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Vol. 81/No. 14 April 10, 2017
(front page)
US gov’t escalates threats on N. Korea
BY SETH GALINSKY
Washington has escalated its threats against North Korea at the same
time as U.S. forces are engaged in provocative Operation Foal Eagle
military exercises in the area with thousands of South Korean troops.
These moves pose the danger of military clashes on the Korean Peninsula
and in the region.
“Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended,”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters March 17 on a visit to
Seoul, a not-so-veiled threat of U.S. military action. “All options are
on the table.”
Washington demands the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea get rid of
its nuclear weapons and cease all efforts to build intercontinental
missiles that could threaten the U.S.
Tillerson cynically added, “North Korea has nothing to fear from the
United States.” But the U.S. has some 28,000 troops stationed
permanently in South Korea and another 49,000 in Japan.
Two days later Tillerson went to China. A key part of his discussions
with Chinese officials was Washington’s push to get Beijing to press
harder against Pyongyang.
The war talk is not just hype. The U.S. Army recently sent 100 Mine
Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles to South Korea that could be used in
any attempt to cross the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone into the North.
These moves come on top of increasingly draconian economic sanctions
designed to deepen the hardships on working people in the North.
In the midst of the U.S.-South Korean war games, the Pentagon announced
it has begun stationing a new generation of attack drones in the South
that are capable of staying in the air for 24 hours, equipped with
Hellfire missiles.
Washington also began deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense,
or THAAD, anti-missile system in South Korea — a decision made under the
Barack Obama administration — despite strong protests from Beijing,
which see it as also aimed at China.
Simultaneously with Operation Foal Eagle, Japanese military forces
joined the U.S. and South Korean navies in large-scale drills off the
Korean coast.
The Trump administration’s shift has bipartisan support. A March 22
editorial in the Washington Post, which has published daily attacks on
Trump and his supporters, congratulated the White House on its
belligerent stance toward Pyongyang.
The Trump administration has “properly focused on what may be the
biggest single threat it inherited: the manic pursuit by the regime of
Kim Jong Un of nuclear warheads and the capacity to launch them at the
continental United States,” the editorial said. “The new administration
is starting with the most sensible opening steps — a strong effort to
enlist China, as well as other nations, in a new campaign of pressure.”
Under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Washington has
tried to paint Pyongyang as the aggressor and a rogue nation. George W.
Bush included the North in his infamous “axis of evil” speech in 2002,
along with Tehran and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. The next year
Washington invaded and occupied Iraq.
Decades of U.S. aggression
Tillerson turned history on its head claiming it is Pyongyang that has
broken previous agreements and that Washington wants a “nuclear-free
peninsula.”
And the U.S. rulers seem oblivious to the added insult of joint
maneuvers with Japanese forces during this year’s war games. For four
decades prior to World War II Japanese imperialist forces occupied
Korea, suppressed teaching the Korean language and history in school,
banned Korean-language newspapers, and arrested or killed tens of
thousands of workers and farmers.
Korean workers and farmers took advantage of the defeat of the Japanese
army to advance their fight for independence. Washington blocked the
fight, landing troops in the south in September 1945 and, with the
agreement of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, dividing the country in two.
By 1948 Washington had crushed the rebellion in the south in blood and
imposed the Syngman Rhee dictatorship. North of Korea’s 38th parallel,
the workers and peasants took power and organized a deep-going agrarian
reform, expropriated landlords and capitalists and carried out other
social measures.
War broke out on June 25, 1950. The U.S. military drove the northern
Korean forces back, virtually to the Chinese border. The new Chinese
government, which until then had given little aid to Korea, poured a
million volunteer soldiers into the war.
Washington and its “blue hat” United Nations allies utilized carpet
bombing with napalm and other weapons of mass destruction that reduced
cities to rubble, but was unable to defeat the North. The war ended in a
stalemate in 1953 — the first military defeat for U.S. imperialism. Some
3 million Korean civilians, half a million North Korean soldiers,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers, and 100,000 South Korean
and U.N. soldiers, including 54,000 from the United States, were dead.
A large majority of Koreans on both sides of the border support
reunification.
While the cease-fire remains in place, the U.S. government refuses to
sign a peace treaty with North Korea to formally end the war. Is it any
wonder that the government of the DPRK and its people are suspicious of
Washington’s intentions?
But North Korea is not without defenses. Pyongyang has the
fourth-largest army in the world, as many as 200,000 special forces,
10,000 artillery pieces and nuclear weapons based underground that could
hit Seoul as well as U.S. military bases anywhere in South Korea.
Any preemptive strike by Washington on Pyongyang — as Tillerson says is
“on the table” — would not be capable of destroying all of North Korea’s
nuclear weapons. The chance they could launch a response against Seoul —
with over 25 million people in the metropolitan area, half the country’s
population — is high.
Related articles:
US wars in Syria, Iraq take deadly toll on working people
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