Jefe's House

Now that Hillary Clinton is beating the drums of war and calling on the entire world to rise to its “duty” to respond to North Korea’s supposed attack on a South Korean warship and the murder of 46 crew, a flood of frightening analogies and comparisons come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is strikingly similar to how US involvement in Vietnam began in 1964: with a false attack attributed to North Vietnam against the US warship Maddox, then exploited as a real attack by LBJ.  By the rules of our SETO treaty this “attack” gave Lyndon Johnson the legal greenlight he needed to take military action in Southeast Asia.

Is South Korea’s Cheonan to USS Maddox as North Korea’s “torpedo sub” is to North Vietnam’s nonexistent Tonkin ghost ships of ’64? Let’s hope not.

The recent events surrounding North Korea also call to mind how Bill Clinton found a way to win the world’s approval to remove mega-mobster Milosevic from power by having NATO bomb Europe (and, by the way, use depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo even after he promised not to do so — way to “help” the Kosovo Albanians) by citing the faked massacre of 45 Albanian civilians (actually KLA soldiers killed during a firefight) by Yugoslav police at Racak, Kosovo in 1999. The American public swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Of course, neither Democrat Lyndon Johnson nor Democrat Bill Clinton have anything on Republican George W. Bush’s trickery to get us into an oil war in Iraq, ostensibly to remove Saddam from power and “help” the Iraqi civilians but at the loss of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians’ lives.

Have Hillary and Obama learned from these masters how best to position a US — I mean South Korean (right) — bombing run into North Korea to get rid of the latest Milosevic, Kim Jong Il? We’ll soon find out. I hope I’m wrong.

Sure KJI is evil and crazy, but let’s hope our aggressive rhetoric of late won’t result in hundreds of thousands of dead North Korean civilians we’re supposedly liberating from oppression, over a relative handful of dead South Korean soldiers.

Hillary’s lustily rattling her sabre, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak is cocking his rifle, and our big trade partner Red China is pretending to be on the fence but leaning heavily toward siding with the US.   The North Korean leadership is just as full of hype as the rest of these players but they’re still calling this whole mess a “wild provocation.” Are they right? If they did torpedo the ship then why be bashful about it? Something’s not right here.

I had to look elsewhere to find out some apparently objective facts beyond all the hype and rhetoric coming from the the West and its flunkies via our mainstream media. The following is culled from South Korea-based pro-democracy news organization NKnet, the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights –

Despite North Korea’s rhetoric that “all communication links between North and South Korea are severed,” and “the North-South Economic Cooperation Council Office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex is being frozen and abolished, and all South Korean workers are to be immediately deported,” … the North Korean military authorities granted entrance to the Kaesong Complex for South Korean personnel this morning. Movement into and out of the Kaesong Complex is continuing normally, while fixed line telephones connecting the Kaesong Industrial Complex and parent corporations in South Korea are operating without any problems, too. This appears to display North Korea’s underlying desire to continue operating the Kaesong Industrial Complex.”

These don’t seem like the actions of a small country eager to go to war against the US, Japan, China and South Korea.

It seems no one over in this hemisphere, in our government or in our media, is interested in reporting such hopeful signs that this will be resolved peacefully. Why is that the case?  It’s more fun, and more lucrative, to beat the drums of war.

Something’s up, y’all.

[photo via infowars.com]