This morning the Pasadena Star-News ran an opinion piece that started life as a blog post at Foreign Policy last week.
Entitled “North Korea’s threat to Guam is deadly serious,” I re-posted part of it last week here because of the appearance of John Pike.
Foreign Policy, like the rest of that part of the national security infrastructure establishment responsible for threat-seeking and writing memos of rationalization on who needs to be blasted, is useless.
For instance, I doubt there’s anyone in Pasadena, not Asian, under 50 who knows where or what Guam is.
In fact, I doubt there’s anyone in the entire chain of small newspapers to which the Star News belongs who ever reads Foreign Policy. Yet little crummy newspapers over the United States picked up the absurd thing, because it’s a classic troll piece.
Foreign Policy, like others in the national security metroplex, would like a war. Because the United States has no foreign policy other than conducting war, starting pre-emptive war or blowing up people in poor countries with drones.
Everyone would feel good because the mouthpieces at the old think tanks would be empowered to crank it into overdrive again.
The North Korean imbroglio plays like a cartoon.
And that’s because North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is a living cartoon character, an absurd-looking fool who wouldn’t last a minute in an American supermarket without being ushered out by security for doing something crazy and annoying, like spilling all the potatoes in the produce section onto the floor so everyone knew he had arrived. His only friend in the world is another person who is crazy and annoying, Dennis Rodman.
What happens if Kim Jong Un shoots a rocket at Guam, no one can tell what is in it, and like everything from North Korea, it’s substandard and breaks up or goes crooked and doesn’t hit anything?
Do we try to shoot it down? Go out to part of the ocean where we think it landed looking for stuff to see if we have to unleash Strategic Command to destroy North Korea? (I asked Pike these questions in a facetious e-mail, like this post, this morning. “Yup,” he answered.)
North Korea is Serbia in 1914.
We should look at the bright side. A world war might bring on necessary stimulus. At least until China opens up its nuclear arsenal.
