War Threatened Over Anti-North Leaflets
(Washington Times)…Jack Kim, Reuters News Agency, Oct 29, 2008.
North Korea’s military threatened on Tuesday to use everything in its arsenal to reduce South Korea to rubble unless Seoul stops civic groups from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the communist state.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 26, 2008
Military Talks Set To Begin
South Korea accepted a North Korean proposal to hold military talks, a Defense Ministry official said Saturday. Ties between the two countries, which are still technically at war, have soured since South Korea’s pro-U.S. president, Lee Myung-bak, took office in February with a pledge to get tough with North Korea. In protest, North Korea suspended reconciliation talks. But South Korea agreed to a meeting Monday, the Defense Ministry official said.
Newsweek, Periscope, Nukes: Too Deep To Hit, By Mark Hosenball, November 3, 2008
Western intelligence experts believe that Iran’s nuclear facilities are so deep underground that it would be difficult for Israel to wipe them out, or even significantly damage them, with a quick airstrike. In order to deal a serious setback to Iran’s nuclear program, at least four key sites inside Iran would have to be hit, said one Western official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information. The facilities, however, are located in tunnels fortified by barriers more than 60 feet thick. According to this official and other U.S. experts, Israel does not possess conventional weapons capable of knocking out the facilities. Breaking through the thick shell would require, at minimum, several bunker-buster bombs striking precisely the same spot. “These targets would be very hard to destroy,” said former U.N. nuclear expert David Albright.
Theoretically, Israel could do a lot more damage with a nuclear strike. But U.S. and other Western experts say there is no reason to believe the Israelis will abandon their policy against shooting first with nukes.
Casualty Of The Surge, (Washington Post)…Michael Gerson, Oct 24, 2008.
The dramatic success of the surge in Iraq is not a central issue in the current presidential race. It did, however, set its shape — and may help determine its outcome in an unexpected way.
John McCain won the nomination of his party, in large part, as a vindicated prophet. After visiting Iraq in the summer of 2003, he argued on “Meet the Press” that “the men and women in the military are doing a superb job. . . . The problem is that they don’t have enough resources. There’s not enough of them, and we are in a very serious situation, in my view, a race against time.” McCain added, “Time is not on our side …
This raises the question: If McCain benefited politically from being correct about the surge, why has Barack Obama not been punished for opposing it?
It was, after all, the single most important decision Obama has made as a public official. His judgment? “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” This initial reluctance is perhaps understandable; many shared it. But Obama persisted in his skepticism after the results became evident. Even in July of this year, he argued, “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.”
But the main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table.
So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency.
And McCain is left with a poignant comfort. He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war.
Stopping A Nuclear Tehran, (Washington Post)…Daniel R. Coats and Charles S. Robb, October 23, 2008, Pg. 19
It is likely that the first and most pressing national security issue the next president will face is the growing prospect of a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran. After co-chairing a recently concluded, high-level task force on Iranian nuclear development, we have come to believe that five principles must serve as the foundation of any reasonable, bipartisan and comprehensive Iranian policy.
… Fourth, so that Israel does not feel compelled to take unilateral action, the next president must credibly convince Jerusalem that the United States will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability.
Both to increase our leverage over Iran and to prepare for a military strike, if one were required, the next president will need to begin building up military assets in the region from day one.
Daniel R. Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia, are co-chairmen of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s national security task force on Iran.
Sen. Obama has stated as recently as Oct 3, 2008, that ” the use of military force should not be taken off the table when dealing with Iran, which he called “a threat to all of us.” Sen McCain has stated that “We cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon”
The Philippines: America’s Other War On Terrorism(McClatchy Newspapers (mcclatchydc.com))…Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers, Oct 22, 2008.
…On a Southeast Asian front that’s vital yet largely unfamiliar to most Americans, some 500 U.S. Special Operations Forces and their Filipino counterparts have been fighting a different, unconventional — and seemingly successful — war against Islamic terrorist groups with links to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida.
The lessons of this relatively low-budget effort could be invaluable as the next U.S. president assumes the task of fighting Islamic extremism with a federal Treasury drained by the nation’s economic woes and the Army and Marine Corps strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2 British Antiterror Experts Say U.S. Takes Wrong Path, (New York Times)…Raymond Bonner, October 22, 2008,
Pg. 12
Two prominent British counterterrorism figures have criticized the United States for what they described as its overly militaristic approach to fighting terrorism and warned of a further erosion of civil liberties.
POST: Catching up with the Kims, Thomas P.M. Barnett on October 22, 2008
My years-old diagnosis for the second Bush term remains valid: deal with Iran, push North Korea’s collapse.
ARTICLE: Forget not their abominations, By Václav Havel and Kjell Magne Bondevik, September 19, 2008
… we must not lose sight of the fact that the North Korean government remains responsible for one of the most staggering human-rights and humanitarian disasters in the world.
The world cannot continue to postpone discussion of these critical issues. We owe it to the people of North Korea to finally take action to alleviate their misery.
U.S. Reaffirms Commitment To Defending South Korea
(Korea Herald)…News Reports, October 18, 2008
The United States yesterday made official its commitment to deploy “appropriate” additional forces to South Korea if necessary on the peninsula.
Under a Korea-U.S. alliance agreement, if a war breaks out on the peninsula, Washington plans to send 690,000 troops, 160 warships and 2,000 aircraft. The size of reinforcements will remain the same, the official said.
Next President’s Iraq War, (Washington Times)…Austin Bay, Oct 17, 2008. p25.
In a month, Iraq will be the next president’s war. From the American perspective, the next president’s phase of the Iraq war will be twofold. First off, it will be a proxy war with Iran’s tyrannical mullahs. The second “fold” will be even more strategically significant: The next president’s war will measure America’s commitment to defending democracy and promoting genuine international security in the 21st century.
The Iraqi perspective differs a shade. Iraq’s war will be yet another Iran-Iraq war, but one where the Iraqis will have an organizational advantage and a significant ideological edge.
Iraq’s organizational advantage has two components. First and foremost, Iraq engages Iran with the United States as an active ally – unless the next U.S. president proves feckless and makes the inexcusably stupid mistake of denying Iraq diplomatic and military support in a crisis.
Iraq’s second organizational advantage is its increasingly capable military and more responsive government.
The next president will be tested by these robed thugs.
Iraq’s emerging democracy presents the mullahs with a complex challenge. Democracy gives Iraq an ideological advantage in its struggle with Iran’s dictatorship. Disgust and discontent has become a way of life inside Iran. The Khomeinist revolution has failed and fossilized as a corrupt theocracy backed by secret police and Revolutionary Guards. The Iranian people look west and see Iraqi Arabs and Kurds seizing a historic opportunity to create their own open, democratic system – and they know the mullahs are the gangsters denying them that opportunity.
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