"Our missile systems are modest, our anti-ballistic missile systems are modest. They're new. It's new research. We've gotten -- testing them. And so I can't -- it's hard for me to give you a probability of success. But, nevertheless, the fact that a nontransparent society would be willing to tee up a rocket and fire it without identifying where it's going or what was on it means we need a ballistic missile system.
I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down." -- Bush,
press conference July 7
What better illustration do we need of the hollow game played out by NK and the Bush regime, at everyone else's expense? Bush is boasting about a U.S. missile defense that won't work as a response to NK missiles that won't fly.
Brilliant. The object of the U.S. and NK is to war without actually attacking each other. An actual attack would queer the game, force a resolution, eliminate a valuable nemesis. That's why we didn't see Bush attack the missile sites before the launch. There was virtually NO chance any of own our missiles could have intercepted the NK missiles and detonated them in mid-air. Bush knows this. There was virtually no chance that NK was going to hit anything significant with their missile launches. The NK president knew this before he launched them.
This just a clumsy invitational dance in the new cold war that the Bush regime is orchestrating and encouraging, hoping that a few 'evil avis' members will step into the spotlight. Bush's posturing as the protector of the country and the world demands a perpetual enemy to justify the continuing militarism.
By scrapping the talks that the Clinton administration were engaged in with NK, the Bush regime invited NK to resume their only activity that makes them relevant to the U.S. and the rest of the world. The NK nuclear program is basically the only way that they can manage a voice in the international arena, where NK desperately needs to pressure interested nation-states into concessions and incentives against their potential nuclear mis-behavior.
It's not so far-fetched to conclude that neither NK, nor the Bush regime, is interested in resolving the nuclear standoff and confrontation with retaliation or diplomacy. From Bush's refusal to either attack NK head-on as he's threatened or sit down and talk it out with them, to NK's sloppy provocation, there is a familiar pattern that will not be lost on those of us who lived with the jingoistic trappings and remnants of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and China. The result then, as is intended by the Bush regime now, is to foster a generation of militarism and military spending in which their manufactured antagonism provides the political fuel for Congress to keep the money spigot open wide, benefiting the military industry cronies that infect our government.
The time has long come when we must cast aside our faith that our leaders will eventually realize our own designs for America. Our Democrats have gone only as far as their numbers have allowed, and they act as if their biggest fear is losing more political ground. But the ground has already shifted underneath them. The forces of the military right rule the halls of Congress by wielding the products of the jingoistic fear they have exploited from the 9-11 attacks. Our representatives and legislators who argue for compromise or balance as they allow these military actions to go on; as they continue to allow the Executive to spy on Americans without a warrant; as they sit in silence as Bush threatens to bomb yet another sovereign nation (Iran) with impunity, cause us all to be complicit in their cowardice.
Bush did his best to avoid the sacrifices that hundreds of thousands of his generation made in Vietnam when he had the opportunity. Yet, he has had no compunction about sending hundreds of thousands of his countryfolk to fight, kill, and die in his opportunistic invasion and occupation of Iraq. The deaths of our soldiers are rarely mentioned by Bush, the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians caught in the line of his aggression are hardly an afterthought to him. It matters little to him that real people 'on the ground' are adversely affected by his choice of militarism over the prospect of peace that comes with committed diplomacy.
Our soldiers, our citizens, the Iraqis under our guns, the North Korean citizens, are clearly at the point of the Bush regime's politics. Unfortunately, there will be more political and military meddling, fueling more violence directed at the symbols of the sponsors of the U.S. imperialism, our soldiers and their agents. Until he can find his way into his next brawl with Iran or Syria, North Korea will remain the deliberate, jingoistic symbol of Bush's paranoid fear.
Threatening phony defenses against NK's phony threats make perfect sense in Bush's scheme to reign supreme as a military commander. Bush and his antagonists will always remain unscathed as those caught in the middle of their pathetic power-play are enveloped in their pernicious protection racket. "With us or against us . . . fighting them there . . . bring them on . . ."
"War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist." -- Orwell, 1984
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