What will President Trump do now to stop North Korean aggression?

The Daily Mail declares that –

South Korea and the US are now planning “military action” to be taken against North Korea “as soon as possible”, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Are the words “military action” and “as soon as possible” in quotation marks to indicate authenticity, or that they are said but not fully believed?

The hydrogen bomb [detonated in a test yesterday] – which is powerful enough to destroy a city – sparked a powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake amid an “escalating” nuclear crisis. …

Or maybe not escalating?

The terrifying tremor was detected in the northeast of the country where the Punggye-ri test site is located – but was so strong that it shook buildings in China and Russia.

But the raw power of the bomb – which has a 100 kiloton yield, around five times bigger than that dropped on Nagasaki – isn’t the only threat it [presents] to the US.

North Korea’s state news agency warned that the weapon “is a multifunctional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack“. …

An EMP – electro-magnetic pulse – is a wave emitted from nuclear explosions that scrambles electronics, much like a sudden power surge can overload a power outlet.

But an EMP is far, far worse; a nuclear bomb detonated high in the atmosphere could knock out the power grid across a swathe of the continental US – or even all of it.

North Korea has threatened an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the US. A nuke detonated high above the ground could produce an EMP that would knock out all electrics within a vast radius – the higher the detonation, the wider the effect. (The miles on the map are measurements of height.)

That would leave hospitals without power, civilian and government agencies unable to coordinate, and the fabric of society unraveling fast. …

The regime frequently flaunts its intercontinental ballistic missile technology and has repeatedly tested hydrogen bombs – but has so far been unable to combine the two into a lethal weapon.

However, Jong-un claims the latest explosive – which seismologists calculated to be eight times as damaging as the Hiroshima nuclear bomb dropped by the US in World War II – could be packed into a warhead and fired towards US territory.

We would say – not keeping calm at all – that if US military intelligence knows (and surely it does!) where the nuclear and missile facilities are in that nasty little country, bomb them now.

And it seems President Trump is thinking along those lines:

He has threatened Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury, such as the world has never seen”. The world needs to see it now.

To wait is to let the danger become far worse.

If Kim Jog-un, the chubby little dictator of North Korea, has these lethal weapons to play with, it won’t be long before the mullahs who rule Iran have them too.

Iran has the money to buy them – thanks to Barack Obama.

The two regimes are already in alliance:

Last month North Korea’s nominal “president” Kim Yong Nam whose official title is Chairman of the People’s Assembly was given red carpet treatment during a 10-day visit to Tehran at the head a 30-man military and political delegation. He was granted a rare two-hours long audience with Khamenei. During his stay, he inaugurated North Korea’s new embassy which includes an expanded military cooperation section.

From Gatestone, by Amir Taheri:

Seen by Khomeinists, who pretend to be sole custodians of “The Only True Religion”, the Kimists, who regard religion as “confused mumbo-jumbo”, must be regarded as adversaries if not outright enemies. And, yet, such is their mutual attraction that the little matter of religion seems to have had no effect on their love fest. The Kimists have even allowed the Khomeinists to set up a mosque in Pyongyang provided they do not try to convert North Koreans.

In the spring of 1979, Kim Il Sung, the founder of the dynasty and grandfather of the present Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, was among the first to congratulate Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini on the seizure of power by mullahs.

A few weeks later, Khomeini, then stationed in Qom, broke his rule of not talking to foreign emissaries by receiving North Korean Ambassador Chabeong Uk for a long session during which the ayatollah dictated a message of friendship to Kim Il Sung, in which, he invited “the masses of Korea” to expel the Americans from the peninsula.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, Kim Il Sung was the first to offer assistance to the Islamic Republic by supplying its version of the Soviet SCUD missiles. In January 1981, invited by Iran, the North Koreans set up a military advisory mission in Tehran to help the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Crops (IRGC) develop tactics and strategies in the war against Iraq.

One tactic quickly adopted by the Iranians was the sue of “swarm attacks” by masses of teenagers sent to clear Iraqi minefields at the cost of thousands of lives, a tactic that Kim Il Sung had developed in the Korean War against the Americans.

North Korea became one of only two nations to sign a military pact of sorts, including joint staff conversations, with Iran. (The other is  Syria which signed in 2007.)

Iran’s top contact man with the North Korean military mission was Khamenei, then a mid-ranking mullah operating as Deputy Defense Minister. The new friends started “military cooperation” in 1982 with special emphasis on helping Iran develop a range of missiles.

Getting to know the North Koreans, Khamenei developed a profound admiration for their “discipline and readiness to sacrifice for their struggle”. But it was not until six years later that Khamenei, by that time named President of the Islamic Republic, could express that admiration directly in a state visit to Pyongyang.

According to those who accompanied Khamenei in the visit, the future “Supreme Guide” saw North Korea as the “ideal state” that only lacked religious faith.

“Khamenei was impressed by how everything (in North Korea) worked like the clockwork,” says Hassan Nami, a member of the entourage. “The fact that in North Korea the individual was dissolved in the collective symbolized by the Supreme Leader overwhelmed Khamenei.”

“Overwhelmed” him with admiration, is implied.

Khamenei’s visit to North Korea, in May 1989, was the first to give him the feeling that he was the rising leader of a rising new power on the world scene. The North Koreans declared a holiday for schools and factories to mobilize a million people to line the streets to greet Khamenei. In a rare gesture, Kim Il Sung himself went to the airport to greet the visitor. The North Korean despot then chaired a special session of the People’s Assembly to hear Khamenei’s speech which included a thinly disguised invitation to Koreans to return to religious belief.

In the end, however, the North Koreans adopted nothing from Khomeinism while Khamenei adopted much of Kim Il Sung’s ideology.

What did the Muslim learn from the Communist?

Kim’s “juche” (self-reliance) shibboleth became Khamenei “eqtesad muqawemati” (Resistance Economics). Khamenei also adopted Kim’s reliance on missiles, caused by the fact that North Korean had no access to modern warplanes, as the main plank of his defense doctrine. The revival of the Shah’s nuclear program, scrapped by Khomeini but revived under Khamenei, was also inspired by Kim who believed a weaker nation enhances its position by owning “the ultimate weapon“.

When it comes to Khamenei’s rejection of compromise with domestic or foreign adversaries, again Kim was the teacher.

Reports of the Kims’ manner of dealing with “domestic adversaries” reaches the West from to time, and “ruthless” describes it. They have them killed.

Kim preached “absolute independence” which meant total disregard for international law, something that Khamenei has made an article of faith for the Islamic Republic.

Going down the list of Khamenei’s beliefs, including his reliance on the military for the survival of the regime, one could see that in many cases the real teacher was Kim Il Sung, not Khomeini.

And now there is open military co-operation between the two regimes.

If ever the might of the American superpower was needed to be brought to bear on an axis of evil while there was yet time to crush it, it is surely now.

Obama is the man who shakes hands with himself.

Amir Taheri writes at Gatestone:

Sometime this week, President Obama is scheduled to sign an executive order to meet the Oct. 15 “adoption day” he has set for the nuclear deal he says he has made with Iran. According to the president’s timetable the next step would be “the start day of implementation”, fixed for Dec. 15.

But as things now stand, Obama may end up being the only person in the world to sign his much-wanted deal, in effect making a treaty with himself.

The Iranians have signed nothing and have no plans for doing so.

The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has not even been discussed at the Islamic Republic’s Council of Ministers. Nor has the Tehran government bothered to even provide an official Persian translation of the 159-page text.

The Islamic Majlis, the ersatz parliament, is examining an unofficial text and is due to express its views at an unspecified date in a document “running into more than 1,000 pages”, according to Mohsen Zakani, who heads the “examining committee”.

“The changes we seek would require substantial rewriting of the text,” he adds enigmatically.

Nor have Britain, China, Germany, France and Russia, who were involved in the so-called P5+1 talks that produced the JCPOA, deemed it necessary to provide the Obama “deal” with any legal basis of their own. Obama’s partners have simply decided that the deal he is promoting is really about lifting sanctions against Iran and nothing else. So they have started doing just that without bothering about JCPOA’s other provisions.

Britain has lifted the ban on 22 Iranian banks and companies blacklisted because of alleged involvement in deals linked to the nuclear issue.

German trade with Iran has risen by 33 percent, making it the Islamic Republic’s third-largest partner after China.

China has signed preliminary accords to help Iran build five more nuclear reactors.

Russia has started delivering S300 anti-aircraft missile systems and is engaged in talks to sell Sukhoi planes to the Islamic Republic.

France has sent its foreign minister and a 100-man delegation to negotiate big business deals, including projects to double Iran’s crude oil exports.

Indian trade with Iran has risen by 17 percent, and New Delhi is negotiating massive investment in a rail-and-sea hub in the Iranian port of Chah-Bahar on the Gulf of Oman.

With help from Austrian, Turkish and United Arab Emirates banks, the many banking restrictions imposed on Iran because of its nuclear program have been pushed aside.

“The structures of sanctions built over decades is crumbling,” boasts Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Meanwhile, the nuclear project is and shall remain “fully intact,” says the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi. “We have started working on a process of nuclear fusion that will be cutting-edge technology for the next 50 years,” he adds.

Even before Obama’s “implementation day”, the mullahs are receiving an average of $400 million a month, no big sum, but enough to ease the regime’s cash-flow problems and increase pay for its repressive forces by around 21 percent. …

The mullahs see the “deal” as a means with which Obama would oppose any suggestion of trying to curb Iran.

“Obama won’t do anything that might jeopardize the deal,” says Ziba Kalam, a Rouhani adviser. “This is his biggest, if not only, foreign policy success.”

Let’s pause and contemplate that for a moment! This farce of a deal, this green light to one of the most  oppressive regimes on earth to go ahead and become a nuclear power, is  – Obama’s “biggest, if  not only, foreign policy SUCCESS”!  

More follows on this success:

If there have been changes in Tehran’s behavior they have been for the worse. Iran has teamed up with Russia to keep Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria, mocking Obama’s “Assad must go” rhetoric. More importantly, Iran has built its direct military presence in Syria to 7,000 men.

Tehran has also pressured Iraqi Premier Haidar al-Abadi’s weak government to distance itself from Washington and join a dubious coalition with Iran, Russia and Syria.

Certain that Obama is paralyzed by his fear of undermining the non-existent “deal” the mullahs have intensified their backing for Houthi rebels in Yemen. Last week a delegation was in Tehran with a long shopping list for arms.

In Lebanon, the mullahs have toughened their stance on choosing the country’s next president.

And in Bahrain, Tehran is working on a plan to “ensure an early victory” of the Shiite revolution in the archipelago.

Confident that Obama is determined to abandon traditional allies of the United States, Tehran has also heightened propaganda war against Saudi Arabia, now openly calling for the overthrow of the monarchy there.

The mullahs are also heightening contacts with Palestinian groups in the hope of unleashing a new “Intifada.”

They have done so. (See yesterday’s post, immediately below.)

“Palestine is thirsty for a third Intifada,” Supreme Guide Khamenei’s mouthpiece Kayhan said in an editorial last Thursday. “It is the duty of every Muslim to help start it as soon as possible.”

Obama’s hopes of engaging Iran on other issues were dashed last week when Khamenei declared “any dialogue with the American Great Satan” to be “forbidden”.

“We have no need of America” his adviser Ali-Akbar Velayati added later. “Iran is the region’s big power in its own right.”

Obama had hoped that by sucking up to the mullahs he would at least persuade them to moderate their “hate-America campaign”.

“Death to America” slogans, adorning official buildings in Tehran have been painted afresh along with US flags, painted at the entrance of offices so that they could be trampled underfoot.

None of the US citizens still held hostages in Iran has been released, and one, Washington Post stringer Jason Rezai, is branded as “head of a spy ring “in Tehran. Paralyzed by his fear of undermining the non-existent deal, Obama doesn’t even call for their release.

Government-sponsored anti-American nationwide events are announced for November, anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran.

The annual “End of America” week-long conference is planned for February and is to focus on “African-American victims of US police” and the possibility of “self-determination for blacks.”

Iran is inciting rebellion and treason among Americans.

According to official sources “families of Black American victims” and a number of “black American revolutionaries” have been invited.

Inside Iran, Obama’s “moderate partners” have doubled the number of executions and political prisoners. Last week they crushed marches by teachers calling for release of their leaders. Hundreds of trade unionists have been arrested and a new “anti-insurrection” brigade paraded in Tehran to terrorize possible protestors.

The Obama deal may end up as the biggest diplomatic scam in recent history.

US Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated FOR Iran to get the “deal” most favorable to Iranian interests and least favorable to the interests of America and Europe.

The talks took so long not because there was disagreement on key issues. Once the US had agreed to let Iran keep its nuclear capacity, the other issues were easy to deal with. The talks took so long because Kerry and Zarif, often working together, were trying to find language that could hide the real issues and highlight peripheral ones. Kerry wanted to hoodwink the US Congress; Zarif wanted to take the Islamic Majlis in Tehran for a ride.

We quote from an important article by Amir Taheri at Asharq Al-Awsat (self-declared to be “the world’s leading pan-Arab daily newspaper”), published in London:

In a fascinating interview last week, Iran’s former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi revealed that during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, through Omani mediation, Tehran put five preconditions for the start of secret talks with the US. “We were surprised when Obama accepted all of them,” Salehi recalls.

And that was before John Kerry, who had a long history of contacts with Tehran including meetings with former President Muhammad Khatami at Davos, had become Secretary of State.

Salehi recalls that when he briefed newly elected President Rouhani on the secret talks, the latter was “astonished” at Obama’s readiness to bend backwards to appease Tehran. For Tehran, Obama and Kerry made an ideal team.

During lengthy negotiations in Geneva, Lausanne and finally Vienna, the Iranian and US teams were often on the same side, fighting to persuade other members of the P5+1 to soften their positions vis-a-vis Iran.

In an off-the-record briefing in Tehran which was nevertheless partly leaked, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi cited a number of occasions when Kerry fought hard to win others to Iran’s position.

One occasion was when the French and the British insisted that Iran formally undertake not to finance and arm the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. “Naturally, we refused,” Araqchi said. “And it was [John] Kerry who persuaded others to drop the issue.”

On another occasion, Russia was pressing for the ban on sale of arms to Iran to be lifted immediately. Iran did not want this, presumably because it felt it would face pressure to buy Russian arms.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later expressed surprise when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Kerry joined forces to keep the ban in place, albeit with minor modifications.

On another occasion, recalled by Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Political Director General Hamid Baeedi-Nezhad who was part of the negotiating team, Kerry sided with Iran to defeat the British and the French who insisted that the ban on sale of aircraft to Tehran remain in force for five more years.

“The whole thing was settled when Kerry gave his word on our behalf,” Baeedi-Nezhad said.

On another occasion, according to Araqchi, Kerry sided with Iran in rejecting a demand by the European Union foreign policy “tsarina” Federica Mogherini to commit Iran not to help Bashar Al-Assad kill more Syrians. Kerry remained “steadfast” that talks should only focus on the nuclear issue.

Kerry also backed Iran’s demand that the travel ban on several civilian and military officials, and some Arab terrorists linked to Iran be lifted. The French, British and Germans were opposed, partly because among the names mentioned were convicted terrorists who had served time in their prisons.

Kerry showed his keenness to please Iran more specifically when he fought to lift the ban on Anis Naccache, a Lebanese “militant” who had been close to Imad Mugniyah, once Hezbollah’s security chief, and allegedly involved in plotting the suicide attack that killed 241 US Marines in Beirut in1983.

Faced with European protests, Kerry came out with his famous: “We are looking to the future, not to the past.”  …

Then comes the paragraph that (yet further) exposes the deep villainy of Kerry and his master, Obama. We quoted it at the top of this post. It bears repeating.

The talks took so long not because there was disagreement on key issues. Once the US had agreed to let Iran keep its nuclear capacity, the other issues were easy to deal with. The talks took so long because Kerry and Zarif, often working together, were trying to find language that could hide the real issues and highlight peripheral ones. Kerry wanted to hoodwink the US Congress; Zarif wanted to take the Islamic Majlis in Tehran for a ride.

By rejecting the proposed “deal” the US Congress would tell the world that the arrangement is one between Obama and an Iranian faction. As a power, the US is not committed to a deal running into decades.

In his keenness to get a “deal”, any deal, Obama reversed the constitutional provision under which a treaty needs a two-third majority in the Congress to become effective. He invented a new method under which the Congress could undo something that is, and at the same time is not, a treaty, after the president has approved it.

The “deal” suffers from a crisis of constitutional identity. A negative Congressional vote could delay its implementation until the president has exercised his veto.

On the Iranian side the Rafsanjani faction has done even better. It has not provided an official Persian version of the “deal” and seems determined to ignore Article 72 of the Islamic Republic’s Constitution and simply pretend that the “deal” is approved without publicly saying so.

At the time of this writing Tehran has not even accepted the new UN resolution and is thus one step behind Obama in their pasodoble.

Was this not treason? 

The United States’ definition of treason is:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

There isn’t really a choice. Iran, with the active help of the UN and the passive help of the decaying West, will win. Lebanon will be a bunker. 

 From the Investor’s Business Daily:

The Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing also killed 22 others and sparked a nationwide protest that became known as the Cedar Revolution.

It soon forced the withdrawal of Syria’s army after decades of de facto occupation of a neighbor it had refused to formally recognize, a sovereign nation it viewed as a lost province of a Greater Syria.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a U.N. commission was formed to determine who killed Hariri and to bring them to justice. Most fingers pointed at Lebanon’s former occupier, Syria, which not surprisingly failed to cooperate in the investigation.

The initial report by Detlev Mehlis, the chief U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, said the decision to kill Hariri, who Damascus feared would rally Lebanese opposition to Syrian influence, "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials" and their Lebanese operatives.

On Wednesday, it became clear that Hariri’s assassins might never be brought to justice and that the U.N. isn’t serious about dealing with that assault on Lebanese democracy — part of a long series of assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists.

Judge Daniel Franzen ordered four Lebanese generals suspected of involvement in Hariri’s murder freed on the grounds there was insufficient evidence for keeping them jailed. In fact, it was not so much a lack of evidence as it was a lack of will by the international community, which refused to press Syria on the issue.

After Hariri’s assassination, the formation of the international tribunal into his death and the withdrawal of Syrian forces gave a boost to those hoping Syrian influence and control were at an end and Lebanese democracy was safe. But much has changed in the last four years.

In 2006, the terrorist group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and added more while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

The campaign culminated in early 2008 with Hezbollah laying siege to government buildings and storming pro-government militia headquarters in West Beirut. The violence subsided after talks in Doha, Qatar, gave Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) its long sought veto power over government decisions in a new Cabinet of national unity. But Hezbollah wants more and in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

Sources in Lebanon say that in recent months Iran has smuggled upward of a billion dollars into Lebanon to help its puppet creation, Hezbollah, buy the election. "Hezbollah intends to win these elections at all costs," says Toni Nissi, secretary-general of the National Council for the Cedar Revolution. "This election victory will allow them to transform their illegal institutions into legal ones." …

Many fear this election could be as disastrous for Middle East peace as the 2006 election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

"The choice is between Lebanon as a beach and Lebanon as a bunker," Middle East expert Amir Taheri recently quoted a Lebanese businessman as saying. "Lebanon could either become an extension of Europe in the Middle East or a bridgehead for Iran in the Mediterranean."

All that will be needed for Iran to triumph will be for the West to continue to do virtually nothing.