Monday, September 18, 2017

Korea --- A Settlement? Very Possible, Highly Unlikely, But....

 
By Steven Jonas

North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons and its right to maintain them, indefinitely. After all, if the three states that have not signed the Nucelar Non-Proliferation Treaty , India, Pakistan, and Israel, can have them, why not North Korea? The excuses for India and Pakistan are primarily each other, for Israel, its size and its geographical isolation. For North Korea, the reason is a rather different one. Rather, it is reasons. Let me count (some of) them: North Korea (1950-53), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954), Hungary (attempted, 1956), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973), (Afghanistan, 1978-86), Nicaragua (partial, 1980s), the Soviet Union (which, despite having nuclear weapons, succumbed to the 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union, 1917-1992), Iraq (2003), Cuba (since 1961, unsuccessful, but still trying), (Iran, presently, still trying), Libya (2012), Venezuela (2017: http://www.globalresearch.ca/large-scale-manoeuvres-encircling-venezuela/5607619 ). And so on and so forth. 

This is a partial list of countries in which the U.S. has attempted, often but not always with success, what is politely called "regime change." The interventions have ranged from the frank overthrow of a freely elected government (Iran, 1953), to direct military invasion of a supposedly "threatening" military dictatorship which, however, presented no threat to the United States other than what was put out in the government propaganda of the time (Iraq, 2003).

It happens that it was the U.S. that created the two Koreas. As World War II was coming to a close, the Soviet Union was poised to invade Japan and its then colonial possession, Korea, on August 8, 1945. One motivation for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) was to foreclose the possibility that the Red Army would establish a foothold on Japanese territory (the first landings were to be on the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido) and would quickly take over the whole of the Korean Peninsula.

With the forestalling of the Soviet invasion, U.S. personnel quickly were moved to Korea. Before they arrived in September, in Washington a young U.S. colonel, one Dean Rusk, looked at a map and decided that a line dividing Korea in two, one a "Soviet" zone, and the other a "U.S." zone, would a) be a good idea, and b) would be [arbitrarily] drawn at the 38thparallel. (With this sort of action, Dean Rusk, an army colonel at the time, was obviously preparing for his much bigger role in preparing and perpetuating the War on Viet Nam.) 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: OpEdNews.com 

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