by B. R. GOWANI
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and former NBA star Dennis Rodman watch North Korean and U.S. players in an exhibition basketball game at an arena in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013. PHOTO/Jason Mojica,AP/VICE Media/CBS
The “we” vs “them” game is played by those who have some hideous agenda to execute. The assumption is always that “we” are the wise, sane, humane, democratic people who play by the rules and are fair in our dealings. On the other hand, it is taken as an absolute truth that “they” are foolish, insane inhumane, dictatorial, who don’t believe in rules and have no sense of fairness.
The rule for branding with a “they” label is very simple: irrespective of democratic or dictatorial tendency of “they”, the label is affixed to anyone who, for any number of reasons, refuses to obey the orders issued by Washington DC.
At present, it is North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un who is occupying the most prominent place on the US radar of mad men. Thomas E. Donilon, the White House national security adviser, said that the United States “refuses to reward bad North Korean behavior.” The badness on part of N. Korea is its scrapping of the 1953 armistice agreement. The two reasons given by it are the US/South Korean refusal to stop military exercises on the N. Korea/S. Korea border because it sees those drills as a prelude to an invasion.
The other reason is the US refusal to accord a nuclear power status to N. Korea, which already has nuclear weapons. The US reason for not accepting N. Korea as a nuclear power is that “it seeks to develop a nuclear-armed missile that can target the United States.” Currently, the range of N. Korean nuclear weapons is in hundreds of miles.
Many in the mainstream news media views N. Korea as the villain and the US as the poor little innocent target of that country. One of them is Ernesto Londoño. Writing in the Washington Post, he accuses that “Kim has put the Korean Peninsula and Washington on a war footing.”
But the problem with this reasoning is that the US has been on a war footing in the Korean Peninsula for a long long time-since the beginning of the 1950s. (Prior to and since its birth, the US has been warring.) The US armed forces have been in S. Korea since that time. The number of US armed forces in S. Korea at present is about 29,000.
The threats issued by Kim Jong Un against the United States have a zero potency. The world’s only Super Power, without any moral compulsions against indulging in terrorism, is sitting on your border. The only thing you can do is to issue empty threats. It has no meaning.
Dennis Rodman, talking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, said:
“He [Kim Jong Un] wants Obama to do one thing: Call him.” “He said, ‘If you can, Dennis – I don’t want [to] do war. I don’t want to do war.’ He said that to me.”
Even if he wants to do war, he can’t afford to do. For him, it will be a loss of power, and invasion and destruction of his country. Its’ just that he needs some recognition from Washington DC and the US financial aid. And the matter will be over in no time.
But the United States is no mood to talk.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com