The so-called “Ulchi-Freedom Guardian” war games, an exercise involving tens of thousands of US and South Korean troops, are to get underway tomorrow–curiously on the same day a major solar eclipse will slice across the US.
The war games will see forces deployed on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Sputnik has published an article on the games that includes a quote from the North Korean news site Rondong Simmun. Here is a bit from the Russian report:
The Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises set to start on Monday, plus the new sanctions on North Korea by the US and the UN, are making things worse instead of easing tensions on the peninsula, the Pyongyang organ Rodong Sinmun said in a Sunday editorial, Yonhap reports.
Indeed, the exercises are “reckless behavior driving the situation into the uncontrollable phase of a nuclear war,” Rodong Sinmun warned.
“The joint exercise is the most explicit expression of hostility against us, and no one can guarantee that the exercise won’t evolve into actual fighting,” the paper warned. “If the United States is lost in a fantasy that war on the peninsula is at somebody else’s door far away from them across the Pacific, it is far more mistaken than ever.”
Sputnik puts the number of troops participating in the exercise as “at least 75,000.” The war games are scheduled to run through August 31. The chances of some sort of “incident” setting off a major confrontation appear to be high. Russia and China have both proposed an agreement under which the North would cease missile tests if the US would stop its military exercises on the Korean peninsula. The US has refused.
And not only that, but Sputnik reports that a number of US allies, including the UK, Australia, Canada, Columbia, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, are all planning to participate in the war games as well.
The Rodong Simmun has an English website that can be found here. An article published on Wednesday reports on a visit made to a DPRK military command center by Kim Jong Un. The article mentions a possible attack upon Guam. Here is a brief excerpt:
Then he listened to General Kim Rak Gyom’s decision on the Strategic Force’s plan for an enveloping fire at Guam at the command post.
He examined the plan for a long time and discussed it with the commanding officers in real earnest.
He praised the KPA Strategic Force for having drawn up a close and careful plan as intended by the Party and examined the firing preparations for power demonstration.
Being told by the commander of the Strategic Force that it is waiting for the order of the Party Central Committee after rounding off the preparations for the enveloping fire at Guam, he said with great satisfaction that the spirit of Hwasong artillerymen is very high and he was freshly determined, seeing by himself the combat preparedness and the sky-high spirit of the Hwasong artillerymen of the large combined unit.
He said that the U.S. imperialists put their own necks into the noose through their reckless military confrontation racket, adding that he would watch a little longer the conduct of the foolish and stupid Yankees spending a hard time of every minute for their miserable lot.
Whether the DPRK has a missile capable of carrying a nuclear weapon all the way to Guam is not clear. The Russian consensus seems to be they do not–and indeed it’s possible the article may have been designed to serve propaganda objectives. But even if they can’t hit Guam, certainly the North Koreans have the capacity to inflict horrendous damage and loss of life upon Seoul, which lies just 35 miles from the DPRK border.
The Korean War technically has never ended. A peace treaty has never been signed. The US could change this state of affairs by entering into negotiations and signing a treaty, but just as it has rejected the proposal put forward by Russia and China, it has rejected this as well. The US has approximately 800 military bases around the world–and we apparently prefer to keep them all, every one of them, in place.
“They have cast a dark shadow of conflict on all nations.”
You might think the above words were spoken by someone such as Paul Craig Roberts in an article about the necons. And certainly they sound as if they might have been. But in reality the quote is from Nikki Haley, who spoke the words in the UN Security Council back in July. “They” are the North Koreans. In other words, it isn’t the US, a country that has overthrown more governments, bombed more cities, and started more wars, at least half of them under false pretexts, than any other country on earth, a country that bombed and napalmed villages and towns all across North Korea in the early 1950s–so many in fact that US General Curtis LeMay once estimated the US had killed about 20 percent of the population.
No. In Haley’s opinion it is the North Koreans who are casting “a dark shadow of conflict” upon the world. Haley’s reality, of course, is inverted, as realities invariably are in official Washington. And as a Russian general commented recently, the US is a country “governed by propaganda.”
Back in July when Haley made her speech at the UN, I posted an article in which I commented as follows:
Another thing to consider in all of this is that a US attack on the North could serve as a “back door” into the open confrontation with Russia which the US Deep State seemingly has been pining for with each new military base and war game exercise on Russia’s borders.
The Washington neocons are intent on spreading chaos and conflict throughout the world, and they have been quite successful at it so far. The next 11 days are going to be tense and dangerous.