How to End
the Korea Crisis
By Ron Paul
September
25, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The descent of US/North Korea “crisis” to the
level of schoolyard taunts should be remembered as
one of the most bizarre, dangerous, and disgraceful
chapters in US foreign policy history.
President Trump, who holds the lives of millions of
Koreans and Americans in his hands, has taken to
calling the North Korean dictator “rocket man on a
suicide mission.” Why? To goad him into launching
some sort of action to provoke an American response?
Maybe the US president is not even going to wait for
that. We remember from the Tonkin Gulf false flag
that the provocation doesn’t even need to be real.
We are in extremely dangerous territory and Congress
for the most part either remains asleep or is
cheering on the sabre-rattling.
Now we have North Korean threats to detonate
hydrogen bombs over the Pacific Ocean and US threats
to “totally destroy” the country.
We are told that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is
a “madman.” That’s just what they said about Saddam,
Gaddafi, Assad, and everyone else the neocons target
for US military action. to the benefit of the
neocons and the military industrial complex.
Where are the cooler heads in Washington to tone
down this war footing?
Making matters worse, there is very little
understanding of the history of the conflict. The US
spends more on its military than the next ten or so
countries combined, with thousands of nuclear
weapons that can destroy the world many times over.
Nearly 70 years ago a US-led attack on Korea led to
mass destruction and the death of nearly 30 percent
of the North Korean population. That war has not yet
ended.
Why hasn’t a peace treaty been signed? Newly-elected
South Korean president Moon Jae-in has proposed
direct negotiations with North Korea leading to a
peace treaty. The US does not favor such a bilateral
process. In fact, the US laughed off a perfectly
sensible offer made by the Russians and Chinese,
with the agreement of the North Koreans, for a
“double freeze” – the North Koreans would suspend
missile launches if the US and South Korea suspend
military exercises aimed at the overthrow of the
North Korean government.
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So
where are there cooler heads? Encouragingly,
they are to be found in South Korea, which would
surely suffer massively should a war break out.
While US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki
Haley, was bragging that the new UN sanctions
against North Korea would result in a
near-complete blockade of the country (an act of
war), the South Korean government did something
last week that shocked the world: it announced
an eight million dollar humanitarian aid package
for pregnant mothers and infant children in
North Korea. The US and its allies are furious
over the move, but how could anyone claim the
mantle of “humanitarianism” while imposing
sanctions that aim at starving civilians until
they attempt an overthrow of their government?
Here’s how to solve the seven-decade old crisis:
pull all US troops out of North Korea; end all
military exercises on the North Korean border;
encourage direct talks between the North and
South and offer to host or observe them with an
international delegation including the Russians
and Chinese, which are after all Korea’s
neighbors.
The schoolyard insults back and forth between
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un are not funny. They
are in fact an insult to all of the rest of us!
Copyright
© 2017 by RonPaul Institute
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