War Dance
What Does Kim Want?
Waiting By The Phone
What’s also different, however, is this, the
latest of the Kim family of despots, Kim
Jong-un. Kim seems to break the mold of most of
his predecessors. The B-movie fan inside me
suspects Kim is faking it; pretending to be
crazy and over-the-top in order to keep his
military leaders in line and keep them from
bumping him off and replacing him with any one
of his several brothers. This Kim has pushed
their extortion routine to new levels both
puzzling and unnerving. Still, no one on the
planet takes the threats seriously which, in a
great political thriller, would be the point:
Kim’s betting no one will actually attack his
country because he’s being so obviously
preposterous now that Obama and other world
leaders are leaving open the distinct
possibility that, like his predecessors, Kim is
putting on a show not for the world but for the
locals. We’re betting Kim is actually a
reformer, not anything at all like his father
and grandfather, but first he needs to get his
military leaders in line and clean house before
he can begin to change things.
This is my suspicion and hope. I suspect Kim is
actually a fan of Obama’s, or that he perhaps
envies the way Obama has—agree or not—changed
the status quo of how the U.S. does things.
Whether Kim is a genuine good guy or an egoist
obsessed with legacy, the Obama Model proposes
that most any reform he enacts—whatever that may
be—will elevate Kim in the history books. In
order to achieve that, Kim must follow Obama’s
model: be unpredictable, be inscrutable, be
relentless in pursuing his goal. This North
Korean “crisis” may be a signal that Kim wants
to change things. What “change” will mean is
still way, way up in the air, but, my bet as a
professional writer, is on a better plotline
than Olympus. I think Kim wants to enact reform
in North Korea and needs Obama, especially, to
help him do it. Further, I think our president
has seriously considered that possibility, and
amping up tensions between our nations (and,
thus, increasing Kim’s street cred in the
process) is actually a means toward that end.
Nobody wants war anymore. Not America, not the
Russians, not even the Chinese. These days,
everybody is all about making money, and there
is so much money to be made that war is evolving
into a discredited, archaic idea. The only true
warmongers left are the ignorant—the illiterate,
severely-undereducated thugs in African nations
and other developing countries. And they don’t
want a *real* war, they just want to shoot
unarmed, even less-literate tribal villagers,
rape their women and slaughter their children.
You can hardly call that a “war.”
The tact most of the world seems to be taking
with Kim Jong-un, thirty-ish son of the late(st)
North Korean strongman Kim Il-sung, is that Kim
is bluffing. It’s what North Korean strongmen
do: talk a lot of yang, scare everyone to death,
and then the U.S. writes him a fat check which
he spends mostly on himself and his military
leaders while his people continue to starve. The
tip-off with this latest Kim is his demand that
President Obama call him. If he really wanted
war, he wouldn’t give a fig about Obama. But I
suspect Kim, like most young men of his
generation, is likely a closet fan of Barack
Obama. Like NBA star Dennis Rodman, who most
notoriously visited the young leader, Kim is
likely a little star struck. I’ve no doubt
whatsoever that he’d stop all this nonsense and
roll out the red carpet in blushing excess if
the U.S. president chose to recognize North
Korea with a state visit.
The only other rational explanation for North
Korea’s inexplicable and unprovoked push to war
is that Kim Jong-un is a raving lunatic or an
ignorant, illiterate madman like those
terrorists constantly coming to power in
developing nations. And I don’t buy it. Kim is
far too well-educated and too modern to be as
disconnected as his father and grandfather were.
He knows, for a certainty, that, should he
launch a nuclear missile on the U.S. or our
allies, America could destroy his entire country
in about ten to fifteen minutes. The entire
North Korean capital would be scorched rubble
long before any of his missiles would ever hit
the U.S. mainland. So, he’s either insane,
suicidal, or, as everyone suspects, he’s
bluffing. He’s trying to bully America and its
allies into paying him off. After all, it’s what
we’ve always done: found some back channel to
pay off dictators like Kim to stop making
everyone nervous.
What’s different this time is, this president
doesn’t seem anxious to play that game. He
seems, rather, to be calling Kim’s bluff, which
can be dangerous. Should Kim Jong-un lose face,
his entire government might collapse, leading to
who-knows-what in a nuclear-armed country of,
yes, fairly ignorant, illiterate people. If Kim
is faking it, he might end up replaced by
someone who actually is as unhinged as Kim is
pretending to be, someone who might initiate a
nuclear exchange with the sole remaining world
superpower.
Neither Obama nor the Chinese seem particularly
interested in allowing Kim to save face. China
has been exerting gentle pressure while
referring to Kim as “The Little Trouble Maker”
behind his back. The U.S. has been, perhaps
unwisely, stoking the fires by calling Kim out.
I presume our president has seen at least a few
episodes of The West Wing and understands that
diplomacy means leaving an open door for Kim to
deescalate without embarrassing himself. Obama
seems uninterested in doing that; he seems to
want to change the international game plan: no
more checks for dictators. The White House seems
to be saying we’re more than willing to help
feed the North Koreans but they’ve got to give
up their nukes and stop this foolishness once
and for all. I doubt that’ll happen, but the
president seems clearly fed up with the legacy
of U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing into these
guys’ pockets while they threaten us with
annihilation. Should Obama change that game
plan, it will mark a historic shift in U.S.
policy, but it’s a real roll of the dice. I
mean, I’m *sure* Kim is bluffing… right?
The crippling psychopathy at work in North Korea
mirrors that of any number of brutal African
military states like the Congo and The Sudan,,
where a clearly unhinged madman holds absolute
power and the masses, fearing for their lives,
rabidly adore him. What fascinates me is the
parallels between the (pretend) lunatic Kim, the
slavishly loyal (at gunpoint) North Korean
people, and our black church tradition and
pastors. The North Korean populace is largely
ignorant, with even the best educated among them
held in fear of their brutal dictator. IN our
church tradition, we tend to treat the pastor
like he is the president or tribal leader,
measuring a pastor’s worth by his congregational
head count and the rigidity of his rule over it.
A two-second Google Images search will provide
dozens of pictures of white pastors, dozens of
pictures of black pastors. The majority of white
pastors are smiling, everybody’s Uncle Bud. The
majority of black pastors are scowling, ruthless
tribal strongmen. White pastors tend to evoke
love and peace; our pastors, in large measure,
evoke the law. Not God’s law, their law. Many or
somber overseers to whom unquestioned submission
is demanded, even when we know, without doubt,
that these men are disgracing the ministry with
sexual or financial impropriety. Many of our
pastors rarely, if ever, make hospital visits or
call us just to see how we’re doing. It’s not
unusual to see white pastors hanging out with
their congregants; they are knowable,
accessible, reachable. In far too many
instances, we have to wait weeks for an
appointment to see our pastors, with such visits
being rigidly timed.
We know This Foolishness With Pastors is going
on, but we turn blind eyes and deaf ears to it.
Why? We fear these men. Why? It is, for me, an
interesting parallel: impoverished North Koreans
and spiritually bankrupt black Church Folk. Both
act in ignorance. Both exhaust themselves
serving self-absorbed dictators.
Enough Already With This Guy: Obama on the phone with the South Korean president (Nov 23, 2010).
Ten Minutes
What is oddly missing from all the hyped-up pseudo-Cuban
Missile Crisis hysteria being fomented largely by the western
press is that the U.S. has these things called “submarines.” It
is certain we have at least two of these new-fangled “subs,”
ships that can actually travel beneath the water, parked
somewhere in Kim Jong-un’s backyard. Our subs likely cannot stop
Kim from launching on Japan or South Korea, but our subs can
completely obliterate North Korea—and Kim with it—with just a
phone call from President Obama. It amuses me that there’s been
all this talk about U.S. land-based ICBM’s, stealth bombers and
satellites, Navy Destroyers and boots on the ground and so
forth, but little or nothing is said about these “submarine”
things.
It is highly unlikely Kim Jong-un is unaware of U.S. nuclear
subs, a single one of which can park twenty-four Lockheed Martin
UGM-133 Trident D5 SLBM’s (Submarine-Launched Ballistic
Missiles), each with up to eight independently-targeted multiple
impact reentry vehicles (or “MIRVs”) carrying a 100-kiloton
nuclear warhead (roughly 16 times the size of the Hiroshima
nuclear bombing) off of Kim’s coastline. These subs are,
absolutely, out there, on routine patrol at all times. Flying at
speeds up to 13,000 mph, a missile sortie launched from a single
Ohio-Class U.S. Navy sub can obliterate the entire nation of
North Korea in about ten minutes or less. And, I promise you,
there are at, minimum, two of these horrific killing machines
parked in Kim’s back yard (called “redundancy”), drilling,
day-and-night, for a strategic missile launch. We don’t need no
planes, no troops, no huge military buildup. Nobody needs to
write an Opera. One phone call from Barack Obama and North Korea
doesn’t exist anymore. Kim surely knows this, which is why few
militarily-informed people are taking him seriously. It is, of
course, possible that he’s just insane or suicidal, but the
world is really wondering, “What does Kim want?”
Usually, the North Korans want money. Every so often they
threaten to start World War III, and America, it’s usually
America, buys them off. While demonizing America and Americans,
Kim Jong-un is at the same time depending, absolutely, on
America’s integrity. He knows we won’t obliterate North Korea
unless North Korea poses an imminent threat to the U.S.
mainland, which it certainly does not. He knows that even a
tactical (or surgical) U.S. deployment of nuclear or
conventional force against North Korea would have devastating
consequences for South Korea, where tens of thousands of U.S.
servicemen and civilians are based, and for neighboring China,
Japan and Guam. Obliterating North Korea, as North Korea
repeatedly threatens to do to the U.S., would create a
devastating nuclear winter which would affect the entire planet
and likely kill off everything on the Korean Peninsula and pose
a dire ecological and health threat to the neighboring nations
as far as our own Hawaiian islands. Thus, the comedy of Kim
threatening to start a war—for no apparent reason whatsoever—is
fueled not so much by Kim’s alleged military power but by the
fact the world’s lone remaining superpower cannot deploy its
power without causing devastating harm.
Casualties of a U.S. nuclear strike would include potentially
millions of starving peasant farmers who have done nothing to us
and who could have done nothing to stop the insane dictatorial
hierarchy that invited such a holocaust.
Even so, President Obama doesn’t seem terribly disposed to going
the appeasement route with North Korea this go-round. Giving
into Kim Jong-un’s demands—thus far, for an Obama phone call (I
actually suspect Kim is an Obama fanboy, but forcing a U.S.
president to call him would be an enormous win)—would set a
terrible precedent. On the other hand, if our president could
calm the world down with a single phone call, I can’t imagine
why he’d refuse. As usual, the only thing stopping the president
from making such a call is politics. Ironically, the only thing
fueling Kim Jong-un’s maniacal lunacy is politics.
Keystone Cops: Kim Jun-un pretending to read important documents for a photo op.
Please Let Us Help
At this writing, the North Koreans are threatening to execute a
test of a missile that could hit Japan or South Korea and,
potentially, the United States. No one actually believes this
missile had the range to hit the U.S., but that’s the noise
North Korea is selling. The world is a bit perplexed and
wondering what, if anything, to do. North Korea‘s last missile
test was an embarrassing failure. A failure of this test, after
all of Kim’s bluster, would be a catastrophic political blow to
the strange and untested new leader. Ironically, it’s actually
in the U.S.’s best interest that the missile test goes off
successfully and without a hitch; Kim could beat his chest for a
while, his massive military can high-five one another, and,
ideally, the seasonal war mongering would wind itself down. A
secret plot of American intelligence actually *assisting* the
North Koreans in their missile test, to ensure Kim does not lose
face, would make a real potboiler of a novel.
Another scenario would be for America to shoot the North Korean
missile down. Our missile-intercept technology has improved by
leaps and bounds, as demonstrated by Israel’s so-called “Iron
Dome” anti-missile technology. However, that technology is a
long way from foolproof. Should the North Koreans actually build
a missile that can fly, we shoot at it and *miss,* that would be
an amazing political win for Kim. If we shoot at it and hit it,
that would cause a perhaps irrecoverable loss of face for Kim,
who would then feel threatened by his own military to further
escalate world tensions in order to prove himself.
Sunday, an unidentified South Korean military source told the
South's Yonhap news agency that satellite imagery showed that
North Korean forces had moved two mobile missile launchers for
short-range Scud missiles to South Hamgyeong province on its
east coast. Upstaged last week by the Boston Marathon bombing,
Kim and company seem to be moving to recapture the world stage
with their missile shenanigans, threatening war for absolutely
no discernible reason whatsoever. In the end it will be the
Korean people, held virtually hostage by brutal regimes led by
one lunatic after another, who will bear the consequences of
this foolishness. It is perhaps saddest when we consider the
entire world—not just the U.S.—would surely come to North
Korea’s aid if they’d just let us.
Christopher J. Priest
21 April 2013
editor@praisenet.org
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