http://themilitant.com/2017/8132/813204.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 32 August 28, 2017
(front page)
US rulers’ 72-year-long drive against the people
of Korea
Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji
Practice invasion during U.S.-South Korean annual Foal Eagle war games,
April 2, 2017.
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
The liberals’ furor against President Donald Trump, and their
determination to drive him from office by any means possible, expanded
for a few days into frenzied warnings that a reckless and dangerous
president with his hands on the button of Washington’s 6,900 nuclear
bombs is on the brink of starting a war against the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea. “Are We All Doomed?” headlined an Aug. 10 op-ed
column by New York Times opinion section editor Bari Weiss, one of many
along these lines.
“I don’t want to be alarmist, but we’re all going to die,” talk-show
host Stephen Colbert — who has boosted his ratings by curse-laden
denunciations of Trump — told his audience Aug. 8.
But the U.S. capitalist rulers are doing the opposite — they’re working
to achieve their class interests in the region without military action
on the Korean Peninsula. President Trump’s threats of unleashing “fire
and fury” are meant to convey the message that the U.S. rulers are
serious in demanding the Kim Jong-Un government in the North agree to
back off development of its long-range missile and nuclear weapons program.
It’s Washington’s imperialist aggression that’s responsible for the more
than 70-year division of Korea. When Korean workers and farmers rose up
in their millions to take advantage of Tokyo’s defeat in World War II to
advance their fight for independence, Washington intervened, leading to
a murderous war that ended in a stalemate. It has maintained tens of
thousands of troops in South Korea since and imposed the division of the
Korean people.
The Trump administration is moving to step up the pressure on Pyongyang.
Convinced the previous three U.S. administrations didn’t act with enough
resolve, it is seeking a way to collaborate effectively with Beijing and
to tighten the screws to gain results.
“The object of our peaceful pressure campaign is the denuclearization of
the Korean Peninsula,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson wrote in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 13. “The U.S.
has no interest in regime change or accelerated reunification of Korea.”
“If China wishes to play a more active role in securing regional peace
and stability,” the two administration officials say, “it must take the
decision to exercise its diplomatic and economic leverage over North
Korea.”
Spokespeople for both the left and right of bourgeois politics have no
other course.
“The Obama administration’s response” to Pyongyang’s advances in nuclear
and missile development “was to do — well, not much of anything, under
the euphemism of ‘strategic patience,’” the liberal Washington Post
editorialized Aug. 11. Their prescription? “Assemble a coalition of
nations to impose economic sanctions sufficiently punitive and targeted
at the regime that Mr. Kim decides he would be better off making a deal.”
In an Aug. 12 op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal, former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger argues for the same. “For more than 30 years,
the world’s response to North Korea’s nuclear program has combined
condemnation with procrastination,” he writes.
“An understanding between Washington and Beijing is the essential
prerequisite for the denuclearization of Korea,” he says. Such an
alliance, with the backing of Tokyo and Seoul would apply “maximum
pressure” on Pyongyang while also offering it “workable guarantees” that
their government would not be overthrown, he says.
Stiff sanctions on North Korea
All these pundits hail the Trump administration’s success in hammering
together a unanimous vote — including Beijing and Moscow — in the United
Nations Security Council Aug. 5 imposing the stiffest sanctions yet on
North Korea. The sanctions — the eighth over the past decade — ban the
import of coal, iron, lead and seafood from the DPRK and prohibit any
increase in the number of workers it sends abroad. The move, like
previous restrictions, hits working people the hardest. Estimates are
the sanctions will reduce the country’s exports by one-third.
Kim responded to President Trump’s comments with threats to launch
ballistic missiles at the American territory of Guam, some 2,100 miles
away. Guam, seized from Spain by Washington in 1898, is home of one of
Washington’s sizable and growing military bases in the Pacific, keys to
the U.S. rulers’ efforts to defend their access to trade routes and
markets in Asia.
With a population of 162,000, residents of the U.S. colony have been
involved in their own fight against U.S. military occupation. Dubbed
Guamanians by the U.S. Navy after World War II, the native Chamorro
people were not given full citizenship rights until 1950. They are
allowed to vote for the U.S. president, but it isn’t counted, since they
are barred from sending delegates to the Electoral College.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in called for military talks with
Pyongyang, the first in three years. Seoul, a city of 10 million people
is just 35 miles south of the border. The highly fortified Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea army has 10,000 artillery pieces capable of
rapidly hitting that city and U.S. troop bases further south.
Giving added weight to Washington’s threats if Pyongyang refuses to
discuss denuclearization, Beijing said that if the DPRK launches
missiles near a U.S. territory and the U.S. retaliates, “China will stay
neutral,” according to the Global Times newspaper. But, it added, if the
U.S. strikes first and tries to overthrow the North Korean regime,
“China will prevent them from doing so.”
“Beyond the bluster, the Trump administration has been quietly engaged
in back channel diplomacy with North Korea for several months,” reported
The Associated Press Aug. 11.
The DPRK has about 10 nuclear warheads, according to the Arms Control
Association. In a program begun under the Obama administration in 2010,
Washington is upgrading its nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1 trillion.
Decades of U.S. aggression
Following World War II Washington, landed troops to prevent the Korean
workers and farmers from taking power and, with agreement of the
Stalinist regime in Moscow, dividing the country in two.
In May 1948 Washington imposed the Syngman Rhee dictatorship, which
together with the U.S. occupation army crushed the rebellion in the
south. North of Korea’s 38th parallel, workers and peasants were able to
take power and organized a sweeping agrarian reform, expropriated
landlords and capitalists and carried out other measures. In September
1948, the DPRK was established in Pyongyang.
War broke out on June 25, 1950, as the U.S. rulers backed the Rhee
regime’s effort to reimpose the dictatorship of capital in the North.
Over the next three years some 2 million U.S. soldiers and more than
160,000 troops from 15 other countries under the banner of the U.N.
fought in Korea. When U.S. forces reached the Chinese border, Beijing
sent 260,000 troops to aid Korean fighters in driving the invasion back.
More than 4 million people were killed in the U.S.-organized war,
including at least 2 million civilians. U.S. bombers leveled Pyongyang
and scores of other cities, towns and villages. The Truman
administration threatened to use nuclear weapons.
The war ended with an armistice — the first time U.S. imperialism failed
to win a war. Ever since, Washington has maintained an official state of
war on the peninsula, refusing to sign a peace treaty with the DPRK.
The U.S. military maintains 28,500 troops in South Korea and conducts
provocative joint military exercises with Seoul deploying tens of
thousand of troops at least twice a year.
The latest, Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, is planned for Aug. 21-31. Like the
last exercise, this one is scheduled to include practice “decapitations”
raids, simulating incursions into the North to assassinate Kim Jong-un
and other government leaders.
Related articles:
SWP: ‘Take nuclear weapons out of hands of US rulers!’
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home