Doppelganger theorists point out that Kim suffered a serious stroke in 2008. But since then, North Korean media reported 122 official visits he made to “factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest… to prove, presumably, that Mr. Kim was alive and well and very much in charge.”

Which possibility is less likely? That Kim made a miraculous recovery and adopted a grueling ceremonial schedule? Or that a stand-in cut the ribbons and took the bows? Cynics point out that Mr. Clinton himself has not been real since sometime in the 1980s, when he was replaced by an unprincipled testosterone-driven opportunist.

We should not be surprised that international diplomacy is now the practice of surrogates. Many of our military functions are subcontracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and other branches of Murder, Inc. We outsource torture and invade countries with (often mis) guided missiles. We live in the wondrous age of clones and drones.

Our political discourse is as synthetic as the foods we eat, driven by a demagogic logic that bears scant relation to reality. Our print and broadcast pundits prefer to generate outrageous headlines for a quick ratings spike than to craft helpful or thoughtful commentary. Hence the (oxy)moronic “Fox News” network. Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are as authentic and toxic as Kim Jong-il, alive or dead.

Television substitutes for millions of “personal” lives. Celebrities act as stand-ins for those who would rather watch than live. Sports and movie stars are grotesquely overpaid because mass audiences find it easier and more comforting to cheer and jeer for designated others than to puzzle out their own, less predictable, existences.

Our addictions to chemical additives and fast food in lieu of natural nutrients make us fat. Our addictions to trash talk and the mindless incitements of half-educated pundits and politicians degrade our mental and emotional functions. We are increasingly unable to differentiate garbage calories from natural energy or malignant chat from substantive civil discourse.

Advertisements once cautioned us to “Accept no substitutes.” But substitutes are mostly what we have now. Was the man who ran for president on a platform of positive change and moral responsibility abducted during his pre-inaugural trip to Hawaii? Was he replaced by the business-as-usual guy now in the White House, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Barack Obama?

Birthers who obsess about Obama’s citizenship are sniffing at the wrong fireplug. It’s not where Obama was born that matters, but where he went.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned in the 1830s that a standing army was a threat to democratic society. We now have one of the largest standing armies in world history. Military priorities supersede our increasingly critical social and civic needs. We squander our resources and terrorize innocent human beings by bombing Afghan villages instead of building schools and highways in our own country or providing health care for our citizens.

War is not a valid substitute for rational foreign or domestic policies. Where is the president, the politician or the pundit who will say so?

In a world of surrogates, substitutes and clones, a body-double for Kim Jong-il is not so scandalous. The original dictator – son of another dictator – did not seem all that fabulous a fellow anyway. So it’s hard to mourn his passing, or lament that phonies may be impersonating him.

In fact, maybe whoever’s pulling the strings could design a more humane model of Kim for the coming decades. Then we could follow their lead and improve all the ersatz bull dada which rules our own culture and our own lives.

ABC’s Peter Jennings called him “a journalist’s journalist.” The New York Times featured his death on its front page (usually reserved for the rich and powerful) in a Peter Flint obituary titled, “IF Stone, Iconoclast of Journalism, Is Dead at 81.” A quintessential muckraker, he described him as “the independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism hailed by his admirers for his scholarship, wit and lucidity” over a career spanning 67 years.

He quoted Stone saying:

“I tried to bring the instincts of a scholar to the service of journalism; to take nothing for granted; to turn journalism into literature; to provide radical analysis with a conscientious concern for accuracy, and in studying the current scene to do my very best to preserve human values and free institutions.” In the spirit of author Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), he “comfort(ed) the afflicted and afflict(ed) the comfortable,” in a way few others matched or kept doing for so long.

In a 1987 interview, he deplored what he called the ascendancy of “right-wing kooks (and) the ugly spirit (of Reagan’s not so subtle message that) you should go get yours and run.” Late in life he learned classical Greek to be able to read untranslated works and write The Trials of Socrates after more than a decade of study. He criticized the accepted Plato view that he died for exhorting his fellow Athenians to be virtuous. According to Stone, he was seen as a security threat at a time Athenian democracy was imperiled.

In Izzy on Izzy, he called himself an “anachronism… an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither mortgage or broker, factor or patron… standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers.”

They were many, loyal, and included Ralph Nader who called him “the modern Tom Paine — as independent and incorruptible as they come (as) journalism’s Gibraltar and its unwavering conscience.”

Stone called himself “a newspaperman all my life,” publishing a paper (the Progress) at age 14, working for a country weekly, and then as correspondent for two city dailies (the Haddonfield Press and Camden Courier-Post). Beginning as a high school sophomore, he did this into his third year of college (at the University of Pennsylvania), then quit because “the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me.” At the same time, he worked afternoons and evenings at the Philadelphia Inquirer “doing combination rewrite and copy desk (work), so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week — big pay in 1928.” He did everything “except run a linotype machine.”

In the 1920s as a teenager, he became radicalized, mostly from reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin (a noted Russian anarchist and early communism advocate), and Karl Marx. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected to its New Jersey State Committee “before I was old enough to vote.” He did publicity for Norman Thomas (1894-1968) in the 1928 presidential campaign, but then “drifted away from left-wing politics because of the sectarianism of the left.”

He also believed that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism, and he wanted to be “free to help the unjustly treated, to defend everyone’s civil liberty, and to work for social reform without concern for leftist infighting.”

Remembering them “with affection,” he praised his employers for never forcing him to compromise his conscience, even as an anonymous editorial writer. From 1932-1939, that was his job for the Philadelphia Record and New York Post, both strongly pro-New Deal papers at the time. In 1940, he came to Washington as The Nation’s editor and remained until his death, working as reporter and columnist for PM, the New York Star, New York Post and New York Compass.

In the 1950s, during the Cold War and McCarthy era, no daily paper (or The Nation) ran his byline, so when the Compass closed in 1952, he launched his own four-page IF Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and wrote:

“Early Soviet novels used a vivid phrase, ‘former people,’ about the remnants of the dispossessed ruling class. On the inhospitable streets of Washington these days, your editor often feels like one of the ‘former people.’ ”

Earlier from its 1946 inception until 1949, he was a regular on Meet the Press, first on radio, then TV. No longer, nor was he seen again on national television for another 18 years because his muckraking threatened the powerful.

It’s never easy starting out on your own, but Stone succeeded by what he called “a piggy-back launching” from the PM, Star, and Compass mailing lists as well as people who had bought his books. From them, he got 5,000 subscribers at $5 each. During McCarthy’s heyday, he got a second-class mailing permit, and was on his way after “working in Washington for 12 years as correspondent for a succession of liberal and radical papers.”

Biographer Myra MacPherson (from All Governments Lie!) said he “went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch-hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. (Deservedly) He became world famous.”

Earlier, he supported Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election campaign, civil liberties for everyone, including communists, and advocated for peace and co-existence with the Soviets. He fought the loyalty purge, FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Pat McCarran’s virulent anti-communism as Senate Judiciary Committee and Internal Security Subcommittee chairmen, and Joe McCarthy.

He wrote the first article against the Smith Act for its 1940 use against Trotskyites and other leftists with suspected subversive leanings.

His idea was to make the Weekly radical by providing information readers could check out on their own. He “tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.” He wanted every issue to provide facts and opinions unavailable elsewhere in the press. He felt like “a guerilla warrior, swooping down in a surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry.”

Unlike beat reporters for major dailies or wire services, he was immune to the pressures they faced. He said Washington has lots of news. If information on some are blocked, go get others because “The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from the time to time.” And by asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.

It’s why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn’t the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.

“Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.” Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. “The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers.”

Most publishers aren’t just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers “stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons.” Even the best papers are timid. They don’t question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few “maverick” dailies are around making it “easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express.”

Journalism was a “crusade” for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being “rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government.” During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America’s traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.

DD Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone

Guttenplan described him as a journalistic “irritant to power for his uncanny ability to seize on the most inconvenient truths and for his vociferous opposition to the existing order.” After becoming radicalized, he was brash, forthright, anti-fascist, pro-labor, a supporter of New Deal politics, and a passionate activist for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and social justice.

In his preface, Guttenplan described the fateful December 12, 1949 moment when Stone went from prominence to a non-person in American politics and his profession. It was during an interchange with the AMA’s Dr. Morris Fishbein on Meet the Press, an ardent foe of universal single-payer health insurance he denounced as “socialistic.” Quoting Stone, Guttenplan wrote:

“Dr. Fishbein, let’s get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr. Harry Truman as a card-carrying communist, or just a deluded fellow-traveler?”

After that, he slowly vanished, was never again on Meet the Press, couldn’t get his passport renewed after a year in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Compass, and when it closed in 1952 was blacklisted as a reporter. As he put it at age 40: “I feel for the moment like a ghost.” And as Guttenplan wrote:

“For some time he live(d) in a kind of internal exile (sitting) in (a) Washington, DC… rented office waiting for the phone to ring (and) after three years (getting no) visitor apart from building maintenance workers and the mailman… (so he gave) up the office… work(ed) from home,” and launched the IF Stone Weekly as a platform to produce radical commentaries for his readers… “slowly, almost imperceptibly, his audience return(ed)” to its final year 1971 peak 70,000 circulation level.

According to Guttenplan, Stone “rode into battle not as a paladin of the powerless or a gadfly, but as an insider, a confidential agent of the (left-wing) ‘party within a party’ that served” progressive politics in the 1930s. He later broke with Harry Truman and supported Wallace. The FBI followed him everywhere, investigated him for five years, and accumulated 6,000 pages in his file, threefold its size for Al Capone. His phone was tapped and his mail intercepted on suspicion he was a Soviet spy, that was, of course, untrue.

By 1970, he was invited in from the cold and given a special George Polk Award in journalism. He got honorary degrees from American University, Brown, Colby, and others, including a baccalaureate and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania where he dropped out before graduating.

His numerous awards included:

• Newspaper Guild of New York Honors Page One Must for his book, Underground to Palestine — written before his views about Israel changed after the 1967 war;
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Award;
• the National Press Club Journalists’ Journalist Award
• ACLU Award;
• the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education In Journalism & Mass Communications;
• Columbia University Journalism Award; and
• on March 5, 2008, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced an annual IF Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence award and an IF Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

In his name, the annual Izzy Award is presented to “an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.”

Three of Stone’s great quotes were:

One of several versions of his saying, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins….”

“You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.” Not Stone. His honor and integrity weren’t for sale.

In a June 19-25, 2009 Counterspin interview, Guttenplan said Stone was never ideologically rigid, and would always change his views in light of new information. He:

never pretended to be a liberal. He was an unashamed radical, and in a way, the most important way in which he matters is he shows us, he reminds us what’s possible. He reminds us what the left can do. He reminds us what our country can do. He reminds us what our government can do if we keep on its back and we make sure it delivers on its promises.

And he showed how good journalism can make a difference, the kind so lacking then and now with no IF Stone around to write it.

He “challenged power by using power’s own record against itself.” And after his hearing failed, he relied increasingly on documents to prove what he famously said:

“All governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time,” and it’s up to good journalists to find and report it. Stone did, what the powerful wanted suppressed in his Weekly and numerous books, including (a treasured signed used copy this writer owns of) his Hidden History of the Korean War.

Published in 1952, Monthly Review co-founders Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface:

“This book….paints a very different picture of the Korean War — one, in fact, which is at variance with the official version at almost every point.” Stone’s investigations into official discrepancies led him “to a full-scale reassessment of the whole” war.

First published, in part, in the Compass and two articles in France’s L’Observateur, its publisher, Claude Bourdet explained in his article titled, “The Korean Mystery: Fight Against a Phantom?”

If Stone’s thesis corresponds to reality (and it did), we are in the presence of the greatest swindle in the whole of military history… not a question of a harmless fraud but of a terrible maneuver in which deception is being consciously utilized to block peace at a time when it is possible.

Stone called it international aggression. So did Huberman and Sweezy writing in August 1951 (14 months into the war):

“….we have come to the conclusion that (South Korean president) Syngman Rhee deliberately provoked the North Koreans in the hope that they would retaliate by crossing the parallel in force. The northerners (who wanted a unified Korea, not war) fell neatly into the trap.” Truman was the instigator who took full advantage when they did, as Stone believed in writing:

we said we were going to Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn’t stop, they kept going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda here and what might that agenda be?

The same one, he later learned, we had in Vietnam that made him outspoken against it. He was the only journalist asked to speak at the first nationwide November 15, 1969 “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam War,” that half a million to Washington one month after a global event was held.

He matched his anti-war spirit with his support for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, social equity, and above all accuracy and truth, and used his journalism as a “crusade” to produce it. He wrote:

“I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying forward the best in America’s traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations” behind all his writings and the legacy that’s now ours.

On June 17, 1989, he died of heart failure in Cambridge, MA and is buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving behind his wife, Esther, of 60 years, and three children, Celia, Jeremy and Christopher. He once told his wife that “if (he) lived long enough (he’d) graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if (he) lasted long enough, from a character to public institution.” He omitted a legend, a committed radical, consummate independent, and ideological hero symbolizing what Public Affairs’ Peter Osnos called his “stubborn tenacity, ferocious independence, and extraordinary will” in pursuing truth.

Or as Guttenplan ended his book:

“IF Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world. We read and work – and wait.”

You confront evil, you do not negotiate with it.

– Natan Sharansky

While it may be a long way from Tel Aviv to Pyongyang, Israel bears considerable responsibility for North Korea’s increasingly fraught relations with the world. Indeed, through its small but influential support network in the United States, the self-styled Jewish state has played a rarely acknowledged but arguably decisive role in undermining progress towards a peaceful resolution of America’s longest running conflict. Though totally oblivious to this unwarranted intervention by a seemingly distant and irrelevant power, hundreds of millions of Koreans, Chinese and Japanese could have paid, and may yet pay, a terrible price for Israel’s covert meddling in East Asian politics.

In his State of the Union Address delivered on 29 January, 2002, George W. Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea an “Axis of Evil” that was allegedly supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. It later emerged that the provocative phrase which arbitrarily linked Pyongyang to Israel’s two greatest regional rivals had been written by David Frum, Bush’s Canadian speechwriter. An ardent Zionist, Frum recently said that the occupied West Bank belongs to Israel but that Palestinians living there shouldn’t have the vote. He is also the co-author with Richard Perle of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, in which the Likudnik neo-conservatives advocated a confrontational approach to North Korea.

Even more threatening from a North Korean perspective than being officially designated “evil” was the National Security Strategy of the United States announced by Bush in September 2002. Charles Krauthammer, a neo-conservative columnist for the Washington Post, coined the phrase “Bush doctrine” to describe the policy of preemptive strikes, which specifically targeted Iraq, Iran and North Korea. However, Philip Shenon, a New York Times reporter, claims in his book The Commission that it was Philip Zelikow, a neo-conservative member of Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board later appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who wrote the policy that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq on the pretext that its supposed “weapons of mass destruction” posed a threat to the United States.

Yet, on the eve of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia, “I’ll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It’s the threat against Israel.” No doubt because this would not be, as Zelikow admitted, a “popular sell” to the American people, the grandiose words given Bush to read were somewhat less candid: “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

The “Zelikow doctrine” had an immediate, and probably foreseeable, catalysing effect on an already fearful North Korean regime. Bruce Cumings, a specialist in modern Korean history, wrote, “From October 2002 onward they acted as if their only deterrent to this irresponsible administration was a nuclear one, a decision that any general sitting in Pyongyang (or Tehran) would have made.” Writing in 2004, Cumings predicted that if North Korea were to develop a nuclear deterrent, it would be known as “Bush’s bomb.” But since it was the Israel-centered neo-conservatives in the Bush administration that scuttled the 1994 Agreed Framework which had frozen Pyongyang’s nuclear developments for eight years, perhaps it might be more accurate to call it “the neo-con bomb.”

If the North Koreans really had the capacity to hit America with a missile — and if Kim Jong-Il were sufficiently “crazy” (as the pro-Israeli media portrays him) to start a war with a global superpower that has up to 5,000 nuclear warheads in its arsenal — they may have considered their own preemptive strike against one particular target in Washington D.C. For the building at 1150 17th Street, home to such neo-con strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and The Weekly Standard, is the source of much of Washington’s apparent animus toward Pyongyang.

It was there on November 22, 2004, for example, that William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, wrote a PNAC memo to “opinion leaders” entitled “Toward Regime Change in North Korea.” In the memo, Kristol praised an article in The Weekly Standard by Nicholas Eberstadt, “one of AEI’s in-house hawks on North Korea.” In “Tear Down This Tyranny,” Eberstadt had called for the ouster of Kim Jong-Il, to be achieved in part by “working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government.”

For neo-cons like Kristol and Eberstadt, it is seemingly preferable to risk provoking war with North Korea than to “appease” an “evil tyrant” like Kim Jong-Il — as if Kim were another genocidal Hitler and the then South Korean leader Roh another naive Chamberlain. Such “moral clarity” presumably comes easier to those who live at a comfortably safe distance from the firing zone.

Eberstadt is also the author of The End of North Korea, whose title summed up the Bush administration’s policy toward Pyongyang, as a New York Times reporter was once told by Eberstadt’s AEI colleague John Bolton, Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, whose hawkishness did much to wreck arms control. Bolton, described by the Zionist Organization of America as “one of Israel’s truest friends in the world,” sabotaged Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempts to start nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

Project for the New Israeli Humanitarianism

While the infamous militarist policies of the pro-Israel neo-conservatives undoubtedly intimidated Pyongyang, the Israel lobby’s lesser known “humanitarian” activism played a complementary role in provoking the North Korean nuclear crisis.

The appointment of Bill Kristol’s friend and fellow neo-con Jay Lefkowitz as special envoy for human rights was one of the Bush administration’s more provocative acts toward North Korea.Lefkowitz, who considers legitimate criticism of Israel to be “anti-Semitism,” was not slow to criticize Pyongyang’s abuses, however. In January 2008, speaking at the AEI, he said, “The way the North Korean government treats its own people is inhumane and therefore deeply offensive to us. It should also offend free people around the world.” Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Lefkowitz’s selective condemnation, his undiplomatic language was hardly calculated to promote a smooth dialogue with the North Koreans.

Drawing on a study entitled “The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps,” Lefkowitz advocated linking humanitarian aid to human rights issues, a counterproductive strategy opposed by career diplomats in the State Department. As chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill put it, “We have no interest in weaponizing human rights.” The same, however, could not be said for Lefkowitz. As Suzy Kim and John Feffer wrote in Foreign Policy in Focus, “Lefkowitz deliberately overstepped his bounds to undermine the nuclear talks by linking them to human rights.”

“The Hidden Gulag” report had been published by the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, an NGO which has among its officers and directors more than a fair share of pro-Israelis. It should, of course, strike people as a little odd to see the likes of Nicholas Eberstadt, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Congressmen Stephen Solarz and Gary Ackerman, and Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, championing North Koreans’ human rights while at the same time condoning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Lefkowitz’s appointment as human rights envoy came about as a result of the U.S. Congress passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004, legislation which his cousin, Michael Horowitz, played a key role in instigating. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the hawkishly pro-Israel Hudson Institute, hailed the passing of the bill as a “miracle” in an interview with Christianity Today. As director of Hudson’s Project for International Religious Liberty, he had mobilized Christian evangelicals to support the legislation based on the religious persecution of North Korea’s approximately 10,000 Christians.

Meanwhile, the plight of the rapidly dwindling Christian population in Israel and occupied Palestine, down from 350,000 in 1948 to about 175,000 today, goes unheeded by Horowitz’s evangelicals, many of whom are misled by Christian Zionist leaders like John Hagee to believe that the Bible endorses the modern state of Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian land.

But the prize for chutzpah in Israel’s human rights advocacy for North Koreans must surely go to Natan Sharansky. In 2005, the “acclaimed human rights activist” told a Freedom House sponsored symposium advocating regime change in North Korea, “The people of North Korea must be free!” That same year Sharansky resigned from the Israeli cabinet in protest over then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza. As Housing Minister, Sharansky had, according to Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, “systematically enlarged the settlements on expropriated Arab land in the West Bank, trampling on the human and national rights of the Palestinians.”

Nevertheless, Sharansky was such a major influence on George W. Bush’s foreign policy that he has been dubbed “Bush’s guru.” The thought that someone more extreme than Sharon helped shape the worldview of the world’s once most powerful leader is, as Avnery put it, “rather frightening.”

“You confront evil,” Sharansky told the Freedom House symposium, “you do not negotiate with it.” And that in a nutshell is the policy prescription pushed by Frum, Perle, Zelikow, Kristol, Eberstadt, Bolton (proof that you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist), Lefkowitz, Horowitz, et al. on the Bush administration in its dealings with “evil” North Korea. The result of heeding that dangerously simplistic advice — a nuclear North Korea — has been an unmitigated failure for American diplomacy in East Asia.

But does Israel’s American lobby see its efforts to undermine negotiations with Pyongyang as a failure? Or to put it another way, does Israel actually benefit from the North Korean nuclear crisis?

With the U.S. having been induced by neo-con lies about weapons of mass destruction to eliminate the Iraqi threat to Israel, the focus of Israeli security concerns has shifted to the alleged Iranian threat. And the threat that an “unpredictable” nuclear-armed North Korea now supposedly poses to the United States is invariably cited by pro-Israelis in their efforts to push Washington toward war with Iran before its “mad Mullahs” too acquire nuclear weapons.

The real threat to Israel, however, is not that Iran is going to “wipe it off the map” (a mistranslation endlessly repeated by the media), but that its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East might end. For without that monopoly on the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, not only would Israel’s regional hegemonic ambitions be forestalled, but the apartheid Jewish state might be forced to pay a little more attention to the egregious human rights abuses closer to home.

“the growing missile threat from North Korea and Iran” — article in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, May 26

“Iran’s threat transcends religion. Regardless of sectarian bent, Muslim communities need to oppose the attempts by Iran … to extend Shia extremism and influence throughout the world.” — op-ed article in Boston Globe, May 27

“A Festering Evil. Doing nothing is not an option in handling the threat from Iran” — headline in Investor’s Business Daily, May 27, 2009

This is a very small sample from American newspapers covering but two days.

“Fifty-one percent of Israelis support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites” — BBC, May 24

After taking office, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We will not allow Holocaust-deniers [Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to carry out another holocaust.” — Haaretz (Israel), May 14, 2009

Like clinical paranoia, “the threat from Iran” is impervious to correction by rational argument.

Two new novels have just appeared, from major American publishers, thrillers based on Iran having a nuclear weapon and the dangers one can imagine that that portends — Banquo’s Ghosts by Rich Lowry & Keith Korman, and The Increment by David Ignatius. “Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let’s bomb Iran,” declares a CIA official in the latter book. The other book derides the very idea of “dialogue” with Iran while implicitly viewing torture as acceptable.¹

On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that “Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere” (English translation: “Should we bomb Iran?”). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Their “opponents” were R. Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, and Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official and CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, a book that, unsurprisingly, did not have too long a shelf life.²

This is what “debate” on US foreign policy looks like in America in the first decade of the 21st century AD — four quintessential establishment figures. If such a “debate” had been held in the Soviet Union during the Cold War (”Detente With The United States Is Going Nowhere”), the American mainstream media would unanimously have had a jolly time making fun of it. The sponsor of the New York debate was the conservative Rosenkranz Foundation, but if a liberal (as opposed to a progressive or radical leftist) organization had been the sponsor, while there probably would have been a bit more of an ideological gap between the chosen pairs of speakers, it’s unlikely that any of the present-day myths concerning Iran would have been seriously challenged by either side. These myths include the following, all of which I’ve dealt with before in this report but inasmuch as they are repeated on a regular basis in the media and by administration representatives, I think that readers need to be reminded of the counter arguments.

• Iran has no right to nuclear weapons: Yet, there is no international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. In any event, the US intelligence community’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2007, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities”, makes a point of saying in bold type and italics: “This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.” The report goes on to state: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program .”
• Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier: I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of all political stripes.
• Ahmadinejad has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re “wiping Israel off the map”, besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”³ Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.
• Iran has no right to provide arms to Hamas and Hezbollah: However, the United States, we are assured, has every right to do the same for Israel and Egypt.
• The fact that Obama says he’s willing to “talk” to some of the “enemies” like Iran more than the Bush administration did sounds good: But one doesn’t have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It’s only change of policy that counts. Why doesn’t Obama just state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else? Besides, the Bush administration met with Iran on several occasions.

The following should also be kept in mind: The Washington Post, March 5, 2009, reported: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” has asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.” This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.” This appeared in Haaretz.com, October 25, 2007 (print edition October 26), but not in any US media or in any other English-language world media except the BBC citing the Iranian Mehr English-language news agency, October 27.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Changeman!

In January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. All my expenses were to be paid by the Cuban government, and I was very much looking forward to the visit. Only one problem — the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration. (On that occasion I went anyhow and was extremely lucky to avoid being caught by the American Travel Police on the way back and being fined thousands of dollars.) I mention this because Obama supporters would have us believe — as they themselves believe — that their Changeman has been busy making lots of important changes, Cuba being only one example. But I still don’t have the legal right to travel to Cuba.

The only real change made by the Obama administration in regard to Cuba is that Cuban-Americans with family on the island can travel there and send remittances without restrictions. The April 13 White House announcement listed several other provisions concerning telecommunications companies, but what this will actually mean in practice, if anything, is unknown, particularly as it affects Cuba’s access to the Internet. American anti-Castroites have long blamed Cuban’s deficient Internet access on the proverbial “communist suppression,” when the technical availability and prohibitive cost were to a large extent in the hands of American corporations. Microsoft, for example, bars Cuba from using its Messenger instant messaging service.⁴ And Google has long blocked Cuban access to many of its features.⁵ Venezuela and Cuba have been working on an underwater cable system that they hope will make them less reliant on the gringos.

The multifarious US economic embargo, which causes unending hardship and expense for the Cuban people, remains in place. Here is Changeman in a recent press conference:

Reporter: Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve heard from a lot of Latin America leaders here who want the U.S. to lift the embargo against Cuba. You’ve said that you think it’s an important leverage to not lift it. But in 2004, you did support lifting the embargo. You said, it’s failed to provide the source of raising standards of living, it’s squeezed the innocent, and it’s time for us to acknowledge that this particular policy has failed. I’m wondering, what made you change your mind about the embargo?

The President: Well, 2004, that seems just eons ago. What was I doing in 2004?

Reporter: Running for Senate.

The President: Is it while — I was running for Senate. There you go.⁶

Yes, there you go; you shouldn’t confuse campaign rhetoric with the real world and the real Changeman.

The case of the Cuban Five is another chance for Changeman to come to the rescue. This outrageous perversion of justice whereby Cubans were sent to the United States to try to learn of further terrorist attacks in Cuba planned by anti-Castroites in Florida and were themselves arrested by the FBI on information partly supplied to the US by the Cuban government as their contribution to the War On Terrorism.⁷

The Cuban Five have been in US prisons for more than 10 years. Around June 15 the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on whether or not they will hear the appeal of the Five. The Clinton administration arrested them. The Bush administration continued the awful, mindless, crimeless persecution for eight more years. But now comes the Changeman administration. Hooray! Oh, in late May, the Changeman administration filed a brief urging the Court to deny the Five a hearing, and on June 2, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an Organization of American States meeting: “I want to emphasize the United States under President Obama is taking a completely new approach to our policy toward Cuba.”⁸

Another opportunity for Changeman to come to the rescue also involves Cuba — closing the Guantanamo prison. But our hero is once again displaying a woeful lack of political courage and imagination. If there’s good evidence that certain detainees are a danger to anyone, then try them in US civilian courts with full rights, a decent defense team, and excluding secret evidence and coerced confessions. If they’re found guilty — and with an American jury sitting in judgment of “terrorists”, this, in almost all cases, would be the verdict — then imprison them in one of America’s maximum security prisons, which already houses about 355 men labeled as “terrorists.”⁹ The new ones will not be any more of a danger in prison than the ones already there.

However, if they’re found innocent, then declare them free men. It would be much easier then to find a country to accept them, including the United States. Until now, the world has been told repeatedly by Washington that these men are “the worst of the worst.” Small wonder that no country or community wants them near. But if they’ve been tried and acquitted, this situation should change markedly.

So Mr. Obama, we’re waiting for you to step into a phone booth.

It’s part of America’s ideology to pretend that it doesn’t have any ideology.

Oh, a woman nominated to be a Supreme Court justice. A woman whose parents are from Puerto Rico. A Latina! A Latina Supreme Court justice! Oh, hooray for America!

Who cares? Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice. He’s black. He’s as hopelessly reactionary as they come. No one should give a damn that Sonia Sotomayor is a woman with a Latin American background. All that counts is her politics. Her ideology. Her positions on important social and political issues. Yes, I know, we’re talking about the Law, the Majesty of the Law, judges who are scholars, impartial scholars, who study the fine points and the history of a law, experts on the Constitution of the United States, not swayed by today’s partisan squabbles but take the long view, looking at precedent, considering what precedent may be set for the future.

Don’t believe it. That may be true in the infrequent Supreme Court case where no ideological question at all is raised. Otherwise the judges are all biased human beings, appointed by a biased president, confirmed by biased members of the Senate.

Patrick Martin recently observed on the World Socialist Web Site: “For the past 12 years … under two Democratic presidents and one Republican, the post of US Secretary of State has been occupied by, in succession, a white woman, a black man, a black woman, and a white woman.”¹⁰ And they all loved the empire. When the empire called for it, they bombed, invaded, and killed; they overthrew, occupied, tortured, and lied; and swore allegiance to Israel and the corporations.

And now we have a black president. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Stokely Carmichael he’s not. His policies and his appointments have all fallen in that area that runs from ever so slightly to the left of center to clear conservative and imperialist on the right. He’s more loath to being identified as, or collaborating with, progressives than with right-wingers. Team Obama sees the left as an eccentric old aunt who keeps showing up at family functions, making everyone uncomfortable and wishing she’d just go away.

America, and the world, have to grow up. Forget color. Forget ethnicity. Forget gender. Forget sexual orientation. Forget even the class the person comes from. Look at the class they serve. And understand that the person wouldn’t be in the position they are, or be nominated for the position, if there was any serious question about their loyalty to the capitalist ethic or American world domination.

It also matters not whether the president is comically inarticulate or whether he speaks in complete grammatical sentences. Keep your eye on the policies.

Obama

To the numerous fans of Barack Obama, on the left, in the middle, on the right, and to the apolitical Obamaniacs, my advice is to read Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, or see the film version of the same name starring Peter Sellers.

Also read The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.

“Men go mad in herds, but only come to their senses one by one.” — Charles Mackay, 19th century Scottish journalist

1. Washington Post, May 26, 2009 book review
2. Washington Post, May 15, 2009
3. Associated Press, December 12, 2006
4. Associated Press, June 2, 2009
5. ”Does Google Censor Cuba?“
6. White House Press Office, April 19, 2009
7. ”Cuban Political Prisoners … in the United States“
8. Washington Post, June 3, 2009
9. ”There Are Already 355 Terrorists in American Prisons,” Slate Magazine, May 29, 2009
10. ”The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender,” World Socialist Web Site, May 28, 2009

The last paragraph summarizes the publicly available facts about the DPRK’s nuclear test #2 (see notes here and here for news accounts). Commentary on the meaning of this test was actually written three years ago, on the occasion of the DPRK’s nuclear test #1 of 9 October 2006 (see here and here).

My commentary of 2006 still applies because neither the policy goals of the United States and Security Council Nuclear Powers, nor the fears of the DPRK leadership have changed since 2006. In the simplest terms, world capitalism under the direction of the United States wants the North Koreans to dismantle their DPRK state and to integrate their economy and workforce into that of an expanded Republic of Korea (South Korea) in a manner similar to the dissolution of the East German communist state (Democratic Republic of Germany, 7 October 1949 to 3 October 1990). The foreign policy of the DPRK, of which its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs are a part, is aimed at combatting the existential threat to the DPRK governing elite.

First, let us consider some of the physical aspects of DPRK test #2.

A yield up to 20 kT is clearly a “success” and indicates the verification of one design of an implosion system (discounting the possibility of a gun-type assembly as in the Hiroshima bomb). I presume, but do not know, that this bomb is an experimental device that is neither compact and light-weight enough, nor ruggedized enough to fit within the payload mass and space limitations of a slim missile body, and to withstand the forces of acceleration required of a ballistic missile nuclear warhead. Any program aimed at that goal will require another test (in perhaps three years?) of a militarized packaging of the “pit” (nuclear core and its surrounding blanket of high explosives) tested today.

The amazingly deep burial at 10 km will probably assure full containment of radioactivity from the DPRK test. US underground tests were often 0.3 km to 0.5 km down. Because of the rapid attenuation of the high frequency parts of an electrical signal with its travel distance along a cable, the US nuclear program engineered its underground tests with the minimum burial depth necessary to assure containment, so as to have the highest fidelity possible for the detection and recording systems relaying and storing experimental data from sensors near the device. Optimizing the burial depth for signal fidelity required a sophisticated arrangement of plugs and backfill to seal the emplacement shaft or tunnel. I wonder if the DPRK test program is satisfied with simple low-fidelity data (the simplest being the sensation of an artificial earthquake), or if they have an underground alcove with high-fidelity recording equipment in a cavern near the detonation point. It may be that the DPRK wished to avoid snooping by US intelligence satellites, so it buried the entire test operation. It is also possible to partially decouple the force of a buried explosion from the surrounding earth by placing the bomb in the center of a larger cavity; this will transmit a weaker seismic signal, and could spoof seismic measurements of yield by foreign powers.

Clearly, the DPRK nuclear program scientists evaluated the data from their test of October 2006, made new calculations, undoubtedly built new assemblies for hydrodynamic testing (perfecting the dynamics of the heavy-metal implosion driven by chemical high explosives), and settled on a design that produced sizable yield. It is equally clear that their nuclear materials program was able to produce sufficient weapons-grade fissile material for at least one new device since 2006 (perhaps 10 kg), and probably several times that amount.

All in all, it is evident they are now a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapons club. The most honest reaction the Security Council of the UN, and the leading world powers could offer would be: “congratulations!”

Now, let us speculate on the political fallout.

The DPRK has made the clearest possible statement that the best defense against domination by superior powers is nuclear weaponry. The greater care with which the U.S. and Security Council Nuclear Powers approach the DPRK confirms this argument. When observing the situations of Palestine, Iraq and Iran, most of the rest of the world would concede the validity of the argument.

The policy of the U.S. is to encourage other nations to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — and renounce nuclear weapons — while exempting itself from it; essentially “disarm that we may more easily rule.” The DPRK posture is a rejection of the US policy, and a pointed example of rebellion calling out to the rest of the world.

Another aspect of the DPRK’s nuclear weapons politics is to put its near neighbors on notice not to think of colonizing it. This message is particularly aimed at South Korea, seen as an extension of US capitalism, and to Japan. There are still Koreans living who remember being brutally enslaved by Imperial Japan, which forcibly annexed Korea during 1910 to 1945. Even more Koreans remember the 1950-1953 war between China and the U.S., on their peninsula. The casualties of that war, for the US-led anti-communist forces, were 474,000; the combined casualties for the communist Chinese and North Korean forces were between 1.19 million and 1.58 million; and the total number of Korean civilians killed or wounded is estimated at 2 million.

Today, Japan fustigates that it may have to build its own nuclear weapons (within one year!) to counter those of the DPRK, and South Korea issued similar statements to assuage domestic concerns about the nuclear developments in the North. There is little reason to fear aggression by the DPRK. While it may soon be true that it could launch a few nuclear warheads into South Korea, Japan and toward US bases and fleets in the Pacific, such attacks would ensure the swift destruction of the DPRK elite by retaliatory actions of the most modern military forces on this planet. Nuclear weapons would not be needed for this; waves of GPS-guided missile strikes with conventional high explosive warheads, followed by similarly guided airborne bombing would eradicate the DPRK nomenklatura and its entire military infrastructure. Also, it is very likely that missiles launched by North Korea would be immediately detected by US and allied nations’ radars and satellites, and countered by anti-missile missiles (today’s equivalent to the flak thrown up in WW2). Such defenses are more likely to be effective against long-range missiles since there is more time to react. The DPRK leadership knows from its own history that US-led military action has no regard for Korean loss-of-life, so they are fully aware that their nuclear arsenal is only a stratagem strictly limited to diplomatic gamesmanship short of actual war.

So, what does the DPRK leadership hope to gain by brandishing nuclear arms? The DPRK leadership’s deepest desire is that of all elites everywhere: a long-term guarantee of its privileged position within the undisturbed extent of its domain. The DPRK wants to interact with the rest of the world in a way that sustains the physical and economic existence of their state but without introducing any ideas or social forces that weaken the control of the DPRK leadership, and the fealty of the population to that leadership. Clearly, the present DPRK regime is skeptical it can follow the Chinese example of introducing a state-directed form of capitalism while maintaining ideological control and sufficient popular obedience, so it is resistant to allowing the population wider exposure to foreign influences. The DPRK nuclear arsenal is the equivalent of a 10 foot (3.3 m) high wall topped with glass shards surrounding an estate with Pit Bulls and Doberman Pinschers running loose. It is a shield built with pride and motivated by fear.

Unfortunately, urging the DPRK leadership to engage in nuclear disarmament is equivalent to urging it to dissolve; the nature of their brittle power structure could not withstand the corrosive effects of the psychological, cultural and economic forces within world capitalism. They know this, hence the obsessive defensiveness. The most humane policy toward the DPRK would be to leave it alone. Over the long term, if it is neither harassed nor provoked, it will slowly relax many of its fears. Once the apprehensions of the DPRK are reasonably lowered because it is no longer being pressured and hurried to fit into a foreign capitalist agenda, then it is likely the society of the DPRK will evolve into greater harmony with the world consensus on many issues. Such a policy would be one of respecting the integrity of another society, and of non-interference. It is definitely not the policy with the highest expected return on investment (ROI), nor the earliest expected payoff, but it is the policy with the least likelihood of harming the Korean people and their neighbors. One has to imagine the possibility of arriving at nuclear disarmament as the inevitable consequence of the disuse of nuclear weapons: they are no longer maintained and rust away because their owners have moved on to other activities.

Internationally, patient respect will ultimately soften the fearful pride of an otherwise unaggressive state. The real solution to nuclear proliferation is the expansion of social and economic justice within our own nations, because nuclear arms are primarily a symptom of economic class warfare coupled with racism. Let the people of North Korea deal with their economic elite, and let us reform ours; and in that way we can eliminate the nuclear weapons squeezed out of the world’s popular collective labor by our various ambitious and parasitic ruling classes.

Obama said, “North Korea’s nuclear ballistic missile programs pose a great threat to the peace and security of the world and I strongly condemn their reckless action.”

If indeed what Obama says is true, then what of the US’s nuclear ballistic missiles? They must also “pose a great threat to the peace and security of the world.” Russia certainly claims that it feels threatened by US ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe.¹ Does Obama also “strongly condemn” “reckless action” on the part of the US, or does Obama propose US exceptionalism? It does not take special critical thinking ability to detect the hypocrisy.

Obama: “North Korea’s actions endanger the people of Northeast Asia, they are a blatant violation of international law, and they contradict North Korea’s own prior commitments.”

North Korea’s actions were to develop a nuclear deterrent against US aggression. If such actions are a violation of international law, then what were the 1,054 nuclear tests by the US? If nuclear missiles endanger the people of Northeast Asia — and never minding the fact that the US had nuclear missiles stationed in South Korea for years — then what should one infer about the presence of US nuclear submarines that ply waters near North Korea ? And what of using Japanese territory for nuclear command?² What do the proximal US nuclear weapons represent for Northeast Asia?

And “blatant violations of international law”? In Nicaragua v. United States, the World Court found the US guilty of what amounts to terrorism. The US was ordered to cease its illegal activities and “to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by the breaches of obligations under customary international law.” The US ignored the judgement.

Further, what does the ongoing occupation of Iraq represent? Does Obama wish to argue that the aggression-cum-occupation was legal? Do the military violations of Pakistani territory respect legality? When the US-Canada-France deposed of elected Haitian president Jean Betrand Aristide, did that represent legality? Etc.

Obama: “Now, the United States and the international community must take action in response. The record is clear: North Korea has previously committed to abandoning its nuclear program.”

One assumes that Obama is referring solely to abandoning a nuclear weapons program. But does not the NPT commit the US among other signatory nuclear powers to abandoning nuclear weapons programs? Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) states:

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

Obama: “Instead of following through on that commitment it has chosen to ignore that commitment.”

Does that mean that the US has not ignored its commitment under the NPT for good faith negotiations to abandon nuclear weapons?

Obama: “These actions have also flown in the face of United Nations resolutions.”

How steadfast is the US in its concern about UN resolutions? After all, its most favored client state Israel is the most prolific violator of UN resolutions. Or do UN resolutions only matter when applied to US enemies and not US client states?

Obama: “As a result North Korea is not only deepening its own isolation, it’s also inviting stronger international pressure — that’s evident overnight, as Russia and China, as well as our traditional allies of South Korea and Japan, have all come to the same conclusion: North Korea will not find security and respect through threats and illegal weapons.”

Threats? Who is North Korea threatening? North Korea has sought a peace treaty with the United States. The US is rejectionist on this matter. The US sets, as a pre-condition, North Korean disarmament (of course the US does not have to disarm). In a sane world, this cannot be considered as a genuine commitment to peace (or fairness).

Obama: “We will work with our friends and our allies to stand up to this behavior and we will redouble our efforts toward a more robust international nonproliferation regime that all countries have responsibilities to meet.”

So when will the US dismantle its nuclear weapons along with other nuclear weapon states?

Obama is much more articulate than Bush. But glibness must not excuse the substance of the person. Obama’s decisions to inflame Afghanistan and Pakistan, his continued US military occupation of Iraq, and his subservience to the Zionist occupation of Palestine reveal him not to be a man of peace.

Obama guised himself as a man bringing hope to the people. False prophets are many; the people must beware of the futility of holding on to false hope. Citizens have an obligation, at least to themselves, to critically contemplate the words of their leaders. Obama’s words may distract from his actions, but they are not difficult to comprehend.

1. ”Ballistic missiles in E. Europe threaten Russia – chief of staff,” RIA Novosti, 24 May 2006.
2. ”U.S. Nuclear Command And Control Operations In Japan,” the Nautilus Institute, 19 July 1999.

These are in order of importance:

1) Washington’s attempt to push for a joint economic stimulus program among the 20 biggest economies at the G-20 meeting in April 2009;

2) Calls for a major military commitment from NATO to increase the number of combat troops in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan to complement the additional 21,000 US troop buildup (Financial Times, April 12, 2009 p.7);

3) Plans to forge closer political and diplomatic relations among the countries of the Americas based on the pursuit of a common agenda, including the continued exclusion of Cuba and isolation of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (La Jornada (Mex. D.F.) April 20, 2009);

4) Weakening, isolating and pressuring Iran through a mixture of diplomatic gestures and tightening economic sanctions to surrender its nuclear energy program (Financial Times, April 16/17, 2009 p. 7);

5) The application of pressure on North Korea to suspend its satellite and missile testing program in addition to dismantling its nuclear weapons program. (Financial Times, April 13, 2009 p.4);

6) Securing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority for a ‘two state solution’, in which Israel agrees to end and dismantle its illegal settlements in exchange for recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ (Financial Times, April 13, 2009, p.5);

7) Pressuring the government of Pakistan to increase its military role in attacking the autonomous Northwest provinces and territories along the Pakistan-Afghan border in support of the US war against Islamic resistance movements, especially among the Pashtun people (over 40 million strong), in both Afghanistan and Pakistan (FT, April 23, 2009 p.3); and

8) Securing a stable pro-US regime in Iraq capable of remaining in power after a withdrawal of the majority of US occupation troops (FT, April 8, 2009).

What is striking about Obama’s objectives is the continuities with the previous administration of GW Bush, even as the mass media proclaims ‘significant changes’. (American Conservative April 14, 2009)

Policy Continuities: Failures of Stimulus Proposals at the April 2009 G20 Summit

Like his predecessor Bush, Obama’s first economic priority is to pour trillions of borrowed dollars into the financial system as opposed to directing state resources toward reviving popular demand, reconstructing the manufacturing sector, creating a universal health system and directly employing the 5 million workers unemployed in the last year. Obama’s economic regime is totally dominated by Wall Street bankers and completely devoid of any representatives from labor, manufacturing and the health sector (FT, April 2, 2009 p11). In essence, Obama has reinforced and deepened the ‘finance-centered’ model of capitalist development, which demands that the G20 countries follow financial stimulus plans – ignoring job creation through the financing of public investments focused on manufacturing. For Obama, ‘economic stimulus’ means reconstructing the power of finance capital, even if it means running hung budget deficits, which undermine other public investments. The ‘theory’ justifying the finance-centered focus is based on the belief that the US world empire is built on the recovery of the supremacy of finance capital – to which the industrial powers should submit (FT, April 15, 2009, p.9). The conflicts at the G20 summit and the ultimate failure of Obama to secure support for his so-called ‘stimulus’ proposal was that he was promoting a financial centered ‘stimulus’ while the rest of the economic powers – with the exception of the UK – were concerned with ‘stimulating’ manufacturing, employment and commodity exports (FT, April 2, 2009 p.4). The pressures of labor and manufacturers in Europe – especially in Germany and France – have far more weight in shaping economic policy than in the United States (FT, March 26, 2009 p. 1).

The incompatibility of the finance-dominated regime of Obama and European, Asian and Latin American regimes reflect the latter’s more economically diversified ruling class, has led to the White House failure to secure a ‘coordinated’ stimulus policy.

Summit of the Americas: Isolation and Divergences

Conflicts of interest prevented Washington from securing any favorable economic agreements at the ‘Summit of the Americas’ Conference in April. The breakdown of the US finance-centered empire and its negative impact on all of the countries of the Americas undermined Obama’s efforts for reassert US hegemonic leadership (see Economic Commission for Latin America – Report to Summit April 17-19, 2009). The White House already knew the futility of any effort to revive a regional free trade agreement. Worse still, Washington’s argument for the advantages of ‘globalization’ were seriously undermined by Obama’s promotion of ‘financial protectionism’ in which US subsidiary banks in Latin America were directed to channel their financial resources back to the home office, drying up financing and credit for Latin American exporters. In other words, under the stress of the economic depression, ‘globalization’ led to the reverse flow of financial resources out of Latin America, prejudicing US influence and leverage while increasing regional ties and economic nationalism among the Latin American countries.

The result was that the Obama regime’s financial-centered empire had nothing to offer and everything to lose in any deep diagnosis of the impact of the recession/depression. The While House had nothing to offer in the way of expanding markets, capital flows or in stimulating productive investments to create employment. In these dire circumstances, the Obama regime preferred vacuous platitudes and systematic evasions of the most pressing economic issues in order to create the illusion of ‘good feeling’ among the participants (La Jornada, April 20 2009). Rather than ‘project power’ in the hemisphere, Washington was reduced to reiterating bankrupt policies justifying the Cuban embargo in splendid isolation (La Jornada, April 17, 2009).

The decline of US power based on its crisis-ridden finance centered empire is evident in its inability to sustain its traditional client rulers or to destabilize adversarial presidents. Even as the Summit was transpiring, in Bolivia a group of armed mercenaries, contracted by US backed economic elites in the separatist province of Santa Cruz to overthrow the Morales regime, were captured or killed by the Bolivian military (La Jornada, April 20 2009). After three years of US financing and deep involvement with regional elites engaged in political and economic warfare against Evo Morales, and after suffering several electoral defeats, Washington and its regional allies could only muster a tawdry hotel shoot-out between Eastern European contract hit-men and the Bolivian army, ending in ignominious defeat.

The political weakness of the Obama regime is even more evident in the major electoral defeats it has suffered in Ecuador, where President Correa was re-elected with over 52% of the vote – a 22% margin over the nearest pro-Washington candidate, Lucio Gutierrez (La Jornada, April 27, 2009). In Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, El Salvador and Honduras, the electorate voted decisively for left and center-left candidates, defeating right-wing US-supported candidates. The only exception was Panama where a right-wing millionaire was elected in May 2009. Though few of the center-left regimes pursue economic-nationalist policies, they do exercise a degree of independence in their foreign and domestic policies, especially with regard to relations with Venezuela and Cuba, trade, investment, state intervention and opposition to the dictates of the IMF.

Moreover, the financial collapse in the US and the accompanying economic depression has led to a major crisis and conflict between North and South American with profound long-term consequences. The implosion of cross-border lending resulting in US (and European) banks returning capital to their domestic markets is depressing regional and world finance for the foreseeable future (Financial Times, April 30, 2009 p. 7). Wall Streets’ financial crash has dealt a strategic blow to financial ‘globalization’ (imperialism). Between April-December 2008 US financial institutions ‘repatriated’ $750 billion dollars from their overseas subsidiaries. Foreign holdings of US banks are shrinking as a share of their total balance sheets – especially hitting Latin American regimes dependent on US capital flows. US investors in Latin America, unable to secure credit, have curtailed their overseas activity. The process of ‘de-capitalization’ of Latin America has accelerated with US and European ‘state-intervention’ of banks, which has led to ‘financial protectionism’ where the ‘state’ banks push for domestic lending at the expense of foreign operations (Financial Times, April 30, 2009 p7). This especially harms countries like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, where repatriating US (and Spanish) financial institutions own a significant percentage of the domestic banks. The withdrawal of capital to the imperial states, financial protectionism and the decline of US official financing means that Obama’s ‘recovery plan’ is based on the de-capitalization of Latin America and the drying up of credit for exporter/importers, exacerbating the recession. The policy implications are readily visible: Obama has few economic assets to pressure Latin America and many liabilities to address.

Given the low priority assigned to Latin Americca in the current crisis, Washington must rely on local elites, which have been weakened economically by Wall Street and the IMF’s declining presence and are now more dependent on state intervention to confront the drop in export market demand. Obama’s economic priorities and financial protectionist policies go directly against any ‘harmonization of interest’ and strengthen nationalist, regionalist and statist political and economic policies and governments in Latin America. The ‘historic movements’ in opposite directions between the US and Latin America are exacerbated by Obama’s commitment to military-centered empire building. While Latin America’s civilian regimes are desperately looking for new markets, credits and investments to buttress their declining capitalist system and forestall domestic social challenges from below, Obama projects the US empire through militarism. Obama’s failed policies in Latin America are the result of structural relations dependent on financial markets (and their breakdown) and global militarism. Over time the diverging composition of regimes and socio-economic policies will become more acute as the recession deepens into a major depression in Latin America. One consequence of this divergence can be seen in the increasing trade between Latin America and the Arab countries, which has tripled since 2005 (Al Jazeera, March 31, 2009).

The most striking indicator of the United States’ declining economic presence and political influence in Latin America is found in the trade figures of Brazil, Latin America’s biggest and most industrialized country. In April 2009, total trade between Brazil amounted to $3.2 billion dollars, while its trade with the US was $2.8 billion (Telegraph, (UK) May 10, 2009). This was the second straight month that China surpassed the US as Brazil’s biggest trading partner, ending 80 years of US primacy. Just as the US pours hundreds of billions of dollars into military-driven empire building, China has steadily pursued its overseas economic empire via billion dollar trade and joint investment agreements with Brazil in oil, gas, iron ore, soya and cellulose. China has already displaced the US as Chile’s primary trading partner, and is increasing its share of trade with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina – and even with staunchly US clients, like Colombia, Peru and Mexico.

As regional wars and economic depression cause the US to retreat from Latin America, the region’s ruling classes look to Asia, especially China, to meet their trade and investment requirements.

Sooner rather than later, issues of superior economic production and growth trump pure military power in shaping the hierarchy of nations in the world economy. This process of an upwardly mobile economic power displacing a crisis-ridden world military power as the chief interlocutor is now being played out in Latin America. While the transition may have begun well over a decade before his administration, the policies of President Obama are accelerating the shift in Latin America away from US dominance.

NATO Conference: Obama’s Military Escalation in Search of Allies

On April 4, 2009 Obama attended the NATO Conference in Strasbourg in order to push for allied support for expanding the war in South Asia. South Asia, and especially the Afghan-Pakistani (Af-Pak) border regions, has become the centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy. This is the area where the US is most vulnerable to strategic military and political losses and where he has had the most difficulty winning material and man-power support from the NATO allies. From the first day in office, Obama has emphasized the ‘strategic’ importance of winning the war in Afghanistan, reversing the advances of the Taliban and other resistance fighters and establishing a stable pro-Washington client regime in Kabul. To that end, Obama has announced a massive escalation of combat troop deployment (over 21,000) to Afghanistan, an additional $80 billion dollars in funding to the already $750 billion dollars allocated for the Pentagon, and has pursued an aggressive epolicy of pressuring European and Asian allies for substantial addition of combat troops and financial aid. At the April NATO conference, Obama’s proposals were bluntly rejected (Financial Times, April 2, 2009 p7). The principle allies agreed to send 5,000 additional troops in temporary and non-combat roles, including 3,000 to ‘monitor’ elections in August 2009 and then to withdraw; two thousand to act as trainers and ‘advisers’ in non-conflict-ridden surroundings (Financial Times, April 8, 2009 p.2). What Obama fails to recognize is that the NATO countries do not consider Afghanistan an area of strategic importance to European security. They do not see the forces engaged as a threat to their safety; they do not see the prospect for a quick, low-cost victory. They do not relish following Obama’s proposed to extend the war into Pakistan – thus multiplying resistance to his plans. They do not want to alienate the vast majority of their own population and destabilize their own power.

European and most Asian allies are not willing to pour scarce resources and military personnel into a losing war, in a non-strategic region at a time of deepening economic recession. Obama on the other hand, following Bush and various other predecessors, and embedded in military-driven empire building, talks diplomacy while vigorously pursuing wars of conquest. His attempts to elevate the local conflict into a threat to world security based on the presence of a tiny number of Al Queda fighters in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, is hardly convincing. Obama’s failure to recognize that the Taliban and other groups have access to vast contiguous and porous borders with ethnic, clan and religious allies capable of sustaining prolonged guerrilla warfare, leads him to extend the frontiers of warfare and escalate the number of US troops. The expansion of the war in turn multiplies enemies and armed recruits. In Pakistan, this creates a wider swath of armed political opposition, which undermines Obama’s client in Islamabad (Financial Times, May 6, 2009 p.1; see also Gareth Porter, “Errant Drone Attacks Spur Militants in Pakistan IPS April 16, 2009). Under strong pressure from the White House, Pakistan launched a major military campaign in the Swat region causing the mass flight of 2 million refugees and failing to defeat the Taliban.

Pouring billions of dollars into a prolonged colonial war with little possible economic gain at a time when GDP is declining by 6% and exports by 30% demonstrates the continued centrality of military-driven empire building and Obama’s role as ‘willing executioner’ (BBC News, April 2, 2009).

The divergence between Europe/NATO and the US/Obama is structurally rooted in their conflicting visions of world power: The former emphasize financing their economies to recover and expand exports versus the latter, which operates under the delusion that prolonged colonial wars in remote regions of the world are essential for the ‘stability’ of world capitalism. Obama’s failure to secure NATO support for the Af/Pak expansion underlines his complete political and military isolation in one of the primary areas of his administration’s policy goals. This means that the US will shoulder the entire cost of a war in Afghanistan, which has spilled over into Pakistan, and bear worldwide condemnation as thousands of civilian casualties mount and millions of refugees flee the air and ground wars (BBC News, May 7, 2009).

Iran: The Zionist Presence and Lost Opportunities

Obama’s stated policy approach to Iran was to ‘turn a new page’, open negotiations without prior conditions in order to secure an agreement to end Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, and its alleged support for ‘terrorist’ organizations, namely Hamas and Hezbollah. In addition, Obama hopes to secure co-operation in the US war in Afghanistan as well as propping up the Maliki client regime in Iraq (Financial Times, March 6, 2009 p. 5).

From the very start, Obama’s policy got off on the wrong foot. He appointed two of the most pro-Israel and virulent enemies of Iran to key posts in Treasury and the State Department. Stuart Levey was reappointed as Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Treasury Department and Dennis Ross (often called ‘Israel’s Lawyer’) has been appointed the State Department’s point-man on Iran. Stuart Levey has led a world-wide crusade of intimidation and coercion against any business, bank or oil company that has any economic dealings with Iran. Ross, who left an Israeli government-funded think tank to take up his new position in the Obama Administration, endorsed a document in late 2008 supporting the ‘military option’ against Iran. Ross and Levey are hardly likely to ‘open a new page’ in US Iranian relations. More to the point, they fit in with a bellicose policy advocating greater confrontation and increasing the likelihood of a new US-Middle East war.

The appointment of Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State will not favor an opening to Iran. She is on public record as advocating the ‘obliteration’ of Iran during the Presidential campaign in 2008 and now in office backs ‘crippling sanctions’ for force Iran to dismantle its nuclear energy program. Her approach follows closely the script of the previous Bush Administration (Financial Times April 23, 2009 p.3).

The Obama regime has not pursued ‘negotiations’ – instead it has been actively engaged in securing tougher sanctions against Iran while dictating the outcomes of any meeting with Tehran.

Under the guiding hand of the Israel-First lobby AIPAC, Congressinal leaders of both parties are backing new and harsher sanctions against companies, “including Lloyds of London, Total (France) and British Petroleum unless they end their involvement in the export of refined oil to Iran or the construction of refineries in that country” (Financial Times, April 23, 2009 p.3). Vice President Biden, in attendance at the annual Washington DC AIPAC Conference (May 1-3, 2009) supported war-like sanctions against Iran. Clearly Obama’s conciliatory rhetoric is in direct contradiction with his hard-line appointments and the harsh sanctions his regime pursues. Obama’s appointment of hard-core Zionists linked directly to Israel to strategic positions reflects the powerful influence which the Zionist Power Configurations exercises over strategic Middle East issues. As a result, Obama’s policy toward Iran is skewed in the direction of serving Israel’s military interests rather than the broader economic and strategic interests of the US empire (Financial Times, February 24, 2009 p. 13).

Obama is pursuing a policy of ‘negotiations’ on exclusively Zionist terms: By demanding Iran surrender its internationally recognized and closely regulated program of nuclear enrichment and abandon strategic allies and principles of solidarity with the rights of the Palestinian people or face a US economic blockade, the White House is rejecting any possibility of a peaceful negotiated settlement.

In pursuing an iron-fist policy toward Iran to satisfy the demands of the Zionist Power Configuration acting on behalf of Israel, Obama is missing major diplomatic, economic and political opportunities to stabilize US imperial interests in the region. Through a process of give and take, Washington could secure Iranian co-operation in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. In the past Iran has demonstrated its willingness to support US puppet rulers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the case of Afghanistan, Iran directly aided the US occupation by attacking fleeing Taliban forces in the Western frontier regions. In contrast, Washington’s close relation with Israel strengthens the Taliban in Afghanistan and Muslim resistance to its occupation of Iraq.

While opposing the Israeli government policy of dispossession of the Palestinians, Iran has declared its willingness to accept a ‘two state solution’ if “that is what the Palestinians want”. The new far-right Israeli regime of Netanyahu/Liebermann, backed by the major American Zionist organizations, openly rejected a ‘two-state solution’, in repudiation the public position of the Obama government during his May 18, 2009 Washington meeting with Obama (BBC News, May 19, 2009).

The US National Intelligence Agencies published a report in November 2008, which publicly refuted Israel’s claim that Iran is engaged in weaponizing its enriched uranium. On the ground investigations by the United Nations and international inspectors from the International Atomic Envery Agency, found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programs (IAEA Report On Iran February 19, 2009). By choosing to endorse Israel’s unfounded claims of an ‘existential threat’ from Iran, the Obama Administration has become an accomplice in Israel’s overt preparations for war against Iran. By refusing to use the findings of the international inspectors and its own intelligence agencies to come to terms with Iran’s nuclear-energy program, Obama runs the risk of becoming embroiled in a devastating war provoked by the government of Israel.

In a time in which the US exports have declined by over 30% in the first quarter of 2009 and the economy is mired in a prolonged deep recession, the Obama regime prioritized military relations with Israel on highly unfavorable terms. In this regard, overall economic losses from Obama’s policy of exclusive dealings with a minor economic player like Israel – has led to the losses of many billions of dollars of potential trade with Iran (BBC News, April 29, 2009). Unlike the highly unfavorable US trade balance with Israel and the monstrous $30 billion-dollar ‘aid’ handout to the Jewish State, Iran offers a major investment outlet and lucrative market for US petroleum, agro-business, chemical and financial enterprises.

By following Israel’s blockade and boycott policies against duly elected Arab leaders, especially Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Washington supports harsh corrupt dictatorships in the West Bank, Egypt and Jordan simply because they are allied to Israel. If, as the Obama regime claims, electoral processes will stabilize the region, then its commitments to Israel and its allies is destabilizing the region.

Instead of pursuing new policies toward Iran designed to secure imperial interests in the region, the Obama regime chooses confrontation which undermines its ‘conciliatory rhetoric’ and, worst, has led to increasing tensions. New sanctions against gasoline exporter could provoke a new, expanded war, which will surely sent the US into an even deeper depression.

North Korea: The Unmasking of a Policy

The Obama regime has undermined the tentative nuclear disarmament agreements reached between the Bush Administration and the North Korean Government. The original agreement was based on reciprocal concessions, in which North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic and energy aid from the US, Japan, China, South Korea and Russia. The North Koreans complied with the agreement, but the economic aid was not forthcoming, in large part because of demands by the US to include intrusive inspections (Financial Times, April 15, 2009). The incoming Obama administration did not take any initiative to move aid programs forward. On the contrary, in response to an experimental rocket launch of a satellite, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called for and secured a condemnation of North Korea’s legal right to space technology and called for the implementation of new economic sanctions (Financial Times April 13, 2009 p. 4). These harsh reprisals caused the North Koreans to end negotiations and to re-start their nuclear weapons program, raising military tensions in the peninsula and undermining the peace process (Al Jazeera, April 14, 2009). In the brief period of three months, the Obama White House has reversed almost a decade of peace negotiations adding a new arena of military confrontation.

Afghanistan-Pakistan: Extending Warfare and Destabilizing a Client

In response to the resurgence of the Afghan resistance and the expansion of its influence beyond its southern strongholds, Obama opened new fronts of conflict in Pakistan by engaging in systematic bombing of villages and communities. As a result, Pakistani fighters and their Afghan allies have drawn increasing popular support extending their influence throughout the Northwest Territories. By pressuring the weak and unpopular Zadari regime to intensify military operations against Pakistanis opposed to the US bombing raids, the Obama regime has eroded what little support it had within the state apparatus (Financial Times, April 2, 2009 p. 7). Over 2 million Pakistanis in the region have been driven from their homes by the military offensive (BBC News, May 19, 2009) Obama’s Pakistan policy is an extension of its failed Afghan military strategy of targeting entire civilian areas (in this case the over 40 million strong Pashtuns) influenced or controlled by the anti-US resistance in the hope of eliminating some Taliban fighters among the thousands of civilian deaths. The result is predictable: The Pakistan Army, the main prop of the weak US client President Zadari, becomes increasingly compromised as a tool for furthering US colonial war aims and surrendering sovereignty in the face of systematic US cross-border attacks. By forcing the divided and over-extended Pakistani regime to engage in large-scale warfare against its fiercely independent citizens in the Northwest Territories, Pakistani cities and towns will have to contend with the catastrophe of over 2 million internal refugees driven from their homes and communities. Obama increases the possibility of a military revolt by nationalist-islamist soldiers and officers, which would shift the entire balance of power in the region (and beyond) against Washington (BBC News, May 8, 2009). Instead of ‘containing’ and limiting the area of combat in Afghanistan, Obama’s Pakistan policy has widened the front and implicated a large but fragile client state in an extended war which could bring about its downfall – not unlike the overthrow of the Shah of Iran (Financial Times, April 27, 2009 p.5).

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan precludes a negotiated national settlement with the Taliban, which confines it to Afghanistan, in exchange for limiting its role as a safe haven for Al Queda. Under increased US attack, the Taliban have internationalized their fight beyond their contiguous borders with Pakistan raising the specter of the US extending deeper into that country in support of their failed client in Islamabad.

Israel-Palestine Policy

White House policy toward the Israeli occupation of Palestine has been characterized by ritual reiteration of policy ( a ‘Two-State Solution’), indecisive and inconsequential attempts to formulate a coherent strategy and capitulation to Israel’s continued territorial expansion (BBC News April 18, 2009). Obama is faced with an openly annexationalist newly-elected far-right government, which rejects even the language of a ‘Two-State Solution’ in direct repudiation of his stated policy (BBC News, April 1, 2009). Washington passively submits to Israeli rebuffs. Obama’s Middle East policy appointees from top to bottom are mostly Israel-Firsters. The Obama regime and the Democratic Party leadership in the Congress are indebted to the Zionist lobby, which rejects any attempt to even ‘pressure’ Israel – thus disarming any of the possible economic or military levers which could be used to pry concessions from the Netanyahu-Leiberman regime. Worse still, Washington supports the Israeli blockade of Gaza ruled by the democratically elected Hamas government in power, thus strengthening Israel’s iron grip on the Palestinians.

One of President Obama’s most egregious foreign policy failures took place during his May 18, 2009 meeting in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. After having made as Israeli-Palestinian ‘two-state’ settlement one of his major foreign policy goals, Obama failed to even secure a verbal commitment from the Israeli extremist leader (BBC News, May 19, 2009). After 4 hours of discussion, Netanyahu rejected Obama’s offer to consider a time limit on diplomatic overtures to Iran (with the implicit threat of a military option) in exchange for the Likud Prime Minister mouthing the ‘three words’: ‘two state solution’! Worse still from the White House view, Natanyahu insisted that any negotiations with the Palestinians were conditional on their recognition of Israel as a Jewish State, thus disenfranchising the 1.5 million Palestinian Muslim and Christians who remained after the mass expulsions.

As if to flaunt his disdain for Obama’s call for a freeze on new settlements, Netanyahu’s regime accelerated plans for 20 new Jewish housing settlements in the occupied West Bank – precisely on the day of their meeting. Worst of all, Obama came out of the meeting displaying his utter impotence – he could not even make a ‘show’ of having any influence on the extremist Jewish Prime Minister. Netanyahu’s brazen and public repudiation of Obama was based on his clear understanding that the power of the US Zionist Power Configuration in Congress and in the Executive branch guaranteed that Obama would not counter Israeli extremism by threatening to decrease US financial or military aid to the Jewish state. After weeks of rumors and stories of Obama’s ‘willingness’ to confront or pressure Netanyahu to accept a two state solution, the end result was a humiliating public debacle in which Obama secured absolutely nothing.

Following his meeting with Obama, Netanyahu (the visitor) went to the US Congress with his power base among a huge majority of members of the House and Senate and top Zionist Jewish leaders, where almost the entire elected US representative body re-affirmed its unconditional support for Israeli policy – strictly on Netanyahu’s terms. The impotence and failings of President Obama in his dealing with Netanyahu was not lost on the entire world (especially the Arab world). Hamas Spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum summed up the general perception thus: “The statements (about a two-state solution) by Obama are nothing but wishes on which we do not much count” (Al Jazeera, May 19, 2009).

The Obama reigme ‘immersion’ in Zionist-Israeli politics blinds it to the favorable opportunities for a grand accord in the region. Hamas leaders have shut down all rocket retaliatory attacks on Israel and called for a 10-year cease fire (New York Times, May 4, 2009). The Arab League (including the Gulf States) has reiterated its willingness to recognize Israel and open diplomatic relations in exchange for an end of the occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. The European Union has opened dialog with Hamas and Hezbollah while postponing extending ‘special’ economic status to Israel. Even Iran has agreed to accept a Palestinian settlement based on the Two-State Solution. Faced with major shifts and concessions, the Obama regime remains impotent It is unable to put any muscle behind its proposals; it struggles even to set conditions for the resumption of peace negotiations. In the meantime, the Zionist Power Configuration inside and outside presses forward with new and more dangerous sanctions against Iran. During the AIPAC Conference in Washington (May 1-5), six thousand Israel-Firsters set their goal on securing Congressional majorities in favor of provocative blockades and sanctions against companies which export refined petroleum products into Iran (Jerusalem Post, May 1, 2009). The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA) currently in the Congress and authored by AIPAC operatives is viewed as a weapon the crush the Iranian economy and overthrow the government. By attempting to entice AIPAC and Israel with the claim that a peace agreement with Palestine would lead to a ‘consensus’ to confront Iran, the Obama regime surrenders its diplomatic option to Iran in favor of Israel’s militarist approach – without securing any changes in its policy toward Palestine.

Conclusion: Consequences of Obama’s Failed Policies

Early on the Obama regime’s foreign policy has suffered a series of important set-backs on major policy issues.

Its G20 economic initiatives to secure or support proposals to coordinate stimulus policies based on financial bailouts and larger deficits were rejected. The re-vitalization of the IMF via an injection of $750 billion dollars was not welcomed by the ‘emerging market’ countries because of the IMF’s harsh conditions. The NATO summit spurned Washington’s demands for more combat troops to Afghanistan. Of the 5000 troops promised, three-fourths are to serve for the duration of the Afghan Presidential election (August 2009) and the rest as trainers and advisers far from the frontlines.

The Summit of the Americas was a fiasco for Washington. It was completely isolated in its defense of US policy toward Cuba, the Cuban Embargo and its designation of Cuba as a ‘state supporter of terrorism’. Obama offered nothing in the way of new policies in the face of the US-induced regional economic recession. At the same time the Latin American countries turned elsewhere – to Iran and China, as well as within the region, for opportunities to stimulate their economies. Obama’s bellicose posturing toward North Korea reversed 6 years of negotiations, resulting in the revival of tensions and the reassembly of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. The escalation of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and its extension into Pakistan undermines US clients in the region and makes it likely that the US military will find itself in an unending colonial war with no possibility of a victory.

Obama’s deep ties to American Zionist policies and organizations and their loyalties to the new far right wing Israeli annexationist regime precludes the pursuit of any policy which could open the way toward a ‘two-state’ resolution of the conflict. The hard-line White House position of escalating sanctions against Iran and the buildup of Israeli long-distance offensive weapons precludes any meaningful new initiatives toward Tehran (Financial Times, March 23, 2009 p.3). The result of these failed policies is that Washington is increasingly politically isolated: Alone in fighting wars in Sough Asia; alone in aiding and abetting Israeli intransigence; alone among its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere in its imposition of an embargo against Cuba. Political isolation means the political and economic costs of Obama’s military-driven empire building will be borne almost exclusively by the US Treasury and citizenry – at a time of unprecedented peacetime deficits and a deepening recession.

Obama’s focus on foreign military adventures, domestic financial bailouts and promoting the IMF has caused the countries of Latin America to turn away from their big traditional partner in Washington and sign up for major trade and investment agreements elsewhere. Brazil welcomed a hundred member delegation of business leaders form Iran, headed by its Prime Minister and composed of a wide array of business and banking leaders to seal multi-billion and co-investment deals. In late May, President Da Silva promoted a big increase in trade and investment with its biggest trading partner – China. The response by Secretary Clinton was pathetic: Instead of recognizing the economic eclipse of the US and seeking to increase the economic presence, she cited the threat of Iranian terrorism – among oil, agribusiness and banking executives (www.presstv.com, May 2, 2009).

Obama’s continued backing for rightwing regional leaders in Bolivia and Ecuador against reformist Presidents, has contributed to the latter repeated electoral victories and the political isolation of the US. Obama’s rhetorics of ‘opening up’ to Venezuela, accompanied by harsh attacks on the dangers of ‘Chavismo’, including unfounded charges of its complicity in drug trafficking, has led to Venezuela’s growing trade and joint investment links with China, Iran and Russia..

Failed policies have consequences. The pursuit of long-term large-scale overseas military commitment in a time of economic depression is self-destructive, self-isolating and doomed to failure. Satisfying Israeli illegal colonial aspirations and military goals sacrifices hundreds of billions of dollars in trade with Iran, the Gulf States and South Asian economies.

The greater problem is not that the Obama regime is pursuing wars that will lead to defeats, but that the entire notion of pouring resources into military-driven empire building at a time of deepening recession is leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees throughout the world, while destroying the livelihoods and social safety new of millions of American citizens.

I’ve said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama’s first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we’ll never know the names of all the victims — It’s doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying, “I’m not going to get into these matters.”¹ Where have we heard that before?

After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: “We regret the loss of life.” These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called “terrorist”.

I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the “changes we can believe in” in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me.

Iran

Just leave them alone. There is no “Iranian problem.” They are a threat to no one. Iran hasn’t invaded any other country in centuries. No, President Ahmadinejad did not threaten Israel with any violence. Stop patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with American warships. Stop halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas. (That’s generally regarded as an act of war.) Stop using Iranian dissident groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran. Stop kidnapping Iranian diplomats. Stop the continual spying and recruiting within Iran. And yet, with all that, you can still bring yourself to say: “If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.”²

Iran has as much right to arm Hamas as the US has to arm Israel. And there is no international law that says that the United States, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. Will you continue to provide nuclear technology to India, which has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while threatening Iran, an NPT signatory, with sanctions and warfare?

Russia

Stop surrounding the country with new NATO members. Stop looking to instigate new “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics and satellites. Stop arming and supporting Georgia in its attempts to block the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia, the breakaway regions on the border of Russia. And stop the placement of anti-missile systems in Russia’s neighbors, the Czech Republic and Poland, on the absurd grounds that it’s to ward off an Iranian missile attack. It was Czechoslovakia and Poland that the Germans also used to defend their imperialist ambitions — The two countries were being invaded on the grounds that Germans there were being maltreated. The world was told.

“The U.S. government made a big mistake from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” said former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev last year. “At that time the Russian people were really euphoric about America and the U.S. was really number one in the minds of many Russians.” But, he added, the United States moved aggressively to expand NATO and appeared gleeful at Russia’s weakness.³

Cuba

Making it easier to travel there and send remittances is very nice (if, as expected, you do that), but these things are dwarfed by the need to end the US embargo. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the almost forty years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. We can now add ten more years to all three figures. The negative, often crippling, effects of the embargo extend into every aspect of Cuban life.

In addition to closing Guantanamo prison, the adjacent US military base established in 1903 by American military force should be closed and the land returned to Cuba.

The Cuban Five, held prisoner in the United States for over 10 years, guilty only of trying to prevent American-based terrorism against Cuba, should be released. Actually there were 10 Cubans arrested; five knew that they could expect no justice in an American court and pled guilty to get shorter sentences.

Iraq

Freeing the Iraqi people to death … Nothing short of a complete withdrawal of all US forces, military and contracted, and the closure of all US military bases and detention and torture centers, can promise a genuine end to US involvement and the beginning of meaningful Iraqi sovereignty. To begin immediately. Anything less is just politics and imperialism as usual. In six years of war, the Iraqi people have lost everything of value in their lives. As the Washington Post reported in 2007: “It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”⁴ The good news is that the Iraqi people have 5,000 years experience in crafting a society to live in. They should be given the opportunity.

Saudi Arabia

Demand before the world that this government enter the 21st century (or at least the 20th), or the United States has to stop pretending that it gives a damn about human rights, women, homosexuals, religious liberty, and civil liberties. The Bush family had long-standing financial ties to members of the Saudi ruling class. What will be your explanation if you maintain the status quo?

Haiti

Reinstate the exiled Jean Bertrand Aristide to the presidency, which he lost when the United States overthrew him in 2004. To seek forgiveness for our sins, give the people of Haiti lots and lots of money and assistance.

Colombia

Stop giving major military support to a government that for years has been intimately tied to death squads, torture, and drug trafficking; in no other country in the world have so many progressive candidates for public office, unionists, and human-rights activists been murdered. Are you concerned that this is the closest ally the United States has in all of Latin America?

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez may talk too much but he’s no threat except to the capitalist system of Venezuela and, by inspiration, elsewhere in Latin America. He has every good historical reason to bad-mouth American foreign policy, including Washington’s role in the coup that overthrew him in 2002. If you can’t understand why Chavez is not in love with what the United States does all over the world, I can give you a long reading list.

Put an end to support for Chavez’s opposition by the Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other US government agencies. US diplomats should not be meeting with Venezuelans plotting coups against Chavez, nor should they be interfering in elections.

Send Luis Posada from Florida to Venezuela, which has asked for his extradition for his masterminding the bombing of a Cuban airline in 1976, taking 73 lives. Extradite the man, or try him in the US, or stop talking about the war on terrorism.

And please try not to repeat the nonsense about Venezuela being a dictatorship. It’s a freer society than the United States. It has, for example, a genuine opposition daily media, non-existent in the United States. If you doubt that, try naming a single American daily newspaper or TV network that was unequivocally against the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Panama, Grenada, and Vietnam. Or even against two of them? How about one? Is there a single one that supports Hamas and/or Hezbollah? A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story concerning a possible Israeli attack upon Iran, and stated: “Several details of the covert effort have been omitted from this account, at the request of senior United States intelligence and administration officials, to avoid harming continuing operations.”⁵

Alas, Mr. President, among other disparaging remarks, you’ve already accused Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”⁶ This is a statement so contrary to the facts, even to plain common sense, so hypocritical given Washington’s history in Latin America, that I despair of you ever freeing yourself from the ideological shackles that have bound every American president of the past century. It may as well be inscribed in their oath of office — that a president must be antagonistic toward any country that has expressly rejected Washington as the world’s savior. You made this remark in an interview with Univision, Venezuela’s leading, implacable media critic of the Chavez government. What regional progress could you be referring to, the police state of Colombia?

Bolivia

Stop American diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, Fulbright scholars, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, from spying and fomenting subversion inside Bolivia. As the first black president of the United States, you could try to cultivate empathy toward, and from, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. Congratulate Bolivian president Evo Morales on winning a decisive victory on a recent referendum to approve a new constitution which enshrines the rights of the indigenous people and, for the first time, institutes separation of church and state.

Afghanistan

Perhaps the most miserable people on the planet, with no hope in sight as long as the world’s powers continue to bomb, invade, overthrow, occupy, and slaughter in their land. The US Army is planning on throwing 30,000 more young American bodies into the killing fields and is currently building eight new major bases in southern Afghanistan. Is that not insane? If it makes sense to you I suggest that you start the practice of the president accompanying the military people when they inform American parents that their child has died in a place called Afghanistan.

If you pull out from this nightmare, you could also stop bombing Pakistan. Leave even if it results in the awful Taliban returning to power. They at least offer security to the country’s wretched, and indications are that the current Taliban are not all fundamentalists.

But first, close Bagram prison and other detention camps, which are worse than Guantanamo.

And stop pretending that the United States gives a damn about the Afghan people and not oil and gas pipelines which can bypass Russia and Iran. The US has been endeavoring to fill the power vacuum in Central Asia created by the Soviet Union’s dissolution in order to assert Washington’s domination over a region containing the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world. Is Afghanistan going to be your Iraq?

Israel

The most difficult task for you, but the one that would earn for you the most points. To declare that Israel is no longer the 51st state of the union would bring down upon your head the wrath of the most powerful lobby in the world and its many wealthy followers, as well as the Christian-fundamentalist Right and much of the media. But if you really want to see peace between Israel and Palestine you must cut off all military aid to Israel, in any form: hardware, software, personnel, money. And stop telling Hamas it has to recognize Israel and renounce violence until you tell Israel that it has to recognize Hamas and renounce violence.

North Korea

Bush called the country part of “the axis of evil”, and Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” and “a spoiled child at a dinner table.”⁷ But you might try to understand where Kim Jong Il is coming from. He sees that UN agencies went into Iraq and disarmed it, and then the United States invaded. The logical conclusion is not to disarm, but to go nuclear.
Central America

Stop interfering in the elections of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, year after year. The Cold War has ended. And though you can’t undo the horror perpetrated by the United States in the region in the 1980s, you can at least be kind to the immigrants in the US who came here trying to escape the long-term consequences of that terrible decade.
Vietnam

In your inauguration speech you spoke proudly of those “who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom … For us, they fought and died, in places like … Khe Sanh.” So it is your studied and sincere opinion that the 58,000 American sevicemembers who died in Vietnam, while helping to kill over a million Vietnamese, gave their life for our prosperity and freedom? Would you care to defend that proposition without resort to any platitudes?

You might also consider this: In all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the three million Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical attention, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology.

Kosovo

Stop supporting the most gangster government in the world, which has specialized in kidnaping, removing human body parts for sale, heavy trafficking in drugs, trafficking in women, various acts of terrorism, and ethnic cleansing of Serbs. This government would not be in power if the Bush administration had not seen them as America’s natural allies. Do you share that view? UN Resolution 1244, adopted in 1999, reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to which Serbia is now the recognized successor state, and established that Kosovo was to remain part of Serbia. Why do we have a huge and permanent military base in that tiny self-declared country?

NATO

From protecting Europe against a [mythical] Soviet invasion to becoming an occupation army in Afghanistan. Put an end to this historical anachronism, what Russian leader Vladimir called “the stinking corpse of the cold war.”⁸ You can accomplish this simply by leaving the organization. Without the United States and its never-ending military actions and officially-designated enemies, the organization would not even have the pretense of a purpose, which is all it has left. Members have had to be bullied, threatened and bribed to send armed forces to Afghanistan.

School of the Americas

Latin American countries almost never engage in war with each other, or any other countries. So for what kind of warfare are its military officers being trained by the United States? To suppress their own people. Close this school (the name has now been changed to protect the guilty) at Ft. Benning, Georgia that the United States has used to prepare two generations of Latin American military officers for careers in overthrowing progressive governments, death squads, torture, holding down dissent, and other charming activities. The British are fond of saying that the Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. Americans can say that the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram began in the classrooms of the School of the Americas.

Torture

Your executive orders concerning this matter of utmost importance are great to see, but they still leave something to be desired. They state that the new standards ostensibly putting an end to torture apply to any “armed conflict”. But what if your administration chooses to view future counterterrorism and other operations as not part of an “armed conflict”? And no mention is made of “rendition” — kidnaping a man off the street, throwing him in a car, throwing a hood over his head, stripping off his clothes, placing him in a diaper, shackling him from every angle, and flying him to a foreign torture dungeon. Why can’t you just say that this and all other American use of proxy torturers is banned? Forever.

It’s not enough to say that you’re against torture or that the United States “does not torture” or “will not torture”. George W. Bush said the same on a regular basis. To show that you’re not George W. Bush you need to investigate those responsible for the use of torture, even if this means prosecuting a small army of Bush administration war criminals.

You aren’t off to a good start by appointing former CIA official John O. Brennan as your top adviser on counterterrorism. Brennan has called “rendition” a “vital tool” and praised the CIA’s interrogation techniques for providing “lifesaving” intelligence.⁹ Whatever were you thinking, Barack?

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi

Free this Libyan man from his prison in Scotland, where he is serving a life sentence after being framed by the United States for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, which took the lives of 270 people over Scotland. Iran was actually behind the bombing — as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July, killing 290 — not Libya, which the US accused for political reasons. Nations do not behave any more cynical than that. Megrahi lies in prison now dying of cancer, but still the US and the UK will not free him. It would be too embarrassing to admit to 20 years of shameless lying.

Mr. President, there’s a lot more to be undone in our foreign policy if you wish to be taken seriously as a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr.: banning the use of depleted uranium, cluster bombs, and other dreadful weapons; joining the International Criminal Court instead of trying to sabotage it; making a number of other long-overdue apologies in addition to the one mentioned re Vietnam; and much more. You’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to bring some happiness to this sad old world, make America credible and beloved again, stop creating armies of anti-American terrorists, and win over people like me.

And do you realize that you can eliminate all state and federal budget deficits in the United States, provide free health care and free university education to every American, pay for an unending array of worthwhile social and cultural programs, all just by ending our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not starting any new ones, and closing down the Pentagon’s 700+ military bases? Think of it as the peace dividend Americans were promised when the Cold War would end some day, but never received. How about you delivering it, Mr. President? It’s not too late.

But you are committed to the empire; and the empire is committed to war. Too bad.

1. Washington Post, January 24, 2009.
2. Interview with al Arabiya TV, January 27, 2009.
3. Gorbachev speaking in Florida, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 17, 2008.
4. Washington Post, May 5, 2007, p.1.
5. New York Times, January 11, 2009.
6. Washington Post, January 19, 2009.
7. Newsweek, May 27, 2002.
8. Press Trust of India (news agency), December 21, 2007.
9. Washington Post, November 26, 2008.

Someday, this road will surely demonstrate the last days of a man who denied Republic of Korea’s state power originates from its people, but foolishly believed it comes from America, dirty richs [sic] and crap newspapers. Therefore, we will resist until our last breath to his idiotic ignorance, incompetence, irresponsible subterfuge, reckless beliefs, and ensure not to be victims of such.

– sentiment about president Lee Myung-bak on a banner strung high across the expanse of Sejong Street by Seoul City Hall

SEOUL, KOREA — Following weeks of street demonstrations, South Korea has resumed importing US beef.

On June 28, I took the subway to Seoul City Hall station where a crowd of 13,000 to 30,000 (there are a range of estimates) had gathered on the lawn and streets to express disapproval over the government’s approval of the resumption of US beef imports to the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea). What began with a few high school students organizing had grown to a candlelight movement that culminated in, according to some estimates, a half million people on 10 June 2008 — coinciding with the 21st anniversary of the demonstrations that toppled the military dictatorship.¹

The scene was similar to the preceding weeks: crowds of people were milling about carrying red or green placards denouncing president Lee Myung-bak and US beef. Many opportunistic entrepreneurs had set up shop on the sidewalks and streetsides, selling ramyeon, mandu, kimbab, drinks, t-shirts, candles, etc. Hundreds of police were present.

US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice, during her visit to Seoul, vouched, “I can only say that American beef is safe and that we hope in time the South Korean people will listen to that, and will be willing to listen to what their government is saying and what we are saying.” To this a friend wryly remarked, “Why the hell would they do that? Listen, I mean.”

Alongside the city hall runs the main thoroughfare of Sedong Street, which ends at the landmark gate of Gwanghwamun. Sejong Street was lined with buses (one demonstrator claimed 160), converted to transport vehicles with barricaded windows for riot gear-clad police. The fleet of buses, many marked by graffiti, were arranged to impede access to sections of Sejong Street where the US embassy is located.

President Lee of the Grand National Party has borne the brunt of South Korean anger during a growing number of demonstrations. In April 2008, Lee proposed the lifting of prohibitions on US beef imports imposed in 2003, following an occurrence of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or Mad Cow disease) in the US. Many South Koreans reacted strongly against the perceived risks of BSE, which had been inflamed by Korean media.

In June, the pressure was such that Lee’s entire cabinet offered to resign in response to the street protests.

Beefs against US Beef

Opposition to the resumption of US beef imports into ROK, because of scientifically dubious claims over the possibility of an outbreak of Mad Cow disease, appeared superficially to be the reason behind weeks of mass demonstrations. Most news reports and analyses have focused on the people’s movement as triggered by such health concerns. Few stories analyzed the democracy underlying the people’s movement and the direction it took.

As much as Lee has forced his will on a chunk of the recalcitrant Korean populace, on its face, the people’s movement could also be accused of being anti-democratic. First, Lee was elected by almost half the voting electorate in December 2007, albeit perhaps aided by a low turnout. Second, banning the import of US beef on specious grounds denies Korean consumers the right to inform themselves and make their own decision whether or not to purchase US beef. Why do the demonstrators not simply ask for uniform across-the-board inspection criteria for all beef, domestic and imported?

Third, the manufactured fear of Mad Cow disease was used as an ideological tool to rally the masses. Regardless of its effectiveness, it is of questionable cogency and threatens to subvert future progressivist movement building.

A Case against US Beef Imports

There were already plenty of better reasons to oppose US beef imports based on health,² humanitarian, and economic grounds. For instance, US beef is laced with hormones and antibiotics. The EU, for one, has long maintained a ban on hormone-injected beef.³

People who profess concern for animal rights would deplore the cruel system of factory farming in which many cattle suffer. The final moments in the abattoir leave much to be desired as well.⁴

US beef is highly subsidized.⁵ Unless ROK beef producers are correspondingly subsidized, then the pasture is stacked against them. The inability of ROK beef producers to compete with cheap US beef threatens to deprive Koreans not only of jobs and an industry, but the right to choose and consume domestic beef.

More Beefs

Much of the media has portrayed the protests as being solely about imports of US beef, but many citizens also voiced concern about the Great Canal project.⁶ The project proposes the construction of three great canals connecting four large rivers and the city of Busan in the southeast with Seoul in the northwest.

A slim military officer (desiring anonymity) behind an information table about the Great Canal project said he was opposed to the project because of the environmental destruction it would entail. He saw Korean conglomerates as the only winners from the project.

Pak Jong-ju, who manned a table for the Korea Socialist Party, said he was at the demonstrations because of injustice. “The US and Korea alliance is a critical issue in Korea,” said Pak, who saw the protests rooted in a great polarization in ROK society among those who support close ties with the US and those who seek independence from the US.

In general, a dichotomy is envisioned in ROK of a conservative, older faction that view relations with the US as crucial. The other faction, younger and left-leaning, wants US troops to leave. They view US involvement in Korea more skeptically.

The US has a history of undermining Korean national aspirations, from backing the diplomatic “handover” of Korea to Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century,⁷ to partitioning Korea,⁸ to inflaming the murderous war on the Korean peninsula,⁹ and backing the South Korean puppet regime’s purging of leftists in the south of Korea.¹⁰

What Koreans Didn’t Demonstrations against

Was tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of citizens taking to the streets the best method of dissenting? Was opposition to beef imports an ideal fillip to street demonstrations, albeit this expanded to include opposition to the Grand Canal project and antipathy to the president?

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs saw the ROK street demonstrations as bringing together the power of technology, organization, and political expression and providing an opportunity “to evolve better forms of democracy that involve more people through the mediation of technology.” But Rheingold also saw a need to develop “mechanisms beyond simply calling people together to demonstrate…” “You need to be able to influence the political apparatus in a democracy in order to have a long-term influence.”¹¹

Did these protestors consist of “smart mobs,” in the sense meant by Rheingold?

For example, it is granted that health is primary, but what of the ability to make a decent living for all citizens? Poverty is, after all, anathema to good health.

Demonstrators did not focus on the income disparity that besets South Korea. It has the third largest gap between the rich and poor among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. According to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, the gap between the top and bottom 10 percent income brackets had grown from 3.65 times in 1995 to 4.51 times in 2005.¹²

To the north, kinfolk are dying. A 55-year-old South Korean Buddhist monk, Pomnyun, has been fasting since 26 May to bring attention to the famine in North Korea.

“Ten million people — that amounts to the half of North Korea’s population — suffer from food shortages, and among those ten million, about 3 million people are in danger of starvation,” said Pomnyun.

When asked to evaluate the response of South Koreans to relief efforts in North Korea, Pomnyun replied: “They help when they become aware of severe famine in North Korea, but most of them do not know what is going on there. They seem to be way too busy with their own lives and are reminded of nuclear weapons programs first when it comes to North Korea.”¹³

In February 2003, in a land where the people greatly suffered the ravages of war not so long ago, why did so few Koreans demonstrate against the aggression-occupation looming for Iraq?¹⁴ Moreover, the animosity stemming from the oppression of Japanese occupation is still very palpable among Koreans today. While the nature of the occupations over time has been different, paradoxically, the history of ROK occupation by the US does not evoke the same widespread animosity among South Koreans to Americans as to the Japanese. To be sure, animosity is present among a section of ROK society, but the US-ROK relationship is touted by another section of society, leading to a political polarization, which sees South Koreans living in a landscape dotted with 36 US army installations. Along with this enduring foreign presence is the fact that a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) exempts US military personnel from Korean legal jurisdiction, something that the US seeks to impose on Iraq.

Crackdown

Many citizens consider holding demonstrations to be a right. A senior policeman, who wished to remain anonymous said, “The demonstration is okay if it is done in the proper manner with permission, not in the middle of the street stopping cars and causing problems.”

Just who was causing the problems depends on one’s vantage point.

Rah Dong-hyuk, broadcasting jockey of Raccoon Broadcasting of Afreeca.com, said the candles were for “justice in media coverage.” The independent media cameras were at the demonstrations to protect the citizen protestors.¹¹

The organizers, who addressed the milling crowd throughout the evening, emphasized that the demonstration should remain peaceful. Dozens of young men wearing military fatigues were present at the demonstration. Having completed their compulsory military service, they now call themselves the Guardians of the Citizens, claiming to protect the citizenry from the state.

One of the Guardians, Kim Jin-kang, said the protestors were there “because the president has been lying … about the Great Canal and American beef.”

Hwang Pil-gyu, of the Lawyer’s Society for a Democratic Society, was quoted by Yonhap News: “Over the course of the candlelight protest movement, there have been cases of indiscriminate detention, arrest, suppression of free expression on the Internet and other abuses of human rights.”¹⁵

The crackdown led to an “urgent appeal” to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees over state tactics, including attempts to arrest protest organizers and the issuance of travel bans on some internet users.¹⁶

On June 30, investigators raided the office of the People’s Association for Measures Against Mad Cow Disease and the office of the People’s Solidarity for Korean Progress, seizing computers and other items, as well as arresting one organizer

Following the crackdown by Korean authorities, street demonstrations have turned silent.

Aftermath

Since his electoral victory, Lee’s popularity crested 75% in February falling to the teens in June — maybe lower.¹⁷

While the sustained demonstration of people’s dissatisfaction at Lee bodes well for a tipping of the top-down power structure, the basis for a revolutionary toppling of the anti-democratic power structure will come when the people’s movement is founded in solidarity for the good of all in society and across societies. It is time that Koreans (and people everywhere) start and sustain a movement calling on the liberation of Iraqis and Afghanis from violence and occupation. One place to begin is to demand the removal of one’s troops from occupation or support thereof in foreign lands.

Conclusion

The beef of the Korean demonstrators that clogged the streets and plaza near the city hall, unwittingly or not, was a beef against so-called free trade (since resumption of US beef imports were a condition of US negotiators) with the US along with an undercurrent of nationalism. In this case, free trade implies the freedom to subsidize and in the game of subsidization the smaller scale Korean farmers are at a distinct disadvantage. The proponents of “free trade” seldom clamor for fair trade. Does fairness not matter?

If the demonstrators had at heart authentic free and fair trade twined with demands for the dignity of labor, preservation of the environment, and the maintenance and improvement of the quality of life for all people, then the demonstrators’s idealism might have stood them in better stead.

If there is a lesson in this, it might be that a movement based on parochial self-interest is doomed to peter out.

Smarter mobs are needed. Solidarity with disadvantaged and progressivist groups is requisite. Leadership is a target for capitalists and, therefore, must be protected. This is best done by basing leadership in the entirety of the people (that is, dissolving the inegalitarian hierarchy that leadership imposes). Only then can a movement truly become mass. This is the smart way to a revolution.

Epilogue

A candlelight protest vigil is expected for next Tuesday when president George Bush is scheduled to arrive in Seoul.

1. Chris Kerr, “South Korea: Mass movement stops the neoliberal bulldozer,” Green Left Online, 12 July 2008; “Beef protest continues with largest candlelight demonstration yet,” K-popped!, 11 June 2008.
2. Andrew Martin, “Largest Recall of Ground Beef Is Ordered,” New York Times, 18 February 2008.
3. “EU, US at odds over WTO beef ruling,” EurActiv.com, 2 April 2008.
4. Janet Zimmerman, “Researcher: Cow abuse isn’t rare,” The Press-Enterprise, 26 March 2008. “Factory Farms and Beef Slaughterhouse Cruelty,” YouTube clip from movie All Jacked Up, Natural News.com.
5. “Grazing Reform,” Center for Biological Diversity, 10 July 2008.
6. “help stop the Great Korea canal project,” Friends of the Earth Australia.
7. See Carole Cameron Shaw, The Foreign Destruction of Korean Independence (Seoul National University Press, 2007).
8. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005): 186.
9. See the Korean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001 (New York: 2001).
10. Charles J. Hanley and Jae-soon Chang, “AP IMPACT: US wavered over S. Korean executions,” Mercury News, 6 July 2008.
11. From “OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum 2008,” OhmyNews, 27 June 2008.
12. Lee Hyo-sik, “Korea’s Income Gap 3rd Largest in OECD,” Korea Times, 14 July 2008.
13. Jeong Taesoo, “Why I Fast: An Interview with Korean Monk Pomnyun,” New America Media, 29 July 2008.
14. Kim Petersen, “Anti-War Demonstrations in China: Apathy in East Asia,” Dissident Voice, 20 February 2003.
15. “S. Korean Activists Petition UN Over Beef Protest Clampdown,” Korea Times, 14 July 2008.
16. Ibid.
17. Kerr, op. cit.

Knowing that he now comes adorned with that indelible modern-day scarlet letter, Bush has attempted to obscure it by cloaking it with the credibility of others. First, it was Colin Powell. Today it’s General Petraeus. When Petraeus no longer suits his needs, Bush will jettison him in order to latch upon another earnest dupe. To date, Bush’s serial successes in cloaking and jettisoning appear to defy the common sense wisdom uttered by Aretha Franklin in 1967: “You’re running out of fools and I ain’t lying.”

Consider the case of Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Gen. Obering has just published a scattershot and grossly misleading article in Defense News sporting the title, “Missile Defense Hits Mark.”

Having read and written about missile defense (see here and here), my immediate response was to ask, “What mark?” After all, as the US General Accountability Office (GAO) concluded just three months ago: “Because MDA has not formally entered the Department of Defense (DOD) acquisition cycle, it is not yet required to apply certain laws intended to hold major defenses acquisition programs accountable for their planned outcomes and cost, give decision makers a means to conduct oversight, and ensure some level of independent program review.” [GAO-07-799T, April 30, 2007]

Consequently, Gen. Obering could not have been talking about hitting the oversight “marks” normally required of other weapons programs. They’ve been put off. Thus, missile defense has not been held to the rigorous standards routinely applied to other weapons programs, notwithstanding the fact that “the U.S. has been trying to develop a reliable missile defense system for over 45 years.” [Philip E. Coyle, "U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe: The Putin Alternative," The Defense Monitor, July/August 2007]

Instead, when Gen. Obering writes about “hitting the mark,” he’s actually talking about deploying elements of the US “Ground-based Midcourse Defense” (GMD) system “just in time” to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that might be launched by North Korea. Thus, his assertion: “When North Korea launched short- and long-range missiles last summer, we had, for the first time, the means to defend all 50 states against a possible attack.”

But there’s just one slight problem with his assertion. It’s blatantly false!

Consider the recent comments by Philip E. Coyle, the Pentagon’s chief weapons evaluator during the Clinton administration. Speaking about the foolishness of the proposed missile defense system for Eastern Europe, Coyle observed: “[T]he United States is deploying missile defense hardware in Alaska and California, and is proposing the same for Eastern Europe, that has not demonstrated the capability to defend Europe, let alone the United States, from an attack by Iran (or North Korea for that matter) under realistic operational conditions. For this reason, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has ‘dumbed down’ the supposed threat from Iran (and North Korea) to just one or two missiles with no decoys or countermeasures. And yet still the MDA has not been able to demonstrate the effective capability to stop even that idealized threat under realistic operational conditions.” [Philip E. Coyle, "U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe: The Putin Alternative," The Defense Monitor, July/August 2007]

Simply put, notwithstanding the roughly $50 billion already lining the pockets of defense contractors during the Bush years and the $49 billion that MDA expects to spend over the next five years, the United States still possesses no demonstrated capability to intercept even one ICBM launched from North Korea or anywhere else.

Thus, rather than “Missile Defense Hits Mark,” a more appropriate title might have been, “The American Taxpayer: An Easy Mark for Missile Defense.”

That new title got me to thinking: Perhaps I could locate the “Erector Set” I played with as a kid. You know, the small metal beams full of holes, capable of being fastened into various shapes by screws, nuts and bolts and put into motion by pulleys, motors and gears. Perhaps, I could craft a Ground-based Midcourse Defense system from that Erector Set, link its projectile-firing pulleys, motors and gears to my computer and a GPS system — and sell it to the Pentagon for a mere $5 billion (to cover material, labor and engineering costs).

Granted, I haven’t fully worked out all the conceptual problems associated with my envisioned GMD interceptor (projectile), but, as the above-mentioned GAO report notes about my competitors: “The reliability of some GMD interceptors remains uncertain . . . because inadequate mission assurance/quality control procedures may have allowed less reliable or inappropriate parts to be incorporated in the manufacturing process.”

Moreover, I’m quite willing to concede to the Pentagon that my GMD system would be slightly less effective than the system it currently deploys. But unlike its unworkable GMD system, my unworkable Erector Set GMD system can be had for pennies on the dollar! (If I charged less than $5 billion, the Pentagon wouldn’t take me seriously.)

For a country to enjoy sovereignty, it must exert control over its entire territory.

– Ecuadorian deputy defense minister Miguel Carvajal speaking at the International Conference for the Elimination of Foreign Military Bases, 5 March 2007.

On 19 May, 27-year-old first lieutenant Oh Jong Soo, a Republic of Korea soldier was found shot dead at a barber shop on a military base in northern Iraq. His death has been ruled a suicide caused by stress from his duties.¹ It was the first death of a ROK soldier in Iraq, a country where the ROK plays a role in support of the United States’ ill fated occupation.

The sinister irony of the “presence” of the ROK military in occupied Iraq became clear when US president George Bush said he foresaw a long-term U.S. troop “presence” (euphemism for “occupation”) in Iraq similar to the one in southern Korea.

“[The] US presence enabled the South Korean economy and system to evolve … It is to say, however, that the US can provide a presence in order to give people confidence necessary to make decisions that will enable democracies to emerge, and say to other people, step back and let the democracies emerge,” said Bush. The message is palpable: the US arrogates the right to occupy another land, and no interference will be brooked while a system amenable to US interests evolves.

The evolution of southern Korea has witnessed a shift from resisting a foreign “presence” on its territory, to acquiescing to a foreign “presence,” and, currently, to assisting that “presence” in imposing its “presence” elsewhere abroad.

Sovereignty

In September of 2006, I walked up the sprawling, manicured grounds of the Independence Hall of Korea,² located near the city of Cheonan. It is the largest museum in the ROK, with seven large exhibition halls dedicated to the Korean peoples struggle against Japanese colonialism. I asked the two Koreans, who accompanied me to the museum, a perhaps impertinent question: “Is South Korea really independent?”

At that time, there was a staunch opposition by Korean farmers and peace activists to the expansion of the US Camp Humphreys Air base near Pyeongtaek. ROK riot police had been attempting a forcible eviction of activists. Even the ROK military was being used against its own people.

This action begs a question: what kind of independence does a country have when the citizenry loses out to the demands of a foreign military on its soil?

In fact, the Korean military does not exercise ultimate authority on its own territory. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA)³ grants the US the specific right to “take all the measures necessary for their establishment, operation, safeguarding and control” of the area and facilities. The ROK, upon consultation, “shall, at the request of the United States armed forces and upon consultation between the two Governments … take necessary measures… The United States may also take necessary measures … upon consultation between the two Governments.” (Article III)

Of particular consternation is Article XXII, which allows US preeminence in concurrent jurisdiction over members of the United States military and dependents. During the period 1967 to 1998, there were over 50,000 crimes committed against Koreans by US military personnel — murder and violations against women being prominent. No apology had ever been issued, and in the “overwhelming number of cases, the accused has never been held accountable to Korean victims.”⁴ In 1998, 96.1 percent of crimes committed by US troops were handled outside Korean jurisdiction.⁵

Consequently, there have been calls to amend the “devastating effects” of the SOFA. The US is accused of being rejectionist in this regard.⁶

SOFA remains in force unless terminated earlier by agreement between both the US and ROK governments (Article XXXI). South Korea appears poised, however, to assume military command over its own forces in the period 2009-2012 when the ROK-US Combined Forces Command are scheduled to be separated.⁷ The turnover of Hong Kong happened in a day, so one might wonder why a three to six-year period is required for the turnover of military sovereignty to the ROK.

University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings characterizes the ROK as a semi-sovereign state.⁸ The DPRK, on the other hand, despite superpower belligerency against it, goes its own path.⁹

The supposed threat posed by the DPRK is allegedly the justification for the continued stationing of US forces in the ROK. That the DPRK is a threat is adduced, according to many Koreans and Americans, by the fact that the North started the Korean War.

But is this a fact? There were several ROK troop incursions into the North preceding the preponderant DPRK invasion that began on 25 June 1950.¹⁰ Cumings wrote, “[C]ivil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes with blame enough to go around for everyone — and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it.”¹¹ This could be construed as a fence-sitter position: no single entity started the “civil” war.

Question: If Korea had not been divided, would DPRK ruler Kim Il Sung and ROK ruler Rhee Syngman have pined to reunite Korea? I submit that origin of the “civil” war can be answered by another question: Who divided Korea? Cumings answered that question: “it is the Americans who bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for the thirty-eighth parallel.”¹² If Cumings is referring to Aesops’s fable, then he is apportioning all the blame to the US. If he is referring to lion’s share in the common usage as major share, then he hasn’t named another party that might be responsible for a minor share.

Cumings described the Americans’ decision to divide Korea at the thirty eighth parallel as “hasty and unilateral.”¹³ US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1943 declaration in Cairo of the looming partition was depicted as a humiliation to the Korean people. ¹⁴

The Koreans had other ideas, though.

Democracy

Yo Un Hyung, called the Father of Democracy in Korea, is a politician well regarded in both the ROK and DPRK. He has a diverse background that spans Christianity, literacy campaigns, anti-smoking campaigns, pro-sports, media, militarization, and pro-independence movements. Probably what best defines him as a person is his being born into a landowning family but releasing his tenant farmers and “virtual slaves” and providing them enough money and land to become self-sufficient.¹⁵

Yo vigorously opposed the Japanese occupation of Korea. On 14 August 1945, Yo was rewarded when the Japanese governor general of Korea, general Abe Endo, handed the reins of self-government to Yo. Yo helped form People’s Committees in all Korean provinces and the Korean People’s Republic arose. On 14 September 1945, the first cabinet was formed. The US, however, feared communism. ¹⁶

For Washington, democracy is fine, as long as it is democracy amenable to US interests. The fledgling democratic Korean People’s Republic was abolished, and vice president Yo was forced to step down, as the United States Army Military Government in Korea consolidated its occupation of the South.

In essence, southern Korea had merely exchanged one form of occupation for another. To this day, US forces remain stationed on Korean soil, and some political figures in the US state that the US presence is a never-ending one. Neoconservatives forthrightly enounce that the US will have a “vital role” in the case of Korean unification to counter increasing militarization in China. While Korean unification might lead to a reduced US military presence on the peninsula, it will not lead to a “termination” of the US military presence, as it serves a “longer-range strategic purpose.”¹⁷

Following the USMGIK and the destruction of socialist movements in the ROK, a succession of military dictatorships ruled. Japanese collaborator Park Chung Hee ruled 18 years before being assassinated, and he was followed by military embezzler presidents Roh Tae Woo and Chun Doo Wan.¹⁸ Conclusively, the US policy in the ROK was anti-democratic.

Why did the US divide Korea? If the Korean people had been permitted to establish their own system of governance, then the masses, which were eager to overthrow the elitist yangban class, were heading toward socialism. The political will of the people was thwarted at great cost. On the southern island of Jeju an “all out guerrilla extermination campaign” by rightists resulted in the deaths of one of every five or six islanders and the destruction of half the villages.¹⁹

Occupation

The Independence Museum’s website describes the “undying desire for Korean sovereignty.” It also proudly notes that the Korean independence movement “triggered and instigated other independence movements in other countries under Japanese ruling [sic] like the May Fourth Movement in China.” This strongly indicates a solidarity with movements against occupation.

The museum, however, does not feature the subsequent USMGIK. Nonetheless, it is discernible that for many Koreans of all ages, the history of the Japanese occupation arouses strong feelings of wounded pride and hostility. Given this animosity to occupation (mixed in the case of the US occupation of the ROK), one might logically infer that Koreans sympathize with other freedom struggles against foreign occupations. This is, paradoxically, not the case in the ROK.

For example, there is minimal awareness in the ROK of the enduring occupation of Palestine rooted in the genociding of the indigenous people and the theft of their land.²⁰

The ex-ROK foreign minister, Ban Ki Moon, in his successful bid to become secretary general of the United Nations, sought the backing of the outstanding defier of UN Security Council resolutions, Israel, a nation in contravention of the conditions of its membership in the UN.

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Zionist Anti-Defamation League, discussed with Ban Israel’s situation. Ban passed scrutiny. Foxman said, “The secretary-general demonstrated to us his grasp of Israel’s security concerns, having seen the country and its borders up close.” According to Foxman, Ban “acknowledged that Israel is treated poorly by the UN General Assembly and by the UN Human Rights Council.” ²¹

Ban also met with the families of Israeli soldiers captured by Hamas and Hizbollah. He pledged “his utmost efforts” to win the soldiers’ release. Later he visited Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial. ²²

There is no mention of Ban having visited with families of Palestinian prisoners. There is no mention of “his utmost efforts” to secure the release of over 10,000 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. There is no mention of any visit to Deir Yassin Remembered. There is no mention of efforts to uphold human rights, international law, and the UN Charter so that Palestinian refugees might exercise their right of return, so that Palestinians dispossessed might repossess their land, so that the International Court of Justice’s ruling against the illegal Apartheid Wall might be enforced.

Ban projected an image amenable image to Zionist interests in his successful effort to become the UN secretary general. Uzi Manor, a former Israeli ambassador to South Korea, opined, “[Ban] is from a friendly country and he’s a friend of Israel.” Ban was depicted as representative of the general South Korean attitude to Israel: “generally admiring and even identifying with Israel as a small country surrounded by hostile elements that excels in technology and education.”²³

How should one view a nation that continues to rail against its period under occupation while acquiescing to the occupation of other nations? Even worse, how should one view a nation that bemoans its period under occupation and yet it participates in the occupation of other nations? Does not the stationing of ROK forces in occupied Iraq thoroughly undermine any claim to historical grievance that it holds against Japan? Some might claim that the ROK forfeited its integrity to complain when it participated in the occupation of South Vietnam and the aggression against North Vietnam. At that time, however, the ROK was under an American-backed dictatorship.²⁴

What has the US interference in Korea wrought? The US-desired partition of the peninsula and occupation of the southern half led to a vicious war, rife with scorched earth campaigns, massacres, torture, rape, and the use of chemical and biological agents. It has been estimated that up to 10 million people were killed. ²⁵

The US “presence” has limited socialism to the North, but was the huge price worth it? Decades of dictatorship followed in the ROK, and what now dissembles as a “democracy” prohibits socialism, the forming of a socialist political party, and hence the appearance of a socialist option during elections.

Economy

The ROK economy has been, for the most part, robust. For this the US does deserve a chunk of credit. It provided the financial support (whether one would classify this as aid or reparations depends on how one depicts the US’s involvement/interference in contemporary Korean history), but it was forced to do this, as it would not do for the DPRK to outperform the ROK economically.

A direct comparison of the two Korea economies is, therefore, unfair.

The ROK, however, has pursued its own path outside the economic strictures of the Washington Consensus. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese collaborator-cum-president Park Chung Hee brought about major industrial development, pushing exports in a state-managed economy in cooperation with conglomerates. The DPRK, however, especially after the dissolution of the USSR, has fallen into economic collapse. Serial meteorological catastrophes played a predominant role,²⁶ but economic sanctions and government-bureaucratic incompetence also hastened the famine that gripped the DPRK. The DPRK is also forced to devote an inordinate percentage of its production to defense because of the geo-political and military situation on the Korean peninsula.²⁷ Consequently, at the present juncture, the ROK stands as a successful economy, especially next to the DPRK.

As for the DPRK’s drive to attain a nuclear weapon deterrent, it can also be viewed in this way: that it might free up government expenditure for other societal needs. Further, it must be understood that the DPRK quest for nuclear weapons followed a similar quest by the ROK under president Park. It came after decades of being threatened by US nukes stationed on South Korean soil and in the face of a continuing threat posed by offshore submarine-launched nukes.²⁸ Finally, it came in the immediate aftermath of the unprovoked attack by the US on a disarmed Iraq.

The lesson that nationalists would draw from this cowardly international crime seems obvious.

1. “S. Korean soldier found dead in Iraq killed himself, Army says,” Yonhap News, 4 June 2007.
2. Independence Hall of Korea
3. General Contents of SOFA and All Ancillary Documents
4. Statement by 73 organizations, “We Demand a Full Revision of the R.O.K.-Status of Forces Agreement,” in Korean Truth Commission, Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea: 1945-2001 (New York: 2001), 18-1.
5. Civil Network for a Peaceful Korea, “Statistics on Crimes Committed by US Troops in south Korea,” in Korean Truth Commission, op. cit., 19-3. The Embassy of the United States Seoul-Korea contends that there is a common misperception that the US “has jurisdiction over every SOFA-status person who commits a crime. In 2001, 82% of all crimes committed by USFK personnel in Korea were subject to Korean jurisdiction. This high percentage confirms our respect for Korean sovereignty and judicial processes.” U.S. Policy and Issues, “U.S. Military Courts-Martial Fact Sheet.”
6. Statement by 73 organizations, op. cit.: 18-1.
7. Y Jung Sung-ki, “ROK, US to Exercise Separate Military Commands,” Korean Times, 21-22 October 2006: 2.
8. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005): 472.
9. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: The New Press, 2004).
10. Ho Jong Ho, Kang Sok Hui, and Pak Thae Ho, The US Imperialists Started the Korean War (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993).
11. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, op. cit., 238.
12. Ibid, 186.
13. Ibid, 187.
14. Ibid, 187-188.
15. Lee Wha Rang, “Who was Yo Un-hyung? (Part I),” Association for Asian Research, 20 February 2004.
16. Lee Wha Rang, “Who was Yo Un-hyung? (Part 2),” Association for Asian Research, 1 March 2004.
17. Thomas Donnelly, Donald Kagan, and Gary Schmitt, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” (Washington, DC: The Project for a New American Century, September 2000): 18-19. It should be noted that the Bill Clinton administration had a similar view to PNAC, as then secretary-of-defense [sic] William Perry sought DPRK leader Kim Jong Il’s agreement to the long-term stationing of US forces on the Korean peninsula. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Basic Books, 2001): 437.
18. Oberdorfer, op. cit., 376-382.
19. Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, op. cit., 221.
20. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publishing, 2006). Regarding the term “ethnic cleansing,” see Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide: Linguistic Honesty is Better with a Clear Conscience,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
21. Breaking News, “Foxman: Ki-moon understands Israel’s plight,” JTA News, 6 April 2007.
22. “UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is flown by Israeli military helicopter over central Israel and the Israel-West Bank defense barrier,” DEBKAfile, 29 March 2007.
23. Hilary Leila Krieger, “Israel favors Ki-Moon to replace Annan,” Jerusalem Post, 3 October 2006.
24. Oberdorfer, op. cit., 64-65.
25. Ramsay Clark, “Indictment for Offenses Committed by the Government of the United States of America against the People of Korea, 1945-2001,” in Korean Truth Commission, op. cit., v.
26. Oberdorfer, op. cit., described it as “a deluge of biblical proportions,” (p. 370) and, as a comparison, over a year later, New Orleans still suffers from the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina.
27. Oberdorfer, op. cit., 396. The percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending by the DPRK is reportedly the highest in the world. “Korean People’s Army,” Wikipedia.
28. Bruce Cumings, North Korea, op. cit., 125.