Catechism     No. 403  |  April 28, 2013     DC RealTalk     Catechism     Study     The Church     Living     Cover     Keeping It Real     Zion     Donate

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OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

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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