The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

So all of a sudden North Korea has turned into a nightmare out of an old James Bond Movie -- a dastardly gang of maniacs brandishing apocalyptic weapons -- and it's looking like the US is going to have to play Agent OO7 and put the kibosh on their evil scheme to intimidate the rest of the world. What a freakin' horror show.

We must imagine that American diplomats are trying like mad to enlist the good offices of the Chinese and the Russians, but apparently they enjoy watching America freak out. This would seem reckless-bordering-on-moronic on the part of the Russians. Have they forgotten that they gave up being soviets a while back? Earth to Vlad Putin: North Korea is no longer your client. As a tactical matter, by doing nothing to help, the Chinese may be foolishly inserting their own tit in a wringer, because if hostilities break out, and they are seen as giving aid-and-comfort to North Korea, then the pipeline of cheap manufactured goods to WalMart that they depend on to maintain their surging economy will be shut down, and a couple of hundred million suddenly unemployed Chinese could send that nation over the edge into anarchy.

Many Americans seem to think that Japan has no armed forces. This is not so. Japan has plenty of fighter-bombers in their "home defense force" and is fully capable of bombing the shit out of these North Korean nuclear facilities. Of course the idea of Japan undertaking such a tactical aggression must be unthinkable to practically everyone, including many Japanese themselves, but the fact is that they are North Korea's prime target. Kim Jong Il sent a couple of medium range missles across Japanese air space a few years ago in an insane act of bravado that very much caught Japan's attention. There is now the suspicion that North Korea can, or will soon, develop missiles capable of hitting the US mainland. Rocket science ain't what it used to be in the Werner Von Braun era; these days building an ICBM is easier than designing a graphics program compatible with Windows ME.

Would Japan act as a military proxy for the US and put an end to Kim Jong Il's nuclear shenanigans? Israel did the world a favor a decade ago by just flying in and bombing Saddam Hussein's reactor. If the Japanese were induced to act for us -- returning the favor of us rebuilding their nation in the 1950s -- then the world will have truly entered a brand-new era of power relations, because from that point on, Japan could not shrink back from its responsibilities to police a portion of the Pacific. In the 21st century, there is too much dangerous technology loose in the world, and if a ridiculous and impoverished state like North Korea can develop a nuclear ICBM capability than plenty of other Asian states could fall under the sway of some maniac and do the same.

China is in a peculiar position, enjoying both favorable and extremely unfavorable strategic prospects. In the matter of oil, which their industrial economy depends on, the Chinese are geopolitically much better positioned for the future than is America. The large oil reserves of central Asia lie a few steps over their border and they can exercise hegemony over them at will. On the other hand, the Chinese face monumental problems in respect to over-population, environmental degradation, fresh water shortages, and AIDS -- the combination of which may de-rail their project of industrial modernization and send the nation into a horrendous vortex of disorder, violence, and death. You would think that the Chinese have every reason to grab Mr. Kim Jong Il by the testicles and take away his toys.

Anyway, I conclude that the US will probably not get any help. We have three to six months before the North Koreans are able to extract weapons-grade plutonium from their processing reactor. My sense is that we are going to have fly in there before then and blow the shit up. By the way, Tom Friedman's suggestion in the NY Times on Sunday was very astute: we should pull all American ground troops out of the Korean peninsula forthwith so as to obviate the question of any ground engagement there. It's about the nukes and the rockets now.

On another subject, The PBS Evening Report with Jim Lehrer re-broadcast a Ray Suarez piece about suburban sprawl in Atlanta. Suerez is not a fool, but the piece sucked out loud. Suarez doesn't even halfway understand the fiasco of suburban hyper-development and what it represents as a social and civic catastrophe. Few of his interviewees had a dime's worth of insight. One was a professional city planner who had made the foolish choice of buying a McHouse in some horrendously far-flung suburb, and he seemed to think the only problem with it was that other motorists were interfering with his commuting pleasure. Suarez's fatuous report is proof that our nation is currently incapable of having an intelligent public discussion about these issues.