Has NORTH KOREA Been Set Up as the New Iraq?

What really is going on with North Korea? Why has it been making threats that – if carried out – could only result in the regime’s destruction?

Why has President Trump been making over-the-top threats about “fury and fire” such as “the world has never seen” (he also did so on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, which was even more bizarre)?

And why is everyone suddenly being fear-mongered into expecting nuclear strikes or apocalyptic events?

As RT noted, NBC anchor Brian Williams (the same anchor who had a virtual orgasm over Trump’s missile strikes on the Syrian airbase and who was previously found to have made up stories about his experiences in Iraq) told a panel of guests that the media’s job was to “scare people to death” about North Korea.

Danielle Ryan’s piece rightly points out the Nuclear Fear-Porn industry’s benefiting from all the hype, with survival products, gas masks and ‘end of the world’ gear being pushed and apparently ‘flying off shelves’, while the media ramps up the frenzy with scare stories and ‘survival guides’.

The media is either genuinely expecting a nuclear confrontation or it is part of an agenda to make people anxious over such a prospect.

A former State Department spokesman for the Obama administration has also accused the media of “fanning the flames” when it comes to escalating tensions with North Korea.

As Danielle Ryan writes, ‘Reading much of the coverage on the rising tensions with North Korea, it would appear that something major has changed recently — that North Korea has suddenly become an existential threat to the US in a way that it wasn’t before. It all seems so much more pressing and dangerous than it did last month. Yes, the US government’s Defense Intelligence Agency now believes North Korea has the capability to mount nuclear warheads on missiles, which could potentially be used to hit US targets. But North Korea has been claiming this capability since last March. So, that’s not new.’

In a report for Asia Times, geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar noted that the same people who are now talking about North Korea’s nuclear warhead capability are the people who sold the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The implication is also that some kind of false-flag event might be staged to justify action against the North Korean regime.

The Saddam/Iraq comparison may be very significant.

There has always been a possibility that the North Korean threat is something that has been deliberately kept in place for many years, not dissimilar to how the ‘threat’ of Saddam Hussein was built up by the US.

There are differences, of course; but essentially Saddam’s regime was armed and built up by the US originally for many years (including with WMD capabilities), until he crossed a line by invading Kuwait – and then Saddam and Iraq became Public Enemy No.1 and a huge platform for the US military-industrial complex to have an absolute field day, first in the 1991 Gulf War and then in the 2003 Iraq War.

In the lead-in to the Iraq War, there was also lots of rhetoric from Bush, Rumsfeld and co about Saddam needing to disarm or to give up his weapons of mass destruction in order to avoid being invaded and overthrown by force. Aside from letting in UN weapons inspectors – who weren’t allowed to finish their work – Saddam, being the kind of character he was, also hit back at the US with lots of bluster and threats in the same way that Kim Jong-Un has been doing.

But, in reality, Saddam’s more hostile or aggressive gestures or statements were more defiance than threat – and they were probably more motivated by his need to remain a strong leader in the eyes of his people (lest they rise up against him). It is possible that Kim Jong-Un is doing the same thing.

As The Free Thought Project notes, another important thing to keep in mind is that the US has essentially enabled and funded North Korea’s actions for more than half a century.

As it notes, the former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was on the board of technology giant ABB when it won a deal to supply North Korea with two nuclear power plants. ‘According to the 2003 report from SWI, the Swiss-based ABB told swissinfo that Rumsfeld was involved with the company in early 2000, when it netted a $200 million (SFr270million) contract with Pyongyang.’

Yet Rumsfeld of course was Defense Secretary of the same Neo-Con administration that was declaring North Korea part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ along with Saddam Hussein and Iran.

And, of course, Rumsfeld was famously involved in the propping up and arming of Saddam Hussein in the 80s (pictured with Saddam above) – and then was Defense Secretary of the Neo-Con adminsitration that invaded Iraq and overthrew him.

Is precisely the same long-term strategy playing out now?

While oil clearly played a massive, central role in the invasion of Iraq, Escobar notes that North Korea “holds trillions of US dollars in unexplored mineral wealth.” He warned that Americans should “Watch the shadow play by candidates bound to profit from such juicy loot.”

North Korea is also a massive opium producer.

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Not that we should make any excuses for the North Korean regime. And I don’t.

And Kim Jong Un is, of course, a lunatic. And the North Korean regime is a horror story. But any nuclear attack by that regime or even any kind of attack on the US would be suicide and would mean the immediate destruction of that regime – and the regime surely understands that. Which makes the idea of a preemptive action or ‘first strike’ by North Korea unlikely.

And – though, admittedly, trying to apply logic to a madman can be a futile exercise – one would assume that the only thing in the world Kim Jong Un or his regime cares about is self-preservation and holding on to power. Which, they would understand, is certainly not facillitated by carrying out an unnecessary attack on US territory.

Which does raise the question of whether some kind of false-flag might be carried out and attributed to the North Korean regime, as Escobar suggests. I don’t know how likely this is or isn’t – but I did also suggest the possibility of a planned nuclear false-flag myslef a few months ago when a large-scale nuclear attack drill was held in New York.

In terms of North Korea, what the ongoing threat provides the US is the justification for a permanent military presence in that part of the world: and right on China’s borders.

This makes it feasible that the reason the entire North Korean problem is being ramped up right now is because – as John Pilger was saying a year ago in ‘The Coming War on China’ – the Trump administration’s main geopolitical agenda is China. It could be that this is all designed to shift the focus more firmly away from the adequately-wrecked Middle East now and onto China and the Far East.

As expored in an earlier article, there was in fact a period not very long ago when diplomatic relations and economic cooperation between South Korea and the Communist dictatorship of North Korea was apparently moving things into a more promising direction (the ‘Sunshine’ period): but this was brought to a halt when the Cheney/Rumsfeld-led Neo-Con administration of George W. Bush abruptly set relations back onto a firmly adversarial, hostile footing.

Which is, basically, where it has been ever since.

Read more: ‘North Korea & the SUNSHINE Policy – A Different Way Things Might’ve Gone’, ‘Is the US Planning a Nuclear False-Flag?’, ‘North Korea – A Totalitarian Dystopia With a Right to Defend Itself‘…