North Korea: What Does Twitter Say About It?
Do we attack or shake our finger at them REALLY HARD?
There is a disturbing meme concerning North Korea crawling into the American consciousness. Depending on what occurs over the ensuing months this meme could be either disappointing to those who believe it or shattering for the entire country.
One of the more influential people I’ve heard saying it is Herman Cain. On Fox News, 5 July, Cain said [paraphrasing] if Korea did anything stupid, it would be a very short war.
I see nonsense like this on Social Media a lot these days. We’ll kick their little asses!
We have a choice as to what to do about North Korea. One, we let them have everything they want, while making blustery noise about it (the most likely outcome) or things continue apace until we have no choice but to attack NoKo.
There is little point in dwelling on the first option. It would look a lot like the Iranian nuke deal. We come away looking stupid and weak and feckless.
So, we’ll look at the second option. Attack.
What would such an attack look like? Who would we be fighting? What would be the short and long-term consequences?
Well, if the DC swamp hasn’t learned the lessons of history, and I see no evidence it has, we would attack the North with a force of about 300,000 troops. 85% of those doing the actual shooting will be American. 15% will be a smattering of Brits and Australians. There might be a tiny contingent of warfighters from Central Europe. A large chunk of “our allies” would be bench warmers and truck drivers from dozens of nations, claiming to be critical to the fight but doing none of the shooting and bleeding.
This adventure will end horribly for everyone, especially the Koreans. Millions will die very quickly. The “war” would then settle into the sickening, familiar pattern of not fighting too hard, hoping to keep the enemy at bay, while loosing a several hundred (thousand?) soldiers per week for years - for absolutely no reason. When we finally would leave the exact same people would be running a divided Korea as when we started.
But wait! There’s more.
We would have to keep China out of the conflict – or at least try. And how would we do that? We’d have to cripple their economy. There is no other way and no guarantee that such a move would work anyway.
To do so would require us to renege on our debt to them. That’s our only ace in the hole with the ChiComs.
We Lose Our Goodies!
But what would that do to us? The answer is simple. NO ONE would lend the United States an empty cereal box for the foreseeable future. Washington DC would run out of operating funds within days. The big, oafish give-away machine that is our present federal system would have to be slashed by more than half overnight.
I ask you, boys and girls, is there anyone in the “swamp” with the sack to even suggest that? Of course there isn’t.
So, you can count out defaulting on debt as a weapon or even as a means of getting the Chinese to go to Pyong Yang and assassinating the fat kid and his generals. If China doesn’t see a free-market North Korea as a good thing FOR CHINA there is no hope of gaining their cooperation. But if we go to war, we have to try to sideline China anyway.
This is why we will likely watch fecklessly, as the fat kid and his asylum become a nuclear power.
Past as Prologue
But what could push us to the brink if no one has the guts to go all out to defeat our enemy?
The answer to that is a scary one. To provide the answer, I must go back two weeks – ancient history for the average voter.
On a Friday in late June, Trump started talking about putting solar cells on the Mexican border wall as a means of making it palatable and practical. He prefaced his first mention of it saying that he just came up with the idea and probably no one else had ever thought of it.
Here’s the rub. A lot of people had heard of it. I heard people talking about it years ago. The morning radio show on the Gulf Coast was talking about it the previous Monday. It wasn’t a serious discussion, of course, but there are people out there thinking that if we added solar cells to the Wall,…why, it would pay for itself!
The reason the President of the United States was talking about such a stupid idea was because HE READ IT ON TWITTER! It was trending! I will save just how stupid this idea is for another article.
But because uneducated adults and precocious teenagers were tweeting about a photovoltaic border wall, Donald Trump latched right onto it and blabbed, probably off-prompter, and insinuated a major policy idea.
For the record, there will never be a border wall to hang solar cells on. But that’s not the point.
So Who Will Give “The Donald” Good Counsel?
What is frightening is that the same fat guys sitting at their computers in their underwear, and the same silly kids tweeting about a solar cell wall, could prompt a major announcement from a president who doesn’t even understand the technology. These are the same types of people tweeting how we could kick Korea’s ass in a day. They love the idea of us killin’ them damn commies.
How can we trust a man who is so easily baited when every adult around him for two years has failed to convince him that mature men don’t use twitter as a policy platform. This is the Trump who only last week got into the same junior high school cat fight with Scarborough and Brzezinski that he’d had with Rosie O’Donnell almost a decade before. And the remarks transmitted were every bit as childish as both O’Donnell and Trump have always been.
THIS is the same president sitting with his phone right now, reading how we need to kick some North Korean ass. If every adult in his circle can’t convince him that what he reads on Twitter is NOT grist for making major decisions, who will counsel him about war and the ruin of our economy?
The one thing that could keep us out of war, and ensures a nuclear North Korea, is that Trump wouldn’t know how to shut down half of the US Government, and his Twitter friends would tell him not to. They don’t want to lose the food stamps or mortgage write-off, or school lunches, etc.
This caution:
If anyone in authority has the slightest inkling in a dark corner of their mind that we might have to go to war with North Korea, and they want us to survive the likely outcome, they must do two things.
They must prepare the nation for an economic battering that would be almost as bad as China would experience. All business with the ChiComs could be shut down. All the money they loan us would dry up.
Any responsible leader who sees war as a possibility needs to initiate the draft - six months ago! To try and fight a “limited war” in this theater would be a greater insult to those who get killed than every war we’ve fought since 1945. And not a one of them turned out to be honorable or even effective.
To attack NoKo we would require MILLIONS of men. Many millions more than we have now. And that would only provide a vague hope of obliterating North Korea’s military. There’s no way to be sure of it and China would still be the wild card as they were in the ‘50s.
Finally, know this:
If we chose military conflict, it will be bloody and painful for EVERYONE. This will not be like Iraq and Afghanistan. The media will not report how another soldier was killed this week. If we hear at all, we will hear casualty reports that routinely reach into the thousands. At the beginning it might be tens of thousands.
If we chose not to fight we need to prepare ourselves for the Century of China. Our reign as the dominant superpower would truly be at an end. This is the ultimate line in the sand. If we cross it unprepared or chose not to cross it, we will lose - and lose BIG.
An interesting side note: If we did decide to go all out on this, we'd have to take back the Panama Canal as well. If you remember back in prehistoric times Jimmy Carter let go of the canal. Do you know who runs it now?
Matt Jordan is the author of Street Politics: It Ain't Your Daddy's GOP Anymore! Grab your copy NOW!
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Photo Credit: global.quiz Flickr via Compfight cc