Courting Doom with North Korea
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- Date: 10 Jul 2006 23:00:20 GMT
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Courting Doom with North Korea
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
CounterPunch - Jul 10, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07102006.html
Courting Doom:
Whack North Korea, Before It Can Protect Itself?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Finding itself in Republican sights and with no Democratic power
center to offer protection, National Public Radio is turning into an
upscale version of Fox "News." Nevertheless, information still gets
out if the listener is sufficiently attentive.
On July 5, NPR's "All Things Considered" interviewed two warmongers
for their views on the North Korean missile test. One was Ashton
Carter, a Clinton administration Assistant Secretary of Defense, now
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The other was
Ambassador Christopher Hill, an Assistant Secretary of State in the
Bush regime.
The Clinton DOD assistant secretary is coauthor of a recent article
advocating an unilateral US military attack on North Korea. HIs first
pitch on NPR was that the whole region, not just the US, is threatened
by North Korea and that everyone should gang up on North Korea to make
them behave. The NPR interviewer asked Carter to reconcile his
multilateralism with his own recommendation for the US to unilaterally
attack North Korea. Carter replied that North Korea's missile was
developed to attack us, so we had to protect ourselves.
When the NPR interviewer asked Carter why deterrence would fail with
North Korea when deterrence succeeded in the case of the more powerful
Soviet Union, Carter agreed that North Korea was not sufficiently
insane to launch an attack on the US. So, if the US is not in danger
of being attacked by North Korea, why does Carter want to attack North
Korea?
The answer is, well, you see, if we permit North Korea to develop any
weapon with which they might be able to stand up to us on some issue
critical to North Korea, well, they might not do as we want them to
do. Carter could not conceive of a world in which any country existed
that might be able to behave differently than the US dictates.
Ambassador Hill agreed, but he came at it in a different way. Hill's
view is that it is China's, Japan's, and South Korea's responsibility
to make North Korea behave as the US wants it to behave. Both Hill and
Carter agreed that no country, with the exception of Israel, has a
right to any interests of its own unless it is an interest that
coincides with US interests. No other interest is legitimate.
Listening to the pair of hegemonic maniacs, I realized that the US is
the new Rome--there is no legitimate power but us. Any other power is
a potential threat to our interests and must be eliminated before it
gets any independent ideas. The US, however, is far more dangerous
than Rome. Rome saw its world as the Mediterranean and, for a while,
Northern Europe, but the US thinks the whole world is its oyster. The
Bush regime is busy trying to marginalize Russia, and neocons are
preparing war plans to attack China before that country can achieve
military parity with the US.
Gentle reader, consider what it means when our government believes
other countries have no right to their own interests unless they
coincide with US interests. It means that we are the tyrant country.
We cannot be the tyrant country without being perceived as the tyrant
country. Consequently, the rest of the world unites against us.
How is the US, which has spent three years proving that it cannot
successfully occupy Iraq, a small country of only 25 million people,
going to control India, China, Russia, Europe, Africa and South
America?
It's not going to happen.
What it does mean is that the US government in its hubris and delusion
is going to continue starting wars and attacking other countries until
a coalition of greater forces smashes us. Even among our European
allies we are already perceived as the greatest threat to world peace
and stability.
Our power is not what it once was. We are weak in manufacturing and
dependent on China for advanced technology products. We are dependent
on China to finance our wars, our budget and trade deficits. How long
will China accommodate us when China reads about Bush's plans to
prevent China from achieving military parity?
The Bush regime thinks that it can have every country under its thumb.
Neocons are fond of proclaiming that it is a unipolar world in which
the US is supreme. This is a fantasy, and it is rapidly becoming a
nightmare.
[Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He
is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.]
*
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