John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DOUG BANDOW IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST
"Mile by mile and person by person, North Korea is the most destabilizing nation on earth."
That statement simply cannot be supported by facts.
It's astonishing to me that anyone would make it.
What wars, coups, and terror operations do you see North Korea involved in?
By contrast, the United States is busy bombing and threatening people in many, many countries, trying to change the world to its own liking.
It has literally torn apart entire well-run countries such as Libya and Syria because it didn't like their governments and because those governments did not toe the American policy line.
It has made a horrible mess of Ukraine by paying for a coup against an elected government.
It's openly trying to do the same in Venezuela.
It is the world’s greatest arms merchant, by far, spreading death and destruction into many lands for profit.
Its annual expenditure on its own military exceeds that of all other major countries combined.
It seems to feel entitled just to rip-up well-established international treaties which worked for peace, as the INF Treaty or the Iran Nuclear Agreement.
Oh, there’s a very long list, but those examples will do.
On an absolute scale, there is no question but Mr. Bandow’s opening claim is accurately directed only at the United States.
Measured on a per-capita basis, America’s quasi-colony in the Middle East, Israel, is the world’s most terrible state for destabilizing behavior. Hands down, it has no competitor.
It has attacked every neighbor that it has, some several times over, seized others’ property, killed a great many people, held millions against their will with absolutely no rights, used its illegal nuclear arsenal to intimidate its region, assisted another dark state, Nationalist South Africa, also to acquire illegal nuclear weapons, worked to subvert the rights of citizens in other countries it influences, as in America with unconstitutional laws it lobbies for, and just in general shown no respect for the rule of law. Its warmly-embraced best friends in the region all are tyrants.
It thumbs its nose at the world, daring anyone to say anything about open lawlessness and oppression. But because Israel has the complete support of the United States’ government, it gets away with it, rarely even being questioned in the press or by politicians. That American support for so much criminal behavior represents another grave charge against the United States itself as a destabilizing force.
Israel is truly also responsible for America’s bloody Neocon wars, being the prime behind-the-scenes advocate for them and a direct, secret participant in some, as in Syria.
Compared to that record, North Korea seems a rather quiet hermit kingdom. It developed nuclear weapons because the United States literally destroyed 20% of its population with three years of holocaust-scale bombing in the Korean War, a fact few Americans understand.
And that war only happened because the United States was adamant about there being no reunification in Korea after WWII, and it did some pretty nasty stuff to oppose it. It was a similar geopolitical game as it played in Vietnam, trying to keep it artificially divided, ultimately resulting in another holocaust-scale bombing, killing millions.
Even today, the United States strictly limits the ability of South Korea’s president to deal freely with North Korea’s president, maintains a sizable army on the border, insists from ten thousand miles away that it must be at the center of all talks, and maintains a large nuclear threat based in Guam.
All the while, the press and writers like Doug Bandow perpetuate the false notion that North Korea is the scariest thing on earth.
