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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the White's Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been who's win?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got the great Sheldon Richman from the Libertarian Institute.
He's the executive editor.
Every Friday he writes, the goal is freedom.
TGIF.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, man?
I'm doing great.
Glad to be back.
Good.
Your article is TGIF, Trump's fire and fury wouldn't be the first for North Korea.
And I was actually just being interviewed and I got to basically plagiarize you and make a lot of your points here about how, you know, this is the forgotten war that Americans hardly know a thing about.
And yet to the North Koreans, my Jesus, this is the worst thing that ever happened to them.
Worse even than the occupation by the Japanese during the second world war.
That's right.
I mean, people may know about the war from MASH, the TV show MASH, the movie MASH.
But if that's all you know about it, you're going to get a very misleading picture.
I mean, of course that was focusing on a mobile army hospital.
And so you saw people who had been shot and people who had been injured in bombings.
And so you might just think, well, it just sounds like sort of the old fashioned conventional war, right?
Where people were shooting and there's some bombing.
But what, in fact, the United States did to the North in that war, actually to a great deal of the South, was to carpet bomb the place and using napalm, or what's also known as jellied gasoline, which just sets people on fire, very hot temperatures, terrible way to go, and leveled North Korea, leveled, bombed, and raised every town and village.
And North Korea was more industrialized than North Vietnam was.
And so the damage from the bombing there was far greater.
And as Bruce Cummings, the great historian of Korea, the Korean and he's written his own article in the Guardian on the subject just recently, they dropped more napalm, the US dropped more napalm on North Korea than they dropped on North Vietnam, which I was kind of stunned to read.
I just did not know that.
So the facts are quite stunning.
If you don't know a lot about the war, or even just, you know, know as much as I thought I knew about the war until fairly recently, that the bombing effort was devastating.
It, like I said, more napalm on North Korea than on North Vietnam.
And they did contemplate the use of nuclear weapons.
Truman had nuclear bombs brought to Korea, the military thought the targets weren't suitable, too small.
And so they never did use nukes, although he threatened, Truman did threaten even publicly at a press conference, threatened to use all everything in the arsenal.
And so it's a horrible thing.
Of course, the point was when Trump threatens fire and fury, they've experienced fire and fury.
Certainly, the grandparents of this current generation in North Korea know something about fire and fury.
Yeah, now, I guess I should say that besides MASH, there are two other things that I know about the Korean War previously sort of had an image in my mind, I guess, maybe some of them from, you know, clips I'd seen on TV, documentaries and so forth.
And that would be when the Chinese so called volunteers came pouring across the border when and I guess I know a little bit more about the history where MacArthur didn't need to and maybe I forget, it could have been even in defiance of orders.
Pushed all the way up to the Chinese border almost to it.
And at that point, that was when the Chinese counterattacked.
The volunteers part is a joke that Maus was like pretending that this was deniable.
This wasn't an official Chinese intervention in the war.
These were just volunteer, I guess, militia guys who went across to defend their Korean friends.
That's just the international politics of it.
But so I guess I've seen footage of those swarms of the North Koreans.
And then there's the story of the heroic landing at Incheon, the very risky landing at high tide at Incheon to turn the tide of the war and to force the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel and all of this.
But so that's it.
Right.
And I'm the kind of guy who I like knowing about stuff, but I hadn't read Cummings book yet or anything like that.
And I never learned really any of what you're talking about until I read an article by him at the History News Network go back five, 10 years ago now.
But it's called Why Truman Really Fired MacArthur.
And it's because MacArthur was hell bent on using especially cobalt laced nuclear bombs.
And he wanted to cover the entire border region of Korea and China with this radioactive cobalt that would poison the border for 10,000 years or whatever in order to keep the Chinese out.
And that was finally when Truman got rid of him.
But that was my first introduction to the story of just this complete carpet bombing, destruction, air war against North Korea.
And it makes perfect sense.
Right.
We know this was the end of World War Two was strategic bombing, meaning not tactical bombing, meaning burn their city to the ground.
Right.
So we should have guessed.
But I know in my life, I was born in 76.
So I grew up in the shadow of Vietnam and MASH, as you say, as far as Korea.
But other than that, it was a forgotten war.
No one ever discussed the North Korean side of the story or what they experienced in the war at all in any context, in any.
There was no Charlie Sheen movie about it or nothing.
Yeah, you know, of course, the U.S., it was the first then in a consecutive string of lost wars by the United States, so they didn't want to talk about it.
You know, things didn't come out well.
Obviously, look, there hasn't been a peace treaty yet in that war.
That war is not over, actually, which is a fact that the North Koreans have been reminding the Americans for many years.
This predates Kim Jong Un.
So, you know, it's not a war that got a lot, that got talked about a lot.
As far as MacArthur goes, I was looking, there was something from Cummings about MacArthur's firing, and he points out that, I'm trying to find it now in the article, that he didn't fire MacArthur because of insubordination, which is the typical explanation, right?
MacArthur wanted a more aggressive war and wanted to go into China and was disobeying orders.
But Cummings says it was, in effect, I think he said he just, he was, Truman was at that point in favor of using nuclear weapons, or certainly in favor of considering them, but he just thought that he wanted, as Cummings puts it, he wanted a reliable commander on the scene should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons.
So, they didn't break over the use of nuclear weapons, according to Cummings, who I think has pretty good authority on this.
Yeah, no, that was, I'm sorry if I kind of oversimplify that.
That's the title of the article I was referring to, but he gets into it.
Yeah, it's much more nuanced than that.
And I should also mention, there's a great, I don't know, hour or something long interview of Cummings on YouTube, if people just, it's Cummings with one M, I believe.
Yes.
And so just type in Bruce Cummings in YouTube, and there's this thing where, he's a very interesting guy, too.
I like his entire temperament and way that he goes about it.
He clearly has no love, it's not like he's some weird kind of sub-Maoist with some, you know, favoritism toward the North Korean regime.
He says it's the most militarist regime in history, where the, in terms of percentage of the population, it's an absolute garrison state.
It's a totalitarian nightmare in every way.
And he doesn't even just say that as a disclaimer.
I mean, he wants you to understand that.
And then, but still, he also wants to help you understand the role of America in making them what they are today, too.
He also points out, in one of the things I read when preparing for that article, that China did not get involved in the war until a couple of months after the United States had already bombed the location in China.
It was like two more months before China gets into it.
That doesn't sound like they were poised to get into it.
And, you know, he goes through how Stalin and Mao, at various times after 1948 or something, were discouraging the current Kim's grandfather from attacking.
Of course, there were skirmishes across the border, some of which were instigated by Syngman Rhee's dictatorship in South Vietnam.
Another thing to we should just put on the table is that- South Korea, you meant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
South Korea was not a free country.
So the US wasn't coming to the aid of a free country against a communist country.
Syngman Rhee was a dictator who was in close coordination with Koreans who had been Japanese collaborators.
And of course, there's great hatred among Koreans for the Japanese.
The Japanese conquered them, made Korea, the unified Korea, a colony in, what, 1910 and was brutal to them.
So that's a big issue.
Of course, Japan is a very close ally of the United States and, of course, South Korea.
So that's also part of this friction between the North and the United States.
And as Cummings points out in an article he had in The Nation not long ago, I link to it in my piece, the grandfather of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, his grandfather was labeled a class A war criminal by the US after World War II.
He was a general in Korea.
And Kim Jong-un's grandfather fought, who was the first communist dictator of North Korea, fought against Abe's grandfather.
So all these issues are there.
And, you know, Americans may not know about this stuff, but the Koreans do.
Yeah.
Well, and I think Americans just wouldn't imagine.
I mean, look, I never knew until somebody told me very explicitly, it might've been Anthony Gregory, who told me he's half Korean.
So that means he has a little bit of a stake in having a little bit finer knowledge about this issue than some of the rest of us.
It may be from him that I finally learned that the people that were the government of the South, the Syngman Rhee regime that you referred to there, that these were the Vichy sock puppets of the Japanese empire, that America took their side in the war.
It would be like if during the American Revolution, the French had come and backed the Tories over all the American patriots or that kind of thing.
Right.
And so, yeah, it was the communists in the North, but they were the ones who had led the fight against the Japanese on our same side in the war that had just ended.
And then, I mean, well, look, if we had made a pretty shoddy analogy to the American Revolution, look at France.
What if after we liberated France, we kept the Vichy regime there and foisted the Vichy regime on the rest of France instead of the patriots who'd fought against them?
And can you imagine that's what we did to the Koreans here?
No, that's right.
And Americans are oblivious of that.
And if they even have heard about it, which I'm sure they haven't, they'd be sort of insensitive to it.
They'd say, OK, what's the big deal?
But it is a big deal.
And the people are told that generation to generation that's passed down.
And it seems to me it does.
It does crystallize in this case of Prime Minister Abe of Japan.
You know, I didn't know that until, you know, the last year reading up on this as things began to heat up the last several months.
And who knew?
Who knew that Abe's grandfather was branded a Class A war criminal by the United States in his, you know, domination and brutality to the Koreans.
So when Americans look at this, they look at it with such a shallow amount of knowledge, and even that overstates their amount of knowledge.
It's not even shallow.
It's like an empty pool.
It's not a shallow pool.
It's an empty pool.
There's nothing there.
And so I don't know how the average person assesses what's going on.
They don't know that the North Koreans for many years now have asked for a formal peace treaty ending the war, a non-aggression pact with the United States, and an end to these provocative war exercises, which are going to start, I think, on the 21st.
Once again, they do, I think, twice a year that Americans and the South Koreans hold war games, play war games on the border and along the coast with North Korea.
And they practice invasion.
They practice regime change.
And they practice flying B-1B bombers, which are nuclear capable, you know, over North Korea.
And Doug Bondow, who is, of course, an analyst who's been watching and writing about Korea for 30 years at least and has written some books and has visited Pyongyang and North Korea, he says they fly over North Korea.
They don't just fly offshore to practice or over South Korea.
He says they violate North Korean airspace.
You know, imagine if Mexico became allied with the Soviet Union, let's say, you know, pre-1991, and they were doing similar kinds of war games near the United States, the coast and the border, the southern border.
What would Americans be saying?
It doesn't look like harmless, you know, practicing of some, you know, military capabilities.
It looks aggressive.
And yet we never want to look at things from the receiving end.
You know, we can tell ourselves, oh, it's not aggressive.
It's just readiness.
But why should the other side believe that?
Why should Tillerson, why should they believe Tillerson when he says we don't intend regime change?
I mean, they once said they didn't intend a regime change in Libya.
And Kim Jong-un is well aware what happened in Libya when, you know, we started bombing allegedly just to protect the civilians of Benghazi who weren't actually under any threat.
And then they ended up, NATO ended up bombing on behalf of Al-Qaeda types who got rid of Gaddafi and did some pretty nasty things before killing him on the roadside back in 2011.
So he's aware of all that.
Why should he trust the United States?
And, you know, things seem to have cooled down the last day or two, and I hope kind of stays that way.
But Trump is in a tough spot on other accounts, and he may decide turning back to Korea as a way to take everybody's mind off it and look strong.
And, you know, that's what has me worried.
He may decide that's the way to get everybody's mind off these other things.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, the most likely outcome here is that Congress removes him and makes me the new president of the United States.
And then at that point, I'm still going to be stuck with Trump's cabinet, though.
So if I went ahead and told Tillerson, hey, go to Pyongyang and tell them the war's over.
Here's the peace treaty.
Here's the security guarantee.
We'll never attack in a million years.
By the way, we're dropping all sanctions.
Congress can go to hell.
We just won't enforce them.
And we're going to end all these war games.
And we insist that you and South Korea be friends and you guys open up negotiations.
We're pulling all our troops out and going home.
That sounds to the status quo, you know, typical person, you know, used to the status quo, I guess I should say, like some kind of, obviously, crazy extreme position.
It's so far from the reality that we're living now.
If I did that, would that just be stupid and naive?
And then the evil villains of Pyongyang would just cackle an evil laugh and get away with some horrible blue bloody murder?
Or do you think that that's possibly anything like a realistic answer to the outstanding problems between the Koreas, the U.S., Japan, etc.?
Well, I think it's entirely realistic.
We can't obviously with certainty predict the future, but we have some indications from the past.
The closest we came to resolving things and defusing this came in during the Clinton years, when he did enter into a comprehensive agreement with the Koreans, which included a non-aggression pact or security pact.
You know, he was also planning an invasion around 1994.
So, you know, his hands certainly weren't clean.
And the U.S. was also going to be providing some aid in one way was going to be by furnishing heating oil.
So their power could be generated that way rather than through nuclear means, because there was a South, North Koreans had a plutonium program going on, which of course, you know, the Clinton administration thought was actually to create fuel or create plutonium for bombs rather than just fuel.
And so, and for eight years under that agreement, the Koreans, the North Koreans froze production of of plutonium and that took them into the Bush years.
So that went beyond the Clinton years.
It was in up to like 2002 or 2003, something like that, maybe into 2002.
But Clinton himself, I don't know exactly why, whether he was getting pressure from the right, you know, he was the great triangulator and maybe didn't want to alienate some right wingers.
He began reneging on the deal and didn't, I don't think furnish the oil or didn't furnish all the oil.
He didn't fulfill, fully fulfill the terms, which made the North Koreans nervous.
And then Bush comes in and Bush then cancels the whole thing, claims that they were cheating.
Although I think it was like, you know, Iraq's WMD didn't provide any evidence of that.
They just were what Trump seems to be about to do with the Iranians.
He just claimed they were cheating and then named them thanks to David Frum, I guess, and the acts of evil in this 2002 State of the Union address, folding them in with Iran and Iraq in the axis of evil, which was a clear message to Kim Jong-un's father that you can't trust or deal with the United States.
So I believe I have the sequence right.
You can correct me.
I think you know about this too.
They pulled out of the nonproliferation treaty, which they weren't even subject to inspections any longer because before that they were in the NPT, just like the Iran is and has been.
And so Bush let everything get out of hand because then he pulled out of that and there weren't even any inspections and they went ahead with their program.
There was some half-hearted attempt to restart things, multilateral talks later in the Bush years, but it didn't come to anything.
But again, Kim's father didn't have any reason to trust the Americans.
He had trusted them.
He had frozen plutonium for eight years and look what it got him.
So yeah, I can, you can see why they'd be leery about that.
US conduct since then in Iraq and Libya and the attempts at getting rid of Assad in Syria just send the message that what's this, you know, we need, you need nukes to deter the United States.
History shows it, the recent record shows it.
And I can see what they're thinking.
So what you say would be, be promising.
I mean, there's every reason to think it would be promising.
There's not a, there's not a great loss in doing it.
Yeah.
I mean, so we give up some exercises and we sign a peace treaty and a security pact.
Well, you know, there's this thing, Sheldon, I don't know if you saw it, but our friend Peter Lee, China hand on Twitter, everybody followed China hand his, his avatar is a Franco American SpaghettiO.
And he's a really, really bright guy.
And he tweeted out last week, a link to this op-ed in the New York times.
And I'm sorry, I forget who it was, pardon me, LA times.
And it was some think tank guy or something, a former official kind of guy.
And, but I think it really hit the nail on the head here.
And it said that, listen, we prefer the status quo.
We could make peace with the North Koreans one way or the other.
Scott Horton's way or another way, but then we wouldn't be able to hang their danger over the head of South Korea and Japan.
And if we made peace with North Korea, then that means we could lose our influence over South Korea and Japan, and they could all end up dominated in the orbit of China, which we must prevent at all costs.
And so it's better to keep this crisis, even at a level of nuclear brinksmanship like this, people are invoking the Cuban missile crisis and all of this stuff because peace is worse.
It's like the report from iron mountain or whatever.
The desirability of peace is very low on their scale of the way they look at these things.
I mean, they're not even embarrassed to write that in the LA times.
Like, shouldn't that be the subject of some horrible conspiracy interpretation of events?
And then they admit it.
I don't think we should discount that.
We know from a lot of other regions of the world that the U.S. is involved in, that there's a lot they don't want to give up.
So the military, the contractors, the military contractors, the political side of it, there's power and prestige in this far-flung empire.
And why give up any part of it if you don't have to?
They don't want to look like they're retrenching at all.
People may take the wrong message from that.
Also, I'm annoyed with the way Trump is putting this on China.
That seems like the easy way out for a lot of people.
Well, let's have China handle it.
They have the greatest leverage.
They'll do it.
And then if they don't do it, he can then say, well, we gave them a chance.
They didn't help us.
They didn't cooperate.
So therefore we can go ahead with our 35% tariff.
And the other day he said, they're stealing from us.
It's really odd when people make a good offer, bring you consumer goods at a good price and you accuse them of stealing from you.
It's a very odd worldview.
So I think China's in a way being set up by Trump so that he can justify his aggressive economic warfare against China.
It's not in China's ballpark.
It's for us to sit down with that regime in Pyongyang and finally end the war and end the conduct that implies the war's still on, namely all these exercises that are threatening.
Most people seem to understand that Kim is not suicidal, that he's not insane.
He could be brutal, but brutal's not the same thing as insane.
He wants to live.
He wants to keep his regime.
I mean, it's a terrible regime.
I hope the Korean people would do something about that.
The North Korean people would do something about that and change it and have a liberal society that would be wonderful.
But we can't do that.
And he's not suicidal.
So he's not going to invite a nuclear strike or even a massive conventional strike by the United States on his country.
And all his so-called threats are always hypothetical, right?
If the U.S. does such and such, we will do such and such.
That's a different kind of threat from, you know, I'm developing a nuclear bomb so I can drop it on you one day.
You know, that's an unconditional threat.
He's simply threatening to retaliate.
And we never, the news media doesn't even like to make that distinction.
They say, you know, when the report came out from the Washington Post just what was the last week about the miniaturization, which was a hyped up bogus, pretty much bogus story.
Because three years earlier, I think it was Doug Bando pointed this out in one of his articles.
Three years earlier, a Republican congressman was saying there's a DNI report that, or DIA, what is it, DIA report.
Yeah, DIA.
Yeah, that shows they miniaturized.
So it's like three years ago they were saying the same thing.
And then we have the reports from- And even then the language was, well, we think that they probably could have by now, kind of thing.
Yeah, it's an assessment.
Not we have a spy who told us.
Well, it's an assessment.
The Post didn't even see the document.
They read, I think, one line from it or something like that.
And as we know from our friends, Phil Giraldi and Ray McGovern, an assessment is not evidence.
It's an assessment.
And they don't even give us the evidence the assessment was based on.
But when that story broke, I was watching CNN at the time.
It was like mid-afternoon or something.
And they had Barbara Starr, who's their Pentagon stenographer, saying, this is just another step toward North Korea's threat to attack the United States.
As if they had just the standing threat to attack the United States as soon as they're capable.
Well, even the Guam thing said, the quote was, and hey, I don't read Korean, but the translation that I read said that the dictator had warned, well, I'm ordering the military to begin to assess options and plans for the possibility of a missile attack near Guam or some kind of thing like that, where even in Korea, he built in, just like a Clinton or something, he built in all this lawyerly language of give me a few subjects and verbs of disclaimer between here and the threat.
Because they're playing that same game of diplomatic language and this and that.
But it doesn't matter, right?
Because then the Americans go, oh, they threatened to nuke us.
I'm like, geez, he really kind of fell short of a direct threat there, deliberately so.
No, several times that day on CNN, we're talking about this longstanding, that was the term, longstanding threat to attack the United States.
Luckily, one of their people who has actually been to Pyongyang, I think like a dozen times and fairly lately, Will Ripley, kept saying that it was an insurance policy, which of course, any bomb that they have is an insurance policy, which of course goes against the general narrative that they're just an aggressive power that is bent on attacking the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
He at least was stressing that, no, it's a deterrent.
And a few other people were willing to say that, but they never integrated it and said, well, wait a second, if we're saying it's a deterrent or an insurance policy, why are we also saying it's a step toward his carrying out his longstanding threat to attack the United States?
I mean, those two things don't go together.
Let's get our story straight, people here at CNN.
Well, that ain't never gonna happen.
Well, you know what, man?
Eric Gares told me that he saw Charles Kruthammer on the Tucker Carlson show and that Tucker Carlson said, well, Charles Kruthammer, I mean, this guy is the sage of Fox News for whatever reason, you know, the go-to guy for all opinions on everything, wrong about everything, horrible hawk on everything.
And he said, hey, look, when Trump says, and it's probably just because he's worried about how unstable Trump is, but he says, when Trump says, look, if you keep threatening us, then we're going to bring you this lake of fire and all of this, you know, what have you, that, and yes, that's a paraphrase, everybody, but which, you know what I mean?
That, that that's not right, man.
He should not say it like that because they threaten us all the time.
And, and a threat from North Korea is not a good enough reason to start a war only.
And he didn't, I guess, even say this, it was sort of implicit, I guess, that only a real preemption of an immediate type threat, but he wouldn't even go that far.
He wouldn't even say that part out loud, right?
He was just sort of saying only if, I think he even, the way Eric paraphrased him anyway, he said that only if they attack us, is it okay to attack them, which is a huge climb down from preemption policy.
And I think without having actually seen it myself, I think he probably built himself in a weasel word for preemption somewhere, I would assume.
But I guess the thrust of what he was saying was, no, we don't want that.
And, and you might threaten them with a lake of fire if they attack us, but not just for a threat, because come on, it's North Korea.
In fact, I gave a speech back in 2013, where I talk about, yeah, well, we do this every spring and every summer, we kind of go through this, everybody pretends that there's about to be a war, and then we forget again until March.
Yeah.
You know, look, maybe, maybe Kim and, and Trump, and maybe he did, maybe they did this with previous presidents.
Maybe they have a deal.
You know, maybe, maybe we're all being fooled.
They say, look, twice a year, we both need to shear off our domestic support.
So let's play this game.
Right.
That's what I hope, right?
Yeah.
See, I keep thinking, I keep hoping somebody's saying that to Vladimir Putin.
They're like, come on, you know, we're just BSing here that this is all just a game for, for medals and contracts, right?
In fact, somebody, oh, you know what it was?
I'm sorry, I'm off on a tangent all over your interview here, but Ray McGovern did a presentation.
And this is all at raymcgovern.com, everybody.
You can find it.
Scroll down a little bit.
It wouldn't, it wasn't too long ago at all. raymcgovern.com.
You scroll down.
He gave this presentation about Russia.
And at the end, he included this Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and at the end, he included this really long clip of Putin talking and explaining and answering questions about stuff.
And I guess they don't show the question, but he's clearly answering the question.
Maybe they even show the question is, but you know, the Americans, they're just making money selling planes.
Everybody knows that they don't really want a war.
They just want, you know, missile defense.
Oh, that he's addressing specifically missile defense.
It doesn't work.
It's just a jobs program.
And he addresses that.
And he says, even if it is just a jobs program, and I understand the way the American economy works.
But still, I got to take it seriously in a ring my country with anti missile missiles.
I'm not just going to turn the other cheek.
I have to take that into account when it comes to my own nuclear strategy.
Sorry for but this is the range of choices that you were leaving for me, you know, and he's very, I'm not saying I like the guy, but I appreciate the fact that at least he speaks English in Russian, you know, he says what he means.
And you can tell what he means.
And he's not apparently much of a he doesn't seem to like to spin a lot.
You know, he says things that sometimes I wish he would lighten up a little bit, you know, but he always seems to be reacting and explaining the truth of things that he's reacting to in a pretty honest way.
Yeah, and he seems pretty sophisticated, judging by long excerpts I saw from Oliver Stone's interviews with him.
Yeah, he certainly is up on the on the scene and on the world scene and understands.
He seems to understand a lot of domestic US politics.
But you know, you never got the I never had the feeling that Brezhnev kind of understood that stuff.
He never didn't seem very impressive.
So Putin, at least at that at that level, seems to read and talk to people and he's a little better clued in.
And yeah, it's interesting that he would realize that the military contractors are a big factor in this.
But it goes to show too, though, that none of our guys ever said to his guys, hey, look, seriously, don't write this down or anything.
But wink, nudge.
This is all bullshit.
You know what I mean?
We know we're bullshitting.
Don't worry about that.
Something like that.
A little bit of reassurance.
I'd like to know.
But yeah, it doesn't seem like it.
Just to just to take us back to Korea, because that's where we started.
You know, there's been some climb down now.
And so, you know, maybe we can do it.
But what directs tug wrecks, Tillerson said, and get a good night's sleep.
Trump switched, you know, when he when he followed up on his fire and whatever it was, fire and fury remark, he said, you know, if they commit actions, so it went from threats to action.
So I guess that's a bit of a bratcheting down.
And then, of course, the time the 15th came and went, what was that yesterday?
And there was no missiles lobbed at in the direction of Guam.
So, you know, Kim decided not to do that.
So I'm hoping, you know, both sides are sort of getting the message and maybe passing, you know, subliminal telepathic messages to each other, like we got to cool it a little bit.
This is getting a little too hot.
And and now, of course, been displaced by what's going on in Charlottesville.
So, you know.
Well, and, you know, this goes to without getting off onto that tangent because it's such a huge subject, but I just don't want to do it today.
But the point that I'd like to make about that is about the role of the media in all of these crises.
I guess I'm sort of imagining the same problems with Korea that we have only with the media where they go, well, you know, and they talk like Sheldon Richman.
We kind of have these problems every year and there's reason to stop and take their interests into perspective.
And, you know, we only have a ceasefire.
Let's have a real peace treaty.
Send Dennis Rodman back over there.
Something reasonable.
They never even take that tone at all.
It's complete amped up crisis at all times.
And then especially for a TV president like Donald Trump, who's this shallow and who sees everything, not through briefings he's read or books he's read or even conversations he's had, but stuff he's seen on TV.
This all has way too much influence over this guy.
And there's such a lack of responsibility.
You know, it's just so much more fun, I guess, to say, oh, everyone, look, the threat of a nuclear war, the evil North Koreans.
People have no idea.
I mean, in fact, I posted a picture on Twitter of North Korea and South Korea and China at night, as us libertarians are inclined to do from time to time.
And someone said to me, my God, this is North Korea.
They can't even turn on the lights and anything.
But apparently a couple of square blocks of the downtown capital city, for God's sake.
This is insane.
This is who's going to take over the world, like in the second version of Red Dawn they put out there.
Come on.
Right.
No, that's right.
And now they could do damage to Seoul, Korea.
If they were attacked, they have a lot of artillery within the striking distance and they have, I mean, maybe it won't work.
I mean, the military is not assessed to be in great, great shape, but I guess we have to assume their military would work or the artillery would work if they fired it and they got rockets and stuff like that.
I'm not talking about nukes, just regular stuff.
So a lot of damage.
And maybe one of the, you'll know how I mean this, maybe one of the good things about all this is nearly everybody understands, except for Lindsey Graham, let's say, or McCain, that there's no military solution to this.
It's not like you could just make some clean surgical strike, which Americans seem to like when they think that's pulled off.
Nobody believes that.
Again, with the exceptions I already named, and I don't know about Trump.
Even a conventional attack on North Korea to get Kim or to do whatever, attempt to disable some nuclear facility, which are underground and underwater, they're not reachable, would result in the destruction of Seoul.
You know, like 10 million people in Seoul, the greater area there is more than that, 20 million, I don't know.
And everybody realizes plus you have nearly 30,000 Americans at the DMZ, there would be a huge amount of deaths, a large number of civilians.
And so for most people, they realize, yeah, I guess we can't do anything militarily there.
That's a good thing.
It would be far worse if people thought, oh no, military strike would be practical.
Then I'd be really nervous.
So we just have to hope that, you know, Trump also understands that.
I presume there are people around him saying, you know, you really can't do anything.
Now I know what Graham's been saying.
Graham has said, he looked me in the face and said, no, there are military options.
I hope Graham is just a liar.
I have to hope he's a liar and that Trump doesn't think that or hasn't said that.
So that's.
It's true though, you know, they've created this frame though, where at least, you know, maybe they're pretending and maybe they mean it and maybe they believe their own lies after they say them a few times, or I'm not sure, but they have painted themselves into this corner where, hey, look, their nukes are getting smaller.
Their rockets are getting better.
And as Trump has said, you know, red line, we're not going to let this happen.
Now he's already, according to the propaganda anyway, they've already gone past the point of what he said he would not allow.
And it is just a matter of time that their rockets get better and their nukes get smaller.
So, you know, yeah, somebody better work out something else soon because we're going to come to the point where their threat of hitting Seattle becomes a credible threat.
And then at that point, you know, and I mean, not, not according to a liar, but according to actual scientists and stuff at that point, then, you know, maybe they'll be imprisoned by the case that they've made up until that point.
You know, we are just talking about politicians here and especially this group.
Right.
One other thing I, we should put, I meant to say before that we should just mention just for getting on the record is that the there, there's also reason to doubt that whatever miniaturization they did has resulted in a usable, you know, practical nuclear a missile that could, a weapon that could be put into a, into one of their missiles, because we know that, what is his name?
Postal at MIT.
And then there were, I think two German experts in this, Schiller and Schmucker, they, they put out a report saying, judging by the tests of the missiles, the trajectory and all that other data available, they, they don't believe their missiles could carry the payload, even of a miniaturized a bomb, which would have to be, they, they say would have to be well under what, 500, whatever.
This is a weight, not a, yeah.
Kilograms.
Right.
Right.
So they, they, they seriously doubt it.
They think eventually they could achieve that, but, but we should not be, Americans should not be worried that they today can strike the United States with a, an ICBM armed with a, with a nuclear warhead.
CNN might want us to believe that and some others do.
But, you know, look at people CNN talked to, they spend most of the time talking to retired military people who are probably also sitting on the boards of, of military contractors.
And then they talked to a lot of their own reporters.
Why don't you see, ever see Bruce Cummings, Doug Bondo, Ted Carpenter of Cato.
These people have been reading and writing about this, studying Korea for, like I say, over 30 years.
I mean, they have a long paper trail of stuff they've been writing.
These are serious scholars of the subject.
And, it's just absurd that the, the, the variety of, of opinion, diversity of opinion CNN is interested in, I take it MSNBC and Fox are no different, is so narrow that you really can't even distinguish one side from the other.
They'll have these panels on where everybody agrees.
I mean, it's just, what kind of service do they think they're rendering to the American viewers when that's what they present?
Well, they think they'd be ripping you off to bring somebody outside that consensus.
Cause obviously that person being an idiot, wasting your time or worse, right.
Dangerously leading you to think that maybe we shouldn't have a war for a minute or something.
That's the way I look at it.
You know, I don't, it's called begging the question as used correctly, right?
Conclusion first, argument second.
Yeah.
And then I don't know, is it too cynical to suggest that this is ratings driven that war talk brings viewers and talk about, oh, there's doesn't really seem to be any need to worry about this.
Well, I'm always impressed by the advertisers on the Sunday morning shows because that's when they can write out and say, brought to you by Northrop Grumman.
Who's the ad for?
What am I supposed to buy?
My own bomber?
Right.
The ad is for investors, right?
That look everybody, we're causing problems.
Can I go online and buy one of those planes?
Right.
Yeah.
It's stock in the company that they're selling to the Sunday morning news show audience.
I'm getting right on Amazon to see whether I can get one.
Yeah.
So I think I just kind of take that same, my same frame of reference about the Sunday shows where the Lockheed ad outright has the big ticket items flying through the sky in the ad.
I guess kind of apply that same model to the rest of the week too.
It may not just be end to stockholders and, and, uh, and policymakers and people involved in that.
It might also be a message to Americans that you should think good things.
When you hear these names, these are people protecting you.
I mean, that meant they always show bombers, right?
And they don't have some voiceover about security and protecting us.
Uh, so I think, I think some of it is actually aimed at the, just the average American watching.
I don't know how many American, American watch those shows, but, uh, but I think it's to make you feel good.
We hear Grumman or you hear, uh, yeah, that, uh, oh, those are, they're making a, yeah, they're making the planes to keep us safe.
I mean, you might as well rather than, oh, those are the guys that milk the taxpayers, you know, who pad their budgets and have cost overruns.
Uh, so I think it's to counter some of that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I should let you go, but thank you so much for coming back on my show.
Sheldon.
It's always great to talk to you.
A pleasure.
And I'm available whenever you want me.
Great.
Keep writing things as you always do.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's the man at the Libertarian Institute, the executive editor, in fact, of the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Fire and Fury wouldn't be the first for North Korea is his article there.
Just look for the bright red and yellow H bomb explosion on the front page at libertarianinstitute.org and go buy my book Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan on sale now at amazon.com.
