This has been a week of sobering political news, to be sure. The gradual implosion of the institutional republican party continued apace, their preferred candidate falling into a deep hole that I suspect neither Mitt Romney nor an MSNBC town hall can pull him out of. Far more disturbing was various pieces of news from overseas: the heightened war of words on the Korean peninsula, the continued saber-rattling over Iran, and a strike in Somalia that killed 150 “terrorists”, though no one is quite sure who these people were.
Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North’s leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our joint exercises with Seoul, which amounts to a massive mock-invasion of North Korea. Given our troubled history with Pyongyang (and the memory of a war that cost 3 million Korean lives), you might think we would try to err on the side of diplomacy. North Korea wants direct bilateral talks with us because we are their principal adversary. They are not a direct threat to us, but they can do a lot of damage to Seoul, so for the sake of all those people we should ratchet down this conflict now.
With respect to Iran, I am going to set aside whatever they claim to have scrawled on the outside of their test missiles (incendiary as it is, it only makes me think of the racist crap IDF soldiers wrote on the walls of destroyed Palestinian elementary schools during the second Intifada). The reporting on the facts of their test launch is instructive. The missiles are not nuclear-capable, so they are not covered by the recent agreement – this was acknowledged in press reports. The expectation of the Security Council, we are told, is that Iran will not test missiles, but they are not “bound” by that expectation. So why the hair on fire? Why should they be the only power in the world not to test their weapons? I think that’s the reason why they led the story with the stuff written on the outside.
Regarding the 150 killed in Somalia, I’m trying to imagine how this gets Somalia closer to peace. But then … that was never the objective in Somalia. Imperial utility is more what we were looking for when we started intervening there in a big way during the late Carter administration – a convenient replacement for Iran.
All I can tell you is that it’s likely only to get worse after this coming election. Unless we vote and stay engaged. You heard it here.
luv u,
jp
