North Korea calls threats by President Trump “the sound of a dog barking.” Here’s why.
For decades Pyongyang has threatened, attacked, captured and killed Americans (and our South Korean allies) without paying any real military price. Instead, America’s reaction has been words, military exercises and, in recent years, cyber attacks and economic sanctions. The last two have caused pain, and President Trump has finally increased sanctions enough to get Beijing’s attention. But none of this seems likely to convince Kim Jong Un that his most prized military assets, or his life, are finally in danger.
How has Kim reacted to recent threats from the U.S.? President-elect Trump tweeted: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won't happen!” It did.
In August, the President warned: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Kim remained on path.
Days ago, the President promised to “totally destroy” North Korea. Kim’s Foreign Secretary responded: "Our rocket's visit to the entire US mainland [is] inevitable…" and later threatened to shoot down U.S. military aircraft in international airspace.
That threat to an American plane has special significance. Unlike most Americans, Pyongyang’s leaders remember how they once shot down a U.S. military aircraft in international airspace and got away with it, along with other outrages. Let’s hope President Trump and his advisors know this history. Start with the “Second Korean War,” waged by Pyongyang against the US and South Korea from 1966-9. More than 150 Americans were killed and wounded, along with an estimated 800 of our Korean comrades-in-arms.
Fought on orders of Kim Il Sung, grandfather and dumpy doppelganger of the current despot, the conflict started with increased attacks on American patrols and installations along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the Koreas. In early 1968 Pyongyang launched a suicide squad into South Korea with orders to chop off the head of the South’s president, then seized the American reconnaissance ship USS Pueblo in international waters. One American crewmen was killed and the other 82 imprisoned and tortured for almost a year. President Johnson called the capture an “aggressive act” that “cannot be accepted.” The president of South Korea, who’d come uncomfortably close to losing his head, urged the US to launch a punitive strike against the North. Instead, Washington issued a groveling apology to Pyongyang in return for the Pueblo crewmen.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon promised: “There isn’t going to be another Pueblo…We are not going to let that happen.” Not long after his election, North Korean fighters blasted a US Navy reconnaissance plane out of international airspace, killing 31 Americans. Nixon asked the Pentagon to draw up plans for a military response. But after dithering over the risk of a broader conflict, Nixon opted to respond with a symbolic show of force. The North Koreans were not impressed.
“The Americans don’t want to continue this fight,” Kim Il Sung boasted to another communist leader in 1971 about the responses to the Pueblo and EC-121. (more on recent revelations concerning North Korean history can be found at the indispensable Wilson Center North Korea International Document Project https://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/north-korea-international-documentation-project)
If the U.S. had no appetite for a fight, Kim and his progeny still did. In following years, North Korea murdered two Americans during an ax attack, shot others during DMZ skirmishes and downed U.S. helicopters. Attacks against South Korea claimed even more casualties, from the 1980s bombing of a South Korean airliner to a massive blast that missed the South Korean President but killed 21 others. During the 1990s, North Korean commandos infiltrated the U.S. with orders to attack nuclear power plants in the case of war, according to a recently declassified U.S. intelligence report. In 2010, North Korea sank a South Korean Navy vessel, slaughtering dozens, and shelled a South Korean island, claiming several lives. Two years ago a North Korean mine crippled two South Koreans.
Meanwhile, North Korea moved to obtain nuclear weapons. U.S. Presidents declared this would never happen. Military action was ruled out, due to the risk of a North Korean response against South Korea. So Presidents Clinton and Bush tried negotiations, bribery, threats and sanctions, all to no avail. By 2006 North was testing nuclear weapons and accelerating its missile program. It even rented out experts to build a nuclear plant in Syria (which Israel destroyed after the U.S. refused to.)
Pyongyang grew confident enough to strike America itself in 2014 with a major hack against Sony Pictures, plus threaten a “11th of September”-type attack against U.S. movie theaters. “They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond,” promised President Obama in 2014. “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose.” Aside from limited financial sanctions, that response remains shrouded in secrecy, but it clearly didn’t stop the North. Before leaving office last year, Obama declared the U.S. would “never accept” North Korea as a nuclear state and promised "to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions." Kept classified: Just how close the Koreans were to a nuclear strike capability against America.
Now President Trump has inherited a situation once unthinkable, perhaps especially among U.S. servicemembers who’ve faced North Korea. America’s leaders have allowed a homicidal, America-hating dictator to obtain the power not just to threaten our military, civilians and allies in Asia, but to kill huge numbers of Americans in the homeland.
President Trump must now make tough decisions his predecessors ducked, including whether the risk to Seoul of military action today outweighs the risk to San Francisco of a nuclear blast tomorrow. He may wish to consider the regrets of President Nixon, who years later concluded this about North Korea’s strategy: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw. I had feared in our handling of the EC-121 incident in 1969 the Communists may have thought they encountered mush.”
As the Korean proverb goes: “A barking dog never bites.”
Mark Sauter @TerrorSentinel is a long-time North Korea watcher who blogs at www.dmzwar.com. He served as an Army officer in the DMZ between North and South Korea and has conducted research in North Korea.
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“They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose,” President Obama promised on Dec. 19, 2014, responding to the cyber attack on Sony and threats of a 9/11-style attack, which the President attributed to North Korea.
“The War to Resist America and Aid Korea".
[2017-09-24]
US is within DPRK’s striking range
People are all afire with fury.
Trump, no more than an old bastard and gang leader, dared to speak of our country’s destruction and annihilation of our people as a whole in front of the eyes of the world.
Beyond “system overthrow” and “regime change”, he came up with such rhetoric as “total destruction” of a sovereign state. Such remarks can only come out of a psycho, not from a politician. A mad dog must be clubbed to death.
Trump should clearly understand that the US mainland is within the striking range of our strategic forces.
Kim Tok Song, professor at Kim Hyong Jik University of Education
North Koreans appears unfazed by President Donald Trump’s latest warning to the rogue regime.
Trump told the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday that if the U.S. is forced to defend itself or its allies, the nation will “totally destroy” North Korea.
North Koreans seems to believe Trump is all bark and no bite.
“If he was thinking he could scare us with the sound of a dog barking, that’s really a dog dream,” North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho said Wednesday. In North Korean culture, a dog’s dream “is one that is absurd and makes little sense,” according to Yonhap News Agency.
“Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un “is on a suicide mission,” Trump warned Tuesday. In response to the president’s new nickname for the young dictator, Ri said he felt sorry for Trump’s aides.
Trump’s warnings, despite criticisms from many on the left, were similar to statements made by other administration officials, as well as those of previous administrations. When former President Barack Obama suggested that the U.S. could “destroy” North Korea last year, the threat was serious, but less so than the one America and its allies face today.
The Korean regime tested many new ballistic missile systems, including an intermediate-range ballistic missile with the proven ability to reach Guam and an intercontinental ballistic missile that can strike parts, if not most, of the continental U.S. North Korea has also tested a suspected staged thermonuclear bomb.
As the North continues to advance its capabilities while threatening to reduce the U.S. and its allies to ashes, the Kim regime is rapidly developing the ability to turn rhetoric into reality.
North Korea asserts that the U.S. hostile policy is the reason it pursues powerful weaponry.
“The U.S. vicious hostile policy toward the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], which has lasted for decades, made the latter to make a crucial decision to protect the safety of the country and the nation and its sovereignty, and it is the historical cause of pushing the DPRK to rapidly bolster up its nuclear force,” the Minju Choson, a North Korean newspaper, recently argued.
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KCNA
Shameless Defeats U.S. Suffered in Confrontation with DPRK
Date: 14/08/2017 | Source: KCNA.co.jp (English) | Read original version at source
Pyongyang, August 14 (KCNA) -- The successive U.S. presidents were fated to suffer bitter defeats in their provocations for aggression and war against the DPRK.Truman ignited a war of aggression against the two year-old DPRK on June 25, 1950, but drained the cup of shameless defeats in the whole course of the war.After succeeding Truman as the U.S. president, Eisenhower made every desperate effort to roll back the tide of war, but the Korean war ended in the great victory of the heroic Korean people led by President Kim Il Sung, iron-willed commander, on July 27, 1953.When the U.S. spy ship "Pueblo" was captured by the navy of the Korean People's Army on January 23, 1968, the U.S. shrunk back from the tough stand of the DPRK army and people, who declared they would react to the U.S. "retaliation" with stronger counteraction and to the total war with all-out war, and had to made a written apology to the DPRK. At that time, U.S. President Johnson deplored that it was the one and only written apology the U.S. made in its history. And Washington Post reported the U.S. got a bloody nose by a small country.Nixon, oblivious of the lesson drawn from the "Pueblo" incident, fomented the EC-121 incident in April 1969 just after winning the presidency and Ford provoked the Panmunjom incident on August 18, 1976 in a bid to concoct an excuse for the start of a new war against the DPRK, all of which resulted in U.S. failure.
U.S. Was Invader in Guise of "Liberator": Venezuelan Body
Date: 21/09/2017 | Source: KCNA.kp (En) | Read original version at source
Pyongyang, September 21 (KCNA) -- The Group for the Study of the Juche Idea at a university of Venezuela on Sep. 8 posted on its website Juche Idea an article titled "Why the U.S. troops are stationed in south Korea" and such subtitled articles as "Invader in the guise of 'liberator'" and "Main obstacle to Korea's reunification."The articles cited detailed data to disclose that the U.S. is chiefly responsible for Korea's division as it sent its troops in the guise of "liberator" to south Korea on Sep. 8 1945.With an ambition to rule Korea as a whole, the U.S. imperialists ignited a war of aggression against the DPRK on June 25, 1950 and coiled up tension on the Korean peninsula after the war by making a series of moves to provoke another war--the incident of U.S. armed spy ship Pueblo, the large-sized spy plane "EC-121" incident and "Panmunjom" incident, etc, they noted.It is the clear understanding of the world community that the U.S., which has scrambled to perpetuate the Korean nation's division and inflamed the inter-Korean conflict, is the stumbling block to Korea's reunification as well as to peace and security in the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia, they stressed.The articles contended that if the U.S. troops withdraw from south Korea, the root cause of war will vanish and the situation be improved on the peninsula and a favorable phase be provided for peace and security in Northeast Asia. -0-