Replies to post #2090 on Foreign Correspondence

[otraque]

Stephanie V. originally posted this Molly Ivins article i have added comments , as i see this as worse than we think.
Clueless People Love Bush

By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on October 26, 2004, Printed on October 26, 2004

Oh, you sweet, innocent, carefree citizens in non-swing states. You have no idea how much fun and slime you are missing.

In the swingers, wolves stalk us mercilessly (as the pro-wolf lobby points out indignantly, no one has ever been killed by wolves on U.S. soil, but try arguing that in the face of the relentless new TV ad campaign). Breaking news everywhere - 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq left unattended, stock market down to year's low, leading economic indicators down, more tragedy in Iraq, the Swift Boat Liars are back, more Halliburton scandal, George Tenet says the war in Iraq is "wrong" - it feels like you're dodging meteorites here in the Final Days.

Actually, the best evidence suggests we need to slow way down and go way back, because far from being able to take in anything new, it turns out many of our fellow citizens, especially Bush supporters, are stuck like bugs in amber in some early misperceptions that have never been cleared up.

It seems the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and even to 9/11, and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows ...

But everybody doesn't know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn't know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is STILL spreading this same misinformation.

Both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein "had a relationship" with al Qaeda or "has long-established ties to al Qaeda." He makes this claim up to the present day. The 9/11 Commission, however, found that there was "no collaborative relationship" between the two.

Cheney, of course, also has never given up his touching faith that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, recently referring to a "nuclear" program that had in fact been abandoned shortly after the first Gulf War. Bush and Cheney misled the country into war using these two false premises, and it turns out an enormous number of our fellow citizens still believe both of them to be true. It's not because they're stupid, but because an administration they trust is still telling them both phony propositions are true. (-edit--i disagree here, I believe her concept of CULT is dead on, rather than it a seems like a cult; it is a cult.. They OBEDIENTLY still believe because they slavishly given over their minds to Bush is in the Whitehouse by the will of G-d, he is good, and democrats are evil; that is all they need in their decision making. I have said all along this is the most dangerous movement in the entire history of the United States and can NOT be underestimated---Bernadette had a nightmarish visit with her sister in Allentown Pennsylvania--she was accused as being evil for going to vote for Kerry by her sister and her husband that have recently been "born again"----the relationship with her sister is over--more families will be tearing apart overtime---if Kerry wins i have suggested there be millions that will willingly view Kerry as anti-christ---there will be violence in our country whovever wins, imo. Only in the Civil War was this country more divided)

Normally, when you get a situation like that - where people are simply not acknowledging reality - it is considered a cult, a form of groupthink based on irrational beliefs propagated by what is normally a charismatic leader.(edit: Molly should say outright IT IS a Cult rather than seeming like a cult,imo.) So those Kerry volunteers earnestly engaging Bush supporters on the latest outrage are way off base. They need to go all the way back to the Two Great Lies that got us into this: Many American soldiers marching into Iraq believed it was "payback for 9/11."

A third slightly blinding fact (to me) is that more people now think Kerry behaved shamefully in regards to Vietnam than did W. Bush. Incredible what brazen lying will do, isn't it?

A friend of Bush's dad got him into the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, a unit packed with the sons of the privileged trying to stay out of Vietnam, and he failed to complete his service there. Kerry is a genuine, bona fide war hero. The men who served on his boat are supporting him for president, but those who didn't serve with him, who weren't there, who don't know what happened, have been given more credence. Wolves will get you!

In further unhappy evidence of how ill-informed the American people are (blame the media), the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Bush supporters consistently ill-informed about Bush's stands on the issues (Kerry-ans, by contrast, are overwhelmingly right about his positions). Eighty-seven percent of Bush supporters think he favors putting labor and environmental standards into international trade agreements. Eighty percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning landmines. Seventy-six percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. Sixty-two percent believe Bush would participate in the International Criminal Court. Sixty-one percent believe Bush wants to participate in the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Fifty-three percent does not believe Bush is building a missile defense system, a.k.a. "Star Wars."

The only two Bush stands the majority of his supporters got right were on increasing defense spending and who should write the new Iraqi constitution.

Kerry supporters, by contrast, know their man on seven out of eight issues, with only 43 percent understanding he wants to keep defense spending the same but change how the money is spent, and 57 percent believing he wants to up it.

So what's going on here? I do not think Kerry people are smarter than Bush people, so why are they better-informed? Maybe a small percentage of ideological right wingers don't believe anything the Establishment media say, but I don't think this is a matter of not believing what they hear, but of not hearing what's factual.

The great triumph of the political right in this country has been the creation of a network of alternative media. There are people who listen to Rush Limbaugh for more hours every day than the Branch Davidians listened to David Koresh. Watch Fox News, read The Washington Times - hey, that's what the Bush administration does, according to its own words.

But it's not just the right wing media purveying lies - they are quoting the administration. These misimpressions come directly from the Bush administration, still, over and over.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute.

[Amaunet]

Russia’s Pacific Fleet Practices for Bush’s Pacific War

In the Pacific Theatre Southeast Asia will be a crucial component of Bush’s world war.
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The Chinese press has slammed the US military exercises, with the leading People's Daily outlining a perceived US plan to build up a line of defense in the Western Pacific that starts with Japan and extends down China's coastline through Taiwan and the Philippines.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2004/07/12/2003178661
#msg-3486693


-Am

Russian Nuclear Sub Successfully Launches ICBM
Created: 02.11.2004 14:27 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 14:27 MSK, 2 hours 37 minutes ago


MosNews


A nuclear-powered submarine of Russia’s Pacific Fleet carried out a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk on Tuesday, the Itar-Tass news agency reports.

The Svyatoi Georgiy Pobedonosets (St. George the Victor) submarine launched the missile from underwater in the direction of the Chizha testing area in Novaya Zemlya, a source in the Russian Defense Ministry has told the agency. The missile’s warhead successfully reached the target at the scheduled time, the source said.

Tuesday’s ballistic missile launch was the first in the Pacific Fleet this year. So far only missile-armed submarines of the Northern Fleet have been involved in mock-combat launches. They have carried out five successful tests of sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles.

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/11/02/missilelaunch.shtml

[Amaunet]

Seoul rows against the US tide
By David Scofield

November 24, 2004

When it comes to North Korea and defusing its nuclear crisis, the United States is finding that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who wants to be friends with North Korea, is becoming increasingly obstructionist. US neo-conservatives want to play hard ball, very hard ball, with Pyongyang, and say South Korea is too soft. Who's side is Seoul on, anyhow? they ask.

Roh made clear just how soft - and infuriating to the US - his policy is when he addressed the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on his way to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Chile. Roh, never one to mince words, stunned many in the audience of foreign-policy experts with his assertion that the central argument underpinning North Korea's nuclear-weapons program - that it is a necessary defense in the face of hostility and threat - is not entirely illogical. But it was a shocking, if frank, pronouncement, to be sure.

Neo-cons are arguing that the US needs to be a lot tougher with North Korea, assuming that all efforts to date in "six-party talks" are going nowhere fast. What is needed, they say, is to plan for economic sanctions or an embargo and at least to plan for military strikes, in hopes these moves will bring Pyongyang to its senses. Conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute Nicholas Eberstadt said in an interview with the Seoul Shinmin two weeks ago that "we've come to doubt whether South Korea is sincerely interested in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula".

Last Friday, US General Leon J Laporte, the current commander of US troops in Korea, responded in kind by reiterating that there was a very real threat of fissile-material proliferation from "cash-strapped" North Korea. But the restatement of the wider threat is an argument South Koreans have heard many times before, its resonance having faded among most of them in recent years.

The "Korean problem", many now believe, is for Koreans to solve.

Every declaration between North and South dating back to the 1972 Basic Agreement, the first joint communique between the two Koreas, has firmly and unequivocally defined the issue of national division as something to be resolved "independent" of foreign involvement.

Issues of wider security and potential regional instability are peripheral to most Koreans. South Korea is not a nation with a strong vision of the world beyond its frontiers. Yes, it's a major exporting power, and yes, the world beyond, most would at least partially agree, is vital to South Korea's prosperity and perhaps stability, but when matters turn to the North, another truth emerges. For most, the North Korea "threat" is so much detritus from a bygone era, a political machination by anachronistically conservative political forces.

Primarily, Korean identity is a product of ethnicity, a perceived homogeneity that binds the Korean nation. Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone believe their culture and ethnicity is sui generis , a unique product of 4,000 years of shared history. This historical connection, the "one blood, one nation" identity, has been a central tenet of political rhetoric in both Koreas for more than 50 years. But since division, political ideology exclusive to both North and South has been woven into the fabric of ethnic identity, and it is these competing political ideologies from which the past half-century of quasi-peace stems.

Political structures (hierarchies) in both Koreas have long espoused the ethnic singularity of Korea while positing their political ideology and political structure as the vessel that captures and protects true "Koreaness". Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first president, refused to sign the 1953 armistice, instead insisting on US support for a march on the North to vanquish the communists and unify the peninsula, a march which never came about. South Korea's third president, Park Chun Hee, the one most closely associated with unprecedented economic growth and development from 1961-79, articulated an ideology of "anti-communism" with implicit reference to the protection of ethnic Korea. The North's Marxist ideologues, he proclaimed, were anti-Confucian, and as such anti-Korean.

North Korea, for its part, portrays the southern half of the Korean Peninsula as a territory of supplicants, puppets of the American imperialists. Nam-Chosun, or South Korea, being little more than a proxy of the US, a nation bent on the destruction and subordination of all Korea.

Given the underlying ethnic homogeneity acknowledged throughout Korea, politically crafted identities designed to position one political ideology as the natural embodiment of ethnic Korea, while at the same time undermining the political legitimacy of the other, is to be expected. But policy successes in South Korea have led to a softening of the image and threat of the North among large swaths of South Korean society, prompting a radical rethink of the past 50 years of "political" division.

A recent online poll conducted in conjunction with one of South Korea's newest online news websites, the Frontier Times, indicates that about 20% of Koreans surveyed believe the South should ally with the North in the event of a US attack, with a further 30% not sure which side they should take. Of course, the specific phrasing of the question and the manner in which the poll was conducted can affect the efficacy; however, anecdotally, the numbers seem roughly consistent with what is felt on the ground in South Korea: most specifically, the undecided 30%.

So how does all this affect the growing nuclear crisis in North Korea and the credibility of the six-party talks? South Korea's "see no evil" policy toward North Korea makes any attempt at regional coercion and pressure incomplete as the South continues to let it be known that punishment is not a component of the engagement package. Finding a regional solution to an issue Roh's administration perceives as intrinsically bilateral is unlikely. The six parties are North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US. The next round has not been scheduled since North Korea protested that South Korea's secret nuclear experiments in the past must be thoroughly investigated, but it is well known that Kim Jong-il was hoping for a John Kerry presidential win in the United States, and was postponing the talks until after the elections, convinced that the atmosphere would be more convivial and flexible with a Democrat in the White House.

The danger to South Korea, of course, remains since North Korea has not encouraged a similar identity shift and mitigated the political threat as has South Korea. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Pyongyang has not taken any steps to remove or reduce 50 years of political perpetuated identity ideology that underpins the system - the politically posited socially enforced belief that North Korea holds the obvious position of Korean national leadership. This was always the danger of former president Kim Dae-jung's, now Roh's, policy. When reciprocity was abandoned and unilateralism was formed into the cornerstone of the engagement process, the impetus and motivation for North Korea to take steps in tandem with the South to remove the threat perception of the other was negated.

Today, North Korea still depicts South Korea as a puppet controlled by US imperialists. It still define itslef as the true protector and maintainer of the Korean nation. Indeed, the South Korean formula of reconciliation espoused by Kim Dae-jung and actively encouraged by Roh calls for a co-federal structure and reconciliation that is strikingly similar to North Korea's 1980 proposal for a Democratic Federal Republic of Koryo since it calls for, among other things, a removal of the National Security Law, the withdrawal of US troops, and unification free of "foreign interference".

Still, whether South Korea's policy choices are reasoned and rational from a foreign perspective is perhaps less pertinent now. South Korea has chosen the road they wish to travel, and this needs to be more fully acknowledged by the US. Indeed, President George W Bush's words of understanding in response to Roh's insistence on a "dialogue only" approach to the North Korean nuclear issue indicates that the present administration in Washington has come to "understand" South Korea's unwavering approach, though unlike South Korea the US will keep options on the table to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.

Indeed, critics of Roh's approach within South Korea feel that just focusing on the nuclear issue is not enough as, according to Kim Tae-woo, a policy expert at South Korea's Institute for Defense Analysis, "If we solve the nuclear problems by confining the agenda only to nuclear issues, than what next? Will we just tolerate the North Korean human-rights problem, missiles and chemical weapons and biological weapons? It begs the question, is it now incumbent on the US and the region to accept that the nuclear program, like other nefarious traits of the North Korea regime, may best be managed within a framework comprising those countries with security concerns and policy priorities that reach beyond the Korean peninsula; is the North Korean threat best tackled independent of South Korea?"

David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [e-mail] for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FK24Dg03.html

[Amaunet]

My take on North Korea

This isn’t really about North Korea it is about Bush’s obsession with China. The United States is purposefully sabotaging negotiations with North Korea and deploying military forces and weapons to the area which are directed primarily against China.

Clearly, ending North Korea's nuclear crisis or even eliminating "evil" is not the ultimate goal of the US. What the US really wants, and is exploiting the North Korea "crisis" to achieve, is to deploy sufficient military forces and resources in the western Pacific (especially close to Taiwan) so as to encourage Taiwan independence, thereby checking China's growth as a power that might compete with the US. Not long ago, the US and Japan were talking about using Japan's Shimoji Island as a military base. Only about 200 miles from Taiwan, Shimoji has a "runway capable of safely handling a fully loaded F-15C fighter jet", observed James Brooke in the New York Times.
#msg-4722542

To this end Cheney has effectively stalled negotiations with North Korea.

Charles Pritchard, the special envoy for talks with North Korea during president Bill Clinton's second term in office, said Cheney's volley was "deliberate".

"It certainly had an effect that many in the Bush administration would like to see and that is the cooling of the possibility of the North Koreans returning to the six party talks," he said.

"The chances of the North Koreans coming back to the talks anytime soon are now less likely," Pritchard said.

He noted that Cheney's criticism of the North Korean leader came just two weeks after US special envoy Joseph deTrani held a rare direct meeting with North Koreans asking them to return to the six-party meeting.

North Korea has boycotted the talks -- also involving China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States -- since the last round a year ago due to what it called hostile US policy.

"The stated policy of the Bush administration is to bring North Korea back to talks and precisely while the North Koreans were considering this, given the message by ambassador Joseph deTrani on May 13, the Vice-President has essentially trumped that message and it had caused the North Koreans predictably to react the way that they have," Pritchard said.
http://www.spacewar.com/2005/050602225535.tthpmpla.html

The administration has also rejected entreaties by China and South Korea, in particular, to put on the table what it might be prepared to offer if North Korea were to strike such a deal.

KEDO, a U.S.-led international consortium formed to implement a nuclear deal with North Korea, on Tuesday decided not to renew the contract of its executive director Charles Kartman, who had been a strong proponent of discussions with the North.
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200505/200505290008.html

It becomes obvious the United States is exploiting the North Korea "crisis" in order to deploy sufficient military forces and resources in the western Pacific which will strengthen Taiwan’s resolve for independence and check China.

In recent weeks, Washington also has sent 17 Stealth warplanes to South Korea as part of a series of steps to increase pressure on the North.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF04Ak01.html

In mid-April of this year, the Japanese government agreed to let the US Army's 1st Corps transfer from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama near Yokohama.

Besides the recent decision to re-deploy the 1st Corps, the US is busily building up Guam as a "power projection hub", with, in the words of Pacific Commander Admiral William Fargo, "geostrategic importance". The US is also trying to shift Guam-based bombers to Yokota airbase near Tokyo. Christopher Hughes of Warwick University, an expert on the region, told the (British) Guardian, "The ramifications of this would be that Japan would essentially serve as a frontline US command post for the Asia-Pacific and beyond."

A number of Bush administration sounding boards, such as neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer, have openly advocated Japan going nuclear as a way to offset the growing influence and power of China. Acquiring nuclear weapons would be relatively easy for Japan, which has plenty of fuel to reprocess, as well as missiles and satellite targeting systems.
#msg-6547899

In the first step toward erecting a multibillion-dollar shield to protect the United States from foreign missiles, the U.S. Navy will begin deploying state-of-the-art destroyers to patrol the waters off North Korea as early as next week.

The mission, to be conducted in the Sea of Japan by ships assigned to the Navy's 7th Fleet, will help lay the foundation for a system to detect and intercept ballistic missiles launched by "rogue nations." - Sep. 25, 2004
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-Am