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Why Are We Still on the DMZ?
Townhall.com ^ | February 15, 2013 | Pat Buchanan

Posted on 02/15/2013 6:18:01 AM PST by Kaslin

North Korea has just pulled off an impressive dual feat -- the successful test both of an intercontinental ballistic missile and an atom bomb in the 6-kiloton range.

Pyongyang's ruler, 30-year-old Kim Jong Un, said the tests are aimed at the United States. So it would seem. One does not build an ICBM to hit Seoul, 30 miles away.

Experts believe North Korea is still far from having the capability to marry a nuclear warhead to a missile that could hit the West Coast. But this seems to be Kim's goal.

Why is he obsessed with a nation half a world away?

America has never recognized his, his father's or his grandfather's regime. We have led the U.N. Security Council in imposing sanctions. We have 28,000 troops in the South and a defense treaty that will bring us into any war with the North from day one, and a U.S. general would assume overall command of U.S. and Republic of Korea troops.

We are South Korea's defense shield and deterrent against the North.

And while America cannot abdicate her responsibility and role in this crisis, we should be asking ourselves: Why is this our crisis in 2013?

President Eisenhower ended the Korean War 60 years ago. The Chinese armies in Korea went home. Twenty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia abandoned communism and ceased to arm the North, and Mao's China gave up world revolution for state capitalism.

Epochal events. Yet U.S. troops still sit on the DMZ, just as their grandfathers did when this writer was still in high school.

Why? North Korea represents no threat to us, and South Korea is not the ruined ravaged land of 1953. It has twice the population of the North, an economy 40 times the size of the North's, and access to the most modern weapons in America's arsenal.

Why were U.S. troops not withdrawn from Korea at the end of the Cold War? Why should we have to fight Seoul's war if Pyongyang attacks, when the South is capable of fighting and winning its own war?

Why is South Korea's defense still America's obligation?

Had the United States moved its soldiers out of South Korea, and its planes and ships offshore, and turned over to Seoul responsibility for its own security, would the North be building missiles that can hit the United States?

Undeniably, Kim Jong Un runs a tyrannical, wretched regime. But its closest neighbors are South Korea, Japan, Russia and China.

Why is Kim Jong Un not primarily their problem, rather than ours?

Had we departed 20 years ago, the South would have built up its own forces to contain the North. Instead, we have allowed it to remain a strategic dependency. And the same holds true for Japan.

Japanese and Chinese warplanes and warships are now circling each other near what Tokyo calls the Senkaku Islands and Beijing calls the Diaoyou. These rocks were occupied by Japan in 1895, when the Empire of the Sun was at war with China and colonizing Taiwan.

After Imperial Japan fell in 1945 and disgorged its colonies, the Senkakus, along with the Ryukyus -- of which the largest is Okinawa -- were returned by President Nixon. And as the Senkakus are but a few rocks sticking out of the East China Sea, no one seemed to mind, before reports surfaced of oil and gas deposits in adjacent waters.

Beijing restated China's claim. Last week, Chinese warships reportedly locked firing radar on Japanese ships and helicopters near the islands. China denies it.

What has this to do with us?

The United States has reportedly signaled Japan that the Senkakus are covered by our mutual defense treaty and if China attacks in those waters, and Japan goes to war, we stand with Japan.

Sixty years ago, U.S. commitments to go to war to keep South Korea and Japan from falling into the Stalin-Mao sphere were supported by Americans, who willingly sent their sons to the Far East to defend the "frontiers of freedom."

But South Korea and Japan long ago became economic powers, fully capable of undertaking their own defense. And the Cold War enemies we confronted no longer exist.

Why have we failed to adapt to the new world we are in? As Lord Salisbury said, "The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies."

Vladimir Putin's Russia is not Stalin's. If Putin is in a quarrel with Japan over the Kuriles, why should that be our quarrel? If Japan is in a quarrel with Xi Jinping's China over the Senkakus, why is that our quarrel?

Are our war guarantees to Japan and South Korea eternal?

Undeniably, should the U.S. seek to renegotiate its defense pacts with Seoul and Tokyo, each would consider, given the rogue regime in the North, a nuclear deterrent of its own. This would stun and shock China.

But what help have the Chinese been to us lately?


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: bhoasia; kimjongun; koreanwar; nknukes; northkorea; nuclearweapons; patbuchanan; safetyandsecurity
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To: cripplecreek
? Not answering my points is the liberal tactic, never mind putting words in someone’s mouth. I said you were advocating a liberal position in my last reply, not calling you a liberal outright.

I don’t believe the status quo is tenable either—but the real alternative is that we have to actually fight, not stand there and look. The DMZ should be at the Arctic Ocean, not where it is presently. Like it or not, fleeing only makes enemies stronger, and the liberals in DC have maintained this status quo to break the will of the US people and make them scared of fighting. Nothing good came from withdrawing from Iraq, just for a recent glaring example—what worked was fighting, and when we stopped fighting, everything stopped working. Any enemy will not “want us there”, but the thing is that we have to not worry about what is wanted and what is not, otherwise we give in to people like Psy (not that he is particularly politically relevant, but his attitude was influenced by others who are).
41 posted on 02/15/2013 8:32:53 AM PST by Olog-hai
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To: Eric in the Ozarks; Olog-hai; cripplecreek

Here’s another ingredient for the recipe:

Stop all trade with communist and totalitarian nations.

Globalists have us giving China the billions in exchange for goods. Our government then borrows back some of this from them.

New world order globalists “advice” in Washington DC keeps us from ever having an outright war with communism, keeps us trading with them. We are opposing communism politically but subsidizing it. Then, trying to keep it from taking more territories. Communism loves to annex nations where the nations are wealthy from capitalism or have raw materials. Annex means take over to get a nation’s output at cost, as opposed to trade, where these things are purchased. Of course, under totalitarianism (which also breeds corruption), no one is motivated for real productivity, aggregate output shrinks and people starve.

America is now subsidizing China. For example, energy and food. The idea is, cut American consumption to lower the price at which China can buy. We supply a good bit of China’s coal (which is the majority of its electricity supply), yet hammer ourselves in our own electricity prices. This is nwo strategy, all you need to do is visit the websites of the Foundations, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Soros, etc., and you’ll see the agendas laid out.

If nwo can influence US policy and public opinion enough that the US will not intervene if China takes SK, nwo will give China the ok to take SK vicariously through NK. IMHO, the NWO plan - all it will take is a few more years of tottering US, where the US economy gets significantly worse, and then a real push for isolationism in the US, stirring up the right emotions in SK, Japan and the US. After a long, protracted, but very limited conventional war, SK can surrender to NK. If the US has enough other massive problems of its own, this plan would seem to be possible.

IMHO, what we need is a war on NWO. After that, American taxpayers would be able to stop subsidizing totalitarian states.


42 posted on 02/15/2013 8:47:43 AM PST by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: Olog-hai

Sometimes it takes a brave man to walk away from a fight but a particularly stupid coward refuses to back down from a fight he’s long since won.

There’s something seriously wrong with having soldiers stationed on foreign bases built by their grandfathers or even great grandfathers.


43 posted on 02/15/2013 8:49:20 AM PST by cripplecreek (REMEMBER THE RIVER RAISIN!)
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To: PieterCasparzen

Of course nowadays we have politicians in DC that are not so hostile to communism in any form, and don’t even mention the word “communism”, preferring to rather campaign on communism’s catchphrases and if the word “communism” ever comes up, the compliant press feeds the masses the tired old line that the fall of the USSR was also the fall of communism.

Seems like Khrushchev’s legendary advice of feeding the USA’s masses small doses of socialism akin to the way to get someone hooked on drugs (or to paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, to be Sanctus Nicolaus ex machina) was followed to the letter by the USA’s own liberal politicians. Part and parcel of this, though, was the hollowing out of the USA’s own manufacturing base, so that in case the enemies of communism (and all forms of leftism) should again gain power, the means to defend against it would be gone, and the people would be dependent on the industrialized totalitarian regimes for all the essentials of domestic supply (to paraphrase Hamilton).


44 posted on 02/15/2013 8:56:35 AM PST by Olog-hai
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To: cripplecreek

Everything you say makes sense, especially from the viewpoint of being averse to empire and being offended by the notion of empire. Problem is, we have not won the fight but abandoned it. Our enemies are very much not averse to empire. Winning the fight means stamping out the ideology behind the enemies’ aggression, ultimately. What is really killing the US right now is having leadership in DC with ideology in line with that of our enemies, and said leadership in command of our fighting forces.


45 posted on 02/15/2013 9:02:07 AM PST by Olog-hai
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To: DesertRhino

New world order, emanating out of European international banking, must be understood in order to know why the 20th century saw the number and type of wars that it did.

The Council on Foreign Relations directs US foreign policy, and it’s sister organization directs that of the UK. The CFR is the tool by which NWO manipulates US foreign policy. NWO successfully sought all America’s involvements in wars in the 20th century. An interesting primer on the subject is “Shadows of Power” by Perloff.

In Washington’s day, America was a colony. He actually advocated staying out of international entanglements for a few decades. He certainly would have realized that since America is the pre-eminent power in the world today that complete isolationism would work to America’s detriment today.

Of course, it is unwise, even for a major power, to be causing trouble, revolutions, wars, etc., that work to the ultimate detriment of the citizens of other nations. That’s where NWO comes in; they are the primary architects of that nonsense. A great example today is the so-called “arab spring”, a nwo operation. The Mideast, Africa, the Far East; they’ve all been manipulated by international banking ad nauseum, in everything from the Opium Wars to the Boer Wars to the slave trade, and of course, manipulations continue to this day.

It was very unfortunate that the founders sought European investment for the Revolution, but that was possible to overcome. During the 1800’s however, european international banking got its investment claws deeply sunk into America by financing, and profiting from, a lot of its development. The wealthy American “tycoons” became inextricably intertwined with international banking, ultimately resulting in the Federal Reserve, the foundation system, CFR, etc., making America, in effect, the leading subsidiary of new world order.

A key figure in this time is George Peabody, the “father” of the foundation system in the US, mentor of J P Morgan’s father and a key operator in the US for European interests, to say the least.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Peabody


46 posted on 02/15/2013 9:24:08 AM PST by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: Kaslin
Experts believe North Korea is still far from having the capability to marry a nuclear warhead to a missile that could hit the West Coast. But this seems to be Kim's goal.

They have no SHIPS?

47 posted on 02/15/2013 9:48:10 AM PST by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Kaslin
Why Are We Still on the DMZ?

UHhh...

To be close to CHINA?

48 posted on 02/15/2013 9:48:57 AM PST by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
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To: Kaslin

I sleep better at night knowing Kim will never be able to hit the East Coast with an ICBM...


49 posted on 02/15/2013 10:45:25 AM PST by FDNYRHEROES (It's 3 AM. Let me sleep on it. I'll get back to you in 16 hours.)
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To: Elsie

SK should air drop free food and toilet paper strung along the boarder, then just mow the Commies down when they come running out to get fed and wipe themselves clean.


50 posted on 02/15/2013 11:15:18 AM PST by RavenLooneyToon (Tail gunner Joe was right.)
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To: Olog-hai

“...telling allies to go it alone means that the “foreign entanglement” remains, and remains unresolved. It also makes us look like extremely unreliable allies.”

I agree. The United States is already perceived that way in many parts or the world. We should also keep in mind that it is this worldwide network of bases that allows the US to project it’s power all over the world. Isolation means giving up this forward position. The lessons of WWI and WWII (and Thomas Jefferson, for that matter) teach us that isolation is no bulwark against “foreign entanglements”.

It seems neither strategy is 100% satisfying.

While it is true the President Washington admonished the nation not to get involved in foreign entanglements. It is also true that he and his successors ignored that advice completely, and got the nation involved in all kinds of “foreign entanglements” - because that’s how the world is. A president can hardly do otherwise.

North Korea + ICBMs + nuclear weapons vs. missile defence (that’s one thing President Bush had right). 1 missile to Seoul and South Korea is done. A withdrawl of the US umbrella means nuclear proliferation as the south responds with the only proven way to counter nuclear weapons - MAD. Ditto across Asia. Does this enhance US security or hurt it?


51 posted on 02/15/2013 12:10:29 PM PST by Owl558 ("Those who remember George Satayana are doomed to repeat him")
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To: PieterCasparzen

Pieter, I’ve agreed with many of your postings but I must disagree with calling PB’s get the troops out of SK and Germany as supporting the NWO. I think the NWO has been using/busing the US Military since WW 1, if not before.


52 posted on 02/15/2013 12:24:23 PM PST by iopscusa (El Vaquero. (SC Lowcountry Cowboy))
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To: iopscusa; Owl558
1 missile to Seoul and South Korea is done. A withdrawl of the US umbrella means nuclear proliferation as the south responds with the only proven way to counter nuclear weapons - MAD. Ditto across Asia. Does this enhance US security or hurt it?

...

... disagree with calling PB’s get the troops out of SK and Germany as supporting the NWO. I think the NWO has been using/busing the US Military since WW 1, if not before.

Well, right now we have a future of NWO in the background influencing all the important governments, the Chinese urbanization bubble creating a huge appetite for grabbing up smaller productive nations, as well as raw materials. This drives up global commodity prices creating a stronger headwind for Chinese economic prosperity the bigger the bubble gets. IMHO, pulling US troops out SK makes US backing for SK much less certain. Though SK might be able to take on NK by itself, if China were to come to the aid of NK and the US did not aid SK, SK would be gobbled up.

Of course, it is sensible to object to NWO influences of wars, revolutions and enslaving people to government debt. Up this point, of course, NWO has not precipitated direct war between the three superpowers, however we can't assume that this will always be NWO's plan. However, with or without NWO (though it looks like NWO is well-implanted), signing over SK to China would just build the Chinese bubble higher, IMHO.
53 posted on 02/15/2013 3:55:04 PM PST by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: petro45acp
Cause we said we would.....

Forever?

54 posted on 02/15/2013 3:56:06 PM PST by Pearls Before Swine
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To: Eric in the Ozarks; Kozak

What are you talking about? South Korea has one of the most powerful ground forces in the world. They have a fairly well equipped army of some 500,000 men, with reserves of another 3-million. To put that in perspective, the US Army has 560,000 men, and reserves of another 560,000. Keep in mind, South Korea has only 1/6th the population of the US. In terms of military expenditures as a percentage of GDP, they’re the fourth largest military budgeted nation on Earth. South Korea is not some unmilitarized country by any reasonable measure.


55 posted on 02/15/2013 4:52:15 PM PST by JerseyanExile
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To: JerseyanExile

Sounds as if you know SK’s status pretty well.
Why are we there ?


56 posted on 02/15/2013 7:21:33 PM PST by Eric in the Ozarks (NRA Life Member)
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To: Eric in the Ozarks

Primarily, in order to show both of the Koreas that in the event of a war between the two, the US will automatically join with the South. That’s the reason what ground troops we do have are positioned so close to the DMZ. Militarily, positioning them there is a bad idea. But it serves a political purpose - by putting them directly in the line of fire if war breaks out, it sends a message that the US would be drawn into said war - we wouldn’t really have the option of deciding to ignore any defense treaties we have with the South.

South Korea is more then capable of defeating the north militarily on its own. But that would come at the cost of grievous casualties to the civilian population due to the truly immense numbers of artillery pieces the North Koreans have along the DMZ. Even without nukes, they could potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people. US air and naval power would be the primary contribution in the event of a war - knocking out North Korean artillery and rocket batteries.


57 posted on 02/15/2013 10:58:12 PM PST by JerseyanExile
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To: Pearls Before Swine

Point taken, we wouldn’t be there in the first place....

Recommend the movie “Back to School” with Rodney Dangerfield, Sally Kellerman.......the scene between Dangerfield and Sam Kinneson.....


58 posted on 02/16/2013 3:26:28 AM PST by petro45acp (No good endeavour survives an excess of adult supervision)
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Comment #59 Removed by Moderator

To: PieterCasparzen

I’m thinking NWO=UN, WB, IMF, BIS, EU, GB, USSA, Israel + smaller allied countries + Saudi Arabia & all dollar based oil producing countries. NATO has become the enforcement and acquisition arm of the NWO. Feel free to disabuse if you think this is not correct.


60 posted on 02/17/2013 8:24:31 AM PST by iopscusa (El Vaquero. (SC Lowcountry Cowboy))
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