American Media Are Getting People at Home Ready for War With North Korea

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 5:36 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] American Media Are Getting People at Home Ready for
War With North Korea
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


[Note:  This item comes from friend Ed DeWath.  DLH]

American Media Are Getting People at Home Ready for War With North Korea
By Matt Novak
Apr 25 2017
<
http://gizmodo.com/american-media-are-getting-people-at-home-ready-for-war-1794620783
>

Remember what it felt like a couple of months ago when you, as an American,
didn’t give much thought to North Korea? I’d like you to try and remember
that feeling over the next couple of weeks, because the US government wants
that to change. The past month has shown a tremendous shift in news
coverage about North Korea. And that’s no accident.

President Donald Trump continues to beat the drums of war, and the media
are going along with him. Trump doesn’t have any particular incentive to
bomb North Korea or advocate for regime change in the country. It’s not
even clear that Trump knows the leader of North Korea’s name. But Trump is
above all a man who likes to be liked. And so far, the actions that have
won him the most praise have been when he dropped a bunch of bombs on Syria.

Some talking heads on American TV will insist that we don’t want war. But
with a subtle shift in narrative, there comes a sense that “we,” as the
world’s police, have no other choice. Once the media talking heads get far
enough down that road, constructive criticism of potential war (both at the
dinner table and the water cooler) become loaded with questions of “well,
if you love North Korea so much, why don’t you move there?”

And just as we saw in the lead up to the second Iraq War in 2003, American
military action will begin to feel inevitable. Talks about diplomatic
options will be brushed away with “we tried that” and there will be no
other course but war.

Then come the slogans: These colors don’t run. Love it or leave it.
Liberate Iraq. Or, in this case, Liberate North Korea. And no matter how
many times you insist that while you would love to see Kim Jong-un ousted
yet don’t want to see war, you will be called a naive traitor—maybe even
that greatest of insults, unAmerican—who doesn’t understand how the real
world works.

Can North Korea strike the US?

All you need to do is open up the New York Times to see the shift in how
Americans now talk about the North Korean threat. In a story published last
night, we’re told that there’s a growing sense of urgency, with the
headline, “As North Korea Speeds Its Nuclear Program, U.S. Fears Time Will
Run Out.”

Behind the Trump administration’s sudden urgency in dealing with the North
Korean nuclear crisis lies a stark calculus: a growing body of expert
studies and classified intelligence reports that conclude the country is
capable of producing a nuclear bomb every six or seven weeks.

By the third paragraph the story is already imagining a hypothetical strike
against a US city, in a scenario that we’ve heard off and on since the late
1990s whenever it’s politically expedient:

Now those step-by-step advances have resulted in North Korean warheads that
in a few years could reach Seattle. “They’ve learned a lot,” said Siegfried
S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who directed the Los Alamos weapons
laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, from 1986 to
1997, and whom the North Koreans have let into their facilities seven times.

And it wouldn’t be the last time that the article cites this outrageous
hypothetical that North Korea could strike US cities. The New York Times
even drops in the possibility of North Korea hitting New York “one day.”

Unless something changes, North Korea’s arsenal may well hit 50 weapons by
the end of Mr. Trump’s term, about half the size of Pakistan’s. American
officials say the North already knows how to shrink those weapons so they
can fit atop one of its short- to medium-range missiles — putting South
Korea and Japan, and the thousands of American troops deployed in those two
nations, within range. The best estimates are that North Korea has roughly
1,000 ballistic missiles in eight or so varieties.

But fulfilling Mr. Kim’s dream — putting a nuclear weapon atop an
intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach Seattle or Los Angeles,
or one day New York — remains a more complex problem.

[snip]

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