Global Research

Evidently, Donald Trump is a political neophyte:  perhaps he succeeds at making business deals, but he is strangely naïve regarding the viciousness of political chicanery and Machiavellian intrigue in Washington.  There is no other explanation for his appointing John Bolton, a notorious hawk, and advocate of pre-emptively attacking the DPRK, to such an influential government position as National Security Adviser.

Although many consider Trump a hawk and a militarist, is seems more likely that he is mesmerized by the possibility of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.  Of course, the possibility also exists that Trump was compelled by certain “interests” to appoint Bolton, and Trump, himself is no more than a puppet, appearances to the contrary.

It cannot have been stupidity by Bolton – even a high school student, by now, realizes that the gruesome death  of Libya’s leader Muammar Gadaffi , and the brazenly violated promises made to him, in exchange for his relinquishing his incipient nuclear program, ( promises  criminally violated by NATO allies, with the endorsement of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973),  led to the destruction of the entire Libyan state, a “model” which perpetually terrorizes the people of the DPRK and its President Kim Jong Un.  In recent history, North Korea was attacked and pulverized during the 1950-1953 Korean War, almost three million North Koreans were massacred by the US command of United Nations collaborating states.  The DPRK has undergone a devastating trauma which it is determined never again to endure, much as the decendants of the Holocaust are determined that “Never Again” will they be so vulnerable to annihilation.  It is obvious that mentioning “The Libya Model” to a North Korean has the same impact as mentioning Nazism to a Holocaust survivor.

The Libya Model

According to the Wall Street Journal, as soon as Bolton assumed his office of National Security Adviser to Trump, he cunningly fired the staff he did not like, and added his cronies to his office.   It is impossible that Bolton would have appeared on major primetime national television, including Sunday’s CBS’s Face the Nation, (and later on Fox News Sunday), stating publicly that the we plan to follow the “Libyan model” in our dealings with North Korea, and not have known that his statements were unendurable provocations to the people and government of the DPRK, which would be forced to respond with outrage.  Perhaps he was also warning the DPRK of the incipient plans of the US and UN,  but without doubt, he recognized that his remarks would intolerably enrage the DPRK, and jeopardize the June 12 summit which appeared to be proceeding swiftly and smoothly to, at the very least, a handshake between Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un.

And, of course, Trump coveted the probably ensuing Nobel Peace Prize, which would eclipse all his other problems, actual or fabricated.  And, perhaps, he would have been just as comfortable with a realistic arrangement, suitable to the DPRK, as well.   According to CNBC, Trump was so eager for the Summit that “the U.S. reportedly canceled a B-52 bomber exercise with South Korea amid threats from North Korea to withdraw from upcoming talks with President Trump, according to a WSJ report citing U.S. officials.  The DPRK had just released a statement that:

“At a time when the DPRK-U.S. summit is approaching the U.S. has launched the largest-ever drill involving B-52 strategic nuclear bomber, F-22 Raptor stealth fighters and other nuclear strategic assets.  This is an extremely provocative and ill-boding act of going against the trend for peace and security in the Korean peninsula and dialogue atmosphere….The U.S. continued introduction of nuclear strategic assets has exposed the process for détente on the peninsula to vulnerability and clouded the prospect of the upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit.”

Obviously, the DPRK’s concerns were being taken seriously by Trump –and at least by those not attempting to undermine him.  The DPRK explicitly repudiated Bolton’s remarks regarding similarity between the situation in the DPRK and Libya, and the DPRK stated that Bolton was “manifesting an awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq, which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers,” adding:  “We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.”

Trump was,  by now, evidently so focused on the prospect of being awarded the Nobel Prize, and speaking of the great accomplishment of achieving world peace, that he actively disputed the inflammatory remarks of his own henchman, Bolton.  While reportedly confusing events in 2003 with events in 2011, Trump probably knew exactly what he was doing, and insisted that he had never intended to use the “Libyan model,” and it was all a mistake.  He was publicly contradicting Bolton, who was poisoning his attempt to pave the way for an amicable summit meeting, and backpedaling desperately, attempting to undercut Bolton’s damning intrusion into the summit process.  Perhaps Trump was awakening to reality.

And on May 23, The New York Times reported:  “Trump backs off Demand that Kim Disarm Instantly:  US Works to Preserve June Meeting For Nuclear Talks.”

Trump had, to a certain degree, publicly “neutralized” the toxic effect of Bolton’s calculated disruption of the peace process,  while, at the same time, in an interview on Fox News, Vice-President Pence again raised the deadly threat of the “Libya model,” though at this point it was glaringly obvious that any reference to the “Libya model” was guaranteed to torpedo the peace process and the forthcoming June 12 Summit between Trump and Kim Jung Un.  As stated in the New York Times, and as is known worldwide,

“Mr. Qaddafi gave up his nuclear program in the apparent hope of staving off Western intervention and sanctions, and of negotiating economic integration with the West.  But little of that happened, and years later he was tortured and killed by rebels after he was weakened in a military action by the United States and European allies.”  (The Times neglected to mention UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which authorized “all necessary means” for that criminal attack.)

DPRK Vice-Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui  then referred to “unlawful and outrageous acts by top American officials” and said that Mr. Pence had made “unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya.”

Trump is apparently unable to control “All the President’s Men,” who are forcing on the DPRK a vicious agenda which North Korea repudiates with great courage and dignity.  It is almost impossible to determine whether Bolton and Pence are simply trumpeting Trump’s intent, or if Trump is now enthralled by the prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize, and a noble historic legacy, a hope which his so-called “advisers” are sabotaging, along with the hope for peace between North Korea, South Korea and the United States.  Inevitably, on May 24, Trump wrote to Kim Jung Un, cancelling the June 12 summit, and reiterating the deadly nuclear threat.

This recalls the analysis by the DPRK’s brilliant former Deputy-Ambassador Ri Tong il, who stated, repeatedly that the US would torpedo every attempt at peaceful reconciliation between North and South Korea, and every effort at reconciliation between the US and the DPRK, because the US is determined to maintain a powerful military presence in South Korea, since their target is, in reality, in the words of Ri Tong il, “The big country in Asia.”  Ambassador Ri never explicitly mentioned China, but the implication was obvious.  According to the New York Times, May 25, “China has much to gain from a peace deal that would prevent a potentially disastrous conflict with the United States on its border, and could ultimately result in the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea… Blaming the Chinese for the change in tone from North Korea strikes me as trying to find a Chinese scapegoat for a summit failure, ‘ said Douglas H. Paal, a vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”

Ambassador Ri Tong Il’s elucidation of the complexity of the situation is confirmed by the fact that during the Korean war from 1950-1953  the Chinese thought that the Americans were attempting to use Korea as a springboard for the invasion of China to restore Chiang Kai-shek to power.  China’s most revered leader, the Honorary Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, the politically sophisticated and brilliant Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) according to her biographer Jung Chang,“fiercely attacked the US intervention in Korea and was prominently involved in the international peace campaign.  She won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 (which was duly recorded in her FBI dossier).”  I have it confirmed from one of the most distinguished and impeccable sources in China that during the 1950s the United States was bombing the Northeast of China, which provoked China to enter the Korean war.

Further, the United States was using germ warfare against both China and North Korea, as confirmed, in detail in the 600 page report by the International Scientific Commission, headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Sir Joseph Needham.  The ISC included scientists from Sweden, France, Italy and Brazil.  The U.S. obtained control of the Japanese biological warfare laboratory, Unit 731, in 1945, in exchange for granting amnesty to Japanese General Shiro Ishii, Chief of unit 731.  General Ishii should have been tried as a war criminal:  Unit 731 had been experimenting on the use of biological weapons, involving the use of human vivisection and barbaric torture of thousands of human beings, including U.S. prisoners of war.

According to her biographer, in Soong Ching-ling’s office in Shanghai in 1952, “she had up on one wall a caricature of US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ‘as a tentacle bug holding a parchment of peace in one hand and hugging a container of bacterial bugs in the other.’”

Currently, in addition to disputes over trade and the South China Sea, the US has been biting larger and larger chunks of China:  flirting with Taiwan, encouraging separatists in Tibet, and most execrable of all, encouraging the Uighur radical Islamic terrorists and separatists in Xinjiang.  United States’ close ally  Saudi Arabia, during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, invites and sponsors 5,000 Islamists from Xinjjang, hosting them for an entire month longer than other pilgrams, and returns them to Xinjiang as indoctrinated Jihadists.  Of course, the “Mother of the Uighurs,” the millionaire Rebiya Kadeer lives in the USA, in Virginia, and is a recipient of support by the NED.

On Friday, May 25, the New York Times published a remarkable letter stating:  “the deliberately insulting remarks by Vice-President Pence and the national security adviser, John Bolton, doomed a trump-Kim summit.  By touting the Libyan model (nuclear disarmament, then United States-backed regime change) they stoked fears that they should have been working to assuage.  This administration has also snached war from the jaws of peace by renouncing the nuclear deal with Iran…Nuclear disarmament will occur not through the caprice of an egocentric president, but through a renewed grass-roots global movement to halt a gratuitous nuclear arms race and to rid the Earth of nuclear weapons before we suffer an actual nuclear catastrophe.”  (David Keppel)

The United Nations is doing nothing effective to promote a sane resolution of this crisis, and could have appointed the Secretary-General’s Envoy for Peace in North Korea, for which former President Jimmy Carter is uniquely, eminently and enthusiastically qualified.  The Secretary-General has Stefan Mistura helping to negotiate a resolution of the crisis in Syria.  Why is he so passive regarding the DPRK?  And if Russia or China would veto the egregious Security Council sanctions against the DPRK, sanctions which now constitute crimes against humanity, the United States’ arrogance would be undercut, and Washington would be compelled to actually negotiate with the DPRK, instead of merely dictating to North Korea, as it currently does.

Kim Jung Un has spectacularly demonstrated his sincere commitment to peace by releasing three political prisoners who were confirmed to be spies hostile to the DPRK, and by publicly and permanently destroying the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, as witnessed by journalists worldwide, and Kim has taken these actions prior to any concessions by the United States.  On the contrary, Trump cancelled the summit after Kim made these dramatic concessions.

Perhaps the most realistic and sanest advice was offered by James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, whose article:  “Ending the Dead End in North Korea was published in the New York Times on May 20.  Clapper states:

“I told President Obama in private that our stance on North Korea was flawed.  Our policy was never to discuss what the United States might do for the North Korean government until it first agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions.  That was a dead end, I told him, and merely ensured that no progress would be made….I believed, and I told President Obama that North Korea won’t budge on its nuclear program because they see us as an existential threat…..    We should set aside for a minute our demand that they disarm before any other negotiation.  We should meet their demand to sign a peace treaty and establish a physical presence in Pyongyang, an office staffed by Americans who can interact with North Korean citizens.  We could model it on the ‘interests section’ we maintained in Havana for decades…which would enhance our understanding and enable the flow of information from the rest of the world.  We would, of course, reciprocate by allowing North Korea to establish a similar mission in Washington.  …Eventually, we would hope to offer a road map to withdrawing many of our forces from the peninsula, while the North Koreans reduced the forces they have along the DMZ, including the artillery and rocketry forces that are poised to fire on Seoul.  If we can figure out a way to lead North Korea’s leaders to a place where they don’t feel so threatened, we could move away from the cusp of a cataclysmic war.  All of this would benefit us, whether we eliminated their nuclear capacity or not.”

As of this writing, attempts are being made to resuscitate the June 12 summit in Singapore.  The United Nations should be more constructively involved.  Instead of supporting the UN Security Council’s strangling sanctions on North Korea, the country which is the least dangerous among all the nuclear states, the UN Secretary General should appoint Peace Envoys similar to appointments which have been made throughout the United Nation’s history, and beginning now with those who have shown respect for the dignity and legitimate needs and concerns of the DPRK:  Jimmy Carter and James Clapper would be the most promising appointments of all.