — e.g., SAS troops out of ammo in Syria lately — where guns are manned and fired — or not — nothing happens without collegial consensus.
Bowden and his interviewees project a picture of war which is unrealistic for a plethora of reasons:
AND ANOTHER THING!
Bowden’s article indicates that Left/Deep State/Bureaucracy types want to surrender USA sovereignty to China/NK because, whatever the costs, Communism (aka Globalism) is preferable to Christianity. This all is about religion, ultimately. USA, Russia, India, Poland/Intermarium and Spain are Western (aka Latin Church), Eastern (aka Greek/Russian Church) and Sanathana Dharma countries willing to preserve their Sanskritic religions and cultures … at sword points if needs be.
Profoundly related: Pax Laticana.
Bowden rightly rejects the concept of “turning the screws.” Identical with the Vietnam-era concept of graduated pressure, “turning the screws” would rely on Kim’s understanding that our limited military actions would be intended to communicate intent and resolve instead of as a personal threat. No god such as Kim can be so attacked without annihilating the attacker.
Decapitation won’t work, either, with no clear succession and an unpredictable response from the military. Too many unknowns. So Bowden suggests acceptance, praying that balancing the loss of, hopefully, at most one American city against the nuclear destruction of North Korea will permit an uneasy but otherwise bloodless relationship between the Kim family and everyone else. This is an unacceptable conclusion.
With some exceptions, such as Iran and Pakistan, ICBM nuclear capable states are so only in the normal and proper state of the relations between sovereign nations. Sovereignty is by force of arms and nations that claim sovereignty both assert and defend that claim with whatever passes for the best current weaponry. This is natural. When a nation such as North Korea grasps for such weapons every other nation already so armed is jointly and severally jeopardized. North Korea no more intends to join the normal bustle of international relations than would a nuclear armed Taliban Afghanistan or ISIL caliphate. Bowden knows this yet suggests acceptance.
The underlying assumptions throughout Bowden’s analysis of Option 1 – prevention – are that 1) North’s military will be as combat effective as an equally sized and equipped Western military 2) the use of nuclear or other weapons by the United States is unthinkable 3) that President Trump is “ignorant of the long history of the problem” and “has not shown abundant capacity for moral judgement,” 4) that it is wrong to value American lives above others 5) that rebuilding a Kim-free North Korea would be stymied by insurgency similar to that in post- Saddam Iraq.
Consider the importance to U.S. military effectiveness of small-unit initiative. Non-Western militaries in authoritarian societies are notable for suppressing such initiative. North Korea is a sharp point on the cactus-map of this world’s authoritarian societies. I don’t think their military would effectively, suicidally prosecute a barrage on Seoul while at the same time countering the “hammer blow” of Option 1. The fanatical discipline and immediate fear of death fostered in North Korea must be inversely proportional to proximity to Kim. North Korean society would collapse with Kim gone, whether dead or in other ways deprived of the constant presence necessary for deification.
To assert that any weapon is unusable is just silly. Let’s say that I am wrong about North Korean military loss of effectiveness in the face of total war and suppose that without nuclear bombardment an infallible deadhand will cause by conventional means Seoul’s fiery destruction along with 25 million South Koreans. Then by Bowden’s calculus of death, in which 1 million must be different than 25 million, it is wrong to not hit the North with nuclear weapons if doing so will cause some reasonable fraction of fewer deaths. But why stop there? If EMP weapons are as great as we’re led to believe, why not liberally use nuclear or explosively pumped flux compression EMP generators to knock out Kim’s communication and soft electronics? If Option 1 is called for then no weapons can be off limits.
Bowden clearly dislikes President Trump. It’s ridiculous to make this defense but here goes: no one who is in their 70s, has built an empire, has dealt in business the world over, and is now the president of this country is ignorant of the history of the Korean peninsula. Bowden’s conclusions are colored by his bias against the Trump administration. Anything Trump does will be, to Bowden, wrong from the beginning.
It is true that it’s easier to talk about expending others’ lives than our own. But that is as it should be. I will sacrifice in a moment Seoul to save Seattle. I would expect them to do the same. To think otherwise is perverse. The United States created this problem in the Koreas and we must solve it. It will be messy.
I’m most confounded by the idea that a post-Kim North Korea would be riddled with insurgencies in the way of Iraq. I think that is a simplistic analogy. Whatever Baathist Saddam loyalists remained after the 2003 invasion were replaced by foreign fighters motivated by a common Salafist theology and sustained by Wahhabi petrodollars. As bad as Kim-worship is it is limited by its nature to North Korea and actualized militarily by a relatively small leadership cadre. Kill them and you kill Kim’s godhood.
The correct course of action is to kill Kim and destroy the North Korean military. Total, unconditional surrender followed by American occupation and rebuilding. Were individual World War II Japanese soldiers any less pure in their fanaticism and loyalty to country than we presume of their North Korean peers? Were they not better fed, trained, and to contemporary standards, armed? Was not their motivating ideology better suited to sustaining morale at a distance from authority? Yet with a hard enough knock on the head the Japanese reformed. So can the North Koreans.
Warmly,
Gen. “Buck” Turgidson
I think your strongest point relates to rejecting Acceptance, namely, that Kim has no intention of joining the community of nations, ergo, all are threaten’d.
Implicit in your SitRep is that the situation is not so much North Korea as Kim and family. I think that is a constructive way to look at it. Down the military chain of command that means less gets done for Kim the farther away the subordinate is from him, even with all the brain-washing, which is never as effective a threat as is often made out to be. Mattis: Nothing keeps me awake at night. I keep other people awake at night. Important to remember: GEN/SECDEF James Mattis’ call sign is NOT Mad Dog. It is Chaos.
It is easier — and draws more devotees — to be fanatical about a dead person (e.g., Salafis) than a living one (e.g., Kim-ists). And fanaticism’s numbers dry up pretty quickly when they are not winning as long as they are met resolutely from the start and can see no victory.
A nationalism which can appeal to the actual, experienced Almighty to inspire Soldiery must dominate a so-called nationalism which must appeal to an evident human, living or dead. Bowden does not factor that fact into his calculations and I expect would want to dismiss its force.
Update 1: I am glad to see this matter pondered and discussed. Mark Bowden already speaks, I think, for the Globalist Left when he argues for accepting nuclear/ballistic NorK.
I think step one is to take NorK as a usurper regime, not a nation state, which has tried, solely because of external support, to divide Korea. Really, NorK was made by Dean Rusk while at the Far East desk of the State Department, using the 38th Parallel as line of demarcation between American and Soviet (later Chinese) zones of influence over Korea.
(Rusk repeated that fiction years later when, as SecState, he drew the DMZ across Vietnam. And for the same reason: to save the Red Army, or as he designated them, “agrarian reformers.”)
Following WWII, Korea was a State Department show, entirely. SCAP (MacArthur) had nothing to do with it until Rusk and State’s little Commie friends did what they always do: show up for tea, uninvited, and kick over the serving tray.
If Rusk and State had allowed SCAP to drop the bridges over the Yalu, none of this we see today would exist. MacArthur was ON the Yalu when the Chinese struck. No commander in the world would have crossed those bridges for a peninsular campaign without having foreknowledge that the bridges would remain intact for his communications. So China struck with human wave attacks and was still beaten — and the bridges stayed — yet even so MacArthur was ready to move north to drive them back, eventually, across the Yalu — which is why he was relieved. Not the narrative, to beat the Red Army.
So NorK is a separatist usurper client of Global Leftism, aka the Red Army — which is why instinctively Bowden is willing to live with them — and conceptualizing what to do about them now is best premised on that geopolitical status of theirs.
I think we are going to see some moves against their supply lines, economics moves, very painful ones. Classic military doctrine: hold an enemy in the front, but put your main effort into kicking him in the rear, aka pinching off his supplies; then, chew.
Update 2: POTUS’ Warsaw speech really threw the commies/muslims back on their supports. Exhibit A, from the Southern Poverty Communist Law Center: Donald Trump’s Visit to Poland Further Emboldens Far-Right Elements. I commented there:
Oh wow, SPLC. You know how to think and write like a Communist. Well, I am a far right fascist (and all the rest) in your accounting, and a Christian Theologian (UCC and ECUSA) into the bargain, a Graduate of The Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York — accounted by you one of your friends in the cause, no doubt (but really not so) — so come after me.
Update 3: Austin Bay: Trump Has 6 Options to Neutralize North Korea—but None Are Good and Trump’s Full-Court Press Is Squeezing the Nukes Out of North Korea; and Sundance: “TERMS” – Secretary Tillerson and Secretary Mattis Release Joint Remarks on North Korea … .
Update 4: Which Is Worse, Nuclear Annihilation or Donald Trump?
Update 5: Austin Bay: Trump Has 6 Options to Neutralize North Korea—but None Are Good
Update 6: Sundance: ¹China tells DPRK to do stupid thing. ²DPRK does stupid thing. ³Trump hits China with economic punishment for [doing] stupid thing.
Update 7: Richard Fernandez: The End Of Containment
One sits at table with a long-run hostile and rockets a short-run hostile as a message to the long-run hostile that they had better climb down. That is a Mafia communication technique that did not escape China’s attention.
Update 8: Over the past two years the increasingly skeptical citizenry of the United States and Europe has been treated to a stream of op-eds and television appearances lamenting the looming collapse of the liberal world order, to be accompanied by a surge of illiberalism, nationalism, and fringe politics. Rarely, however, does such hand-wringing stray beyond shopworn comparisons of the “complex interdependence” of the glorious past and the parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the current era. In truth, we are not witnessing a dramatic systemic change driven by conniving external forces, but a meltdown of political authority in the West caused by the relatively straightforward indolence of its political class. Our troubles are less about liberalism’s decline or the ascendancy of left or right politics. Simply put, the citizenry in the West has been frustrated for decades with its elites’ inability to deliver workable solutions to the problems of slow growth, deindustrialization, immigration, and the overall decline of self-confidence across the West.
The legitimacy, and hence stability, of the international system rests to a degree on the ability of the leading powers to deliver at home—or, simply put, to govern. The increasing volatility of international politics is in part a byproduct of systemic dysfunction across the West at the level of domestic politics. Americans and Europeans alike are running out of patience with the governing class. In Europe, the government’s inability to control mass migration or develop effective solutions to domestic terrorism are two important drivers of the growing public discontent. In the United States the middle and working classes have been frustrated for decades with the government’s inability to remedy de-industrialization, urban decay, and declining economic opportunity.
Glenn Reynolds comments: And in both places, as the “elite” has grown demonstrably less competent and honest, it has also grown visibly more contemptuous of the people it purports to govern. That contempt is, I think, the most poisonous part of the whole equation.
My essays on the question of authority are here.
Update 9: Eight Reasons North Korea Is Not Leveling Seoul
Update 11: North Korea’s Threat Might Be Worse Than We Think
Dwight R. Rider, 30 years a targeting specialist for the U.S. with a master’s degree from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), says the reason the U.S. intelligence community (I.C.) says negotiation is the only option is that the I.C. rejected the study his group made that identified hidden nuclear facilities and weapons in North Korea and now realizes they don’t know where to target. Thus, in their minds, any pre-emptive attack might have only minimal effect on North Korea’s capability and leave the rogue state with plenty of retaliation options.
Update 12: Trump’s North Korea Threat-Theater Is Working
Update 13: David Archibald: Advice for Our Vietnamese Friends on China
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
