THE SINS OF THE FATHER

The conventional wisdom is that Kim Jong Un is a dangerous psychopath on an insane mission to obtain nuclear weapons.  It is undeniable that he is very dangerous and he definitely is determined to get nuclear weapons.  A nuclear armed North Korea would constitute a risk that no President could ignore.  However, when evaluating him, it is important to realize that the history of the Korean War looks very different to us than it does to Kim Jong Un.  Our version of the Korean War is that North Korea attacked South Korea.  South Korea was quickly over-run.  Douglas McArthur saved our bacon and turned things completely around.  He routed the North Korean Army all the way to the border with China.  China invaded North Korea and pushed us back to the DMZ.  While there is a cease fire, technically the war never ended.

The part that most Americans do not realize is that during the war the United States soon established air supremacy by destruction of North Korean aircraft in the air and on the ground.  The U.S. Far East Air Forces (FEAF) used B29 bombers to conduct massive aerial assaults on transport centers, industrial hubs and to some extent cities.  In November 1950 FEAF began an intensive firebombing campaign that incinerated multiple North Korean cities:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Bombing_of_North_Korea_1950-1953

A report by an international fact finding mission from East Germany, West Germany, China and the Netherlands stated: “The members in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed and there were very few undamaged villages.”

The following article provides estimates of the Korean War Casualties.

https://www.shmoop.com/korean-war/statistics.html

These estimates are probably too low, particularly with regard to civilian casualties in North Korea.

The point is that the government and people of North Korea experienced first-hand the impact of a massive bombing campaign by the United States with little or no capacity for defense.  Prior to the war the population of North Korea was estimated to be 9 million.  The death toll in North Korea is estimated to be 1.5 million.  That is over three times the estimated number of deaths in South Korea.  I have seen other estimates suggesting two million civilian deaths in North Korea.  By any measure, a significant percentage of the North Korea population died during the war and many of those casualties were civilians killed by U.S. bombing raids.

We have a long history of fighting wars with massive bombing campaigns.  North Korea knows that if there is a war, the pattern will be repeated, only with even more destructive results.  North Korea reportedly has close to 1 million active troops with another 5.5 million in reserve.  They could do a lot of damage, but when Kim Jong Un says only a nuclear weapon will enable North Korea to defend itself against a super power like the United States, he actually has a point.

We also have a bad habit of changing our mind.  For example Qaddafy was told we would stop trying to remove him from power if he stopped his nuclear arms program and started helping us capture terrorists.  He kept his part of the bargain.  So did we, while Bush, was President.  Barack Obama changed his mind.  NATO bombed Libya into submission. Qaddafy was killed and Hillary Clinton gloated saying: “We came, we saw, he died.” Qaddafy is gone but Libya, by all accounts, is a total mess. Many people argue that removing Saddam Hussein was also a huge mistake, but at least Saddam Hussein was considered a threat to us.  No one even argues that Qaddafy was a threat to the U.S.  He just paid a terrible price for trusting us.

While we would be insane to trust Kim Jong Un, one could argue that he would be equally insane to trust us.  Perhaps we can put him in a position where we can make him an offer he can’t afford to turn down.  So far that hasn’t come close to working.  Every day there is a delay we are one day closer to the point of no return.  If we wait until he is capable of hitting us with a nuclear weapon, we will have waited too long.

A lot of people are forgetting something very important.  Donald Trump is President of the United States and he has a duty to defend us.  When you undermine his credibility, particularly to our enemies, you put us all at risk.  They used to say that politics stopped at our borders.  Unfortunately, that is far from true today.  I don’t know if Donald Trump or anyone else can fix this.  I do know that if the main stream media continues their daily attempts to discredit him it will be increasingly difficult to even imagine a good outcome. If Kim Jong Un believes the main stream media reports that Trump is a liar who cannot be trusted, then the situation moves from hopeless to beyond hopeless.  If that happens the only predictable outcome is that the main stream media will blame everything on Donald Trump.

TDM