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I told Barack, last time he called me for advice, that it's very simple: Tell China that the U.S. is going to be providing two or three hundred nuclear warheads and missiles to Japan, for their own protection against North Korea. The idea of a nuclear Japan is such a nasty thought for the Chinese (not without some justification, history being what it is), that they will stop supporting North Korea.
Only you imbeciles could make a connection between a S Korean ship and Obama.
Go outside and get some fresh air already.
You really don't get it: Nobody really cares about Obama, except for comic relief.
*waits for the comedic part*
South Korean ship sinking, North attack suspected: report
Reuters
Friday, March 26, 2010; 11:38 AM
SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean naval vessel with more than 100 aboard was sinking on Friday in waters near North Korea and Seoul was investigating whether it was hit in a torpedo attack by the North, South Korean media said.
Broadcaster SBS said many South Korean sailors on the stricken vessel were feared dead.
South Korea's YTN TV network said the government was investigating whether the sinking was due to a torpedo attack by the North, and Yonhap news agency said the Seoul government had convened an emergency meeting of security-related ministers.
Yonhap also reported a South Korean navy ship firing toward an unidentified vessel to the north.
North Korea in recent weeks has said it was bolstering its defenses in response to joint South Korean-U.S. military drills that were held this month.
Only you imbeciles could make a connection between a S Korean ship and Obama.
Go outside and get some fresh air already.
On Thursday, Seoul accused North Korea of firing a torpedo into one of its frigates. Forty-six sailors died on March 26 when an explosion ripped their vessel, the Cheonan, in two.
When parts of the ship were raised, investigators immediately saw that metal was bent inward. Therefore, an external explosion destroyed the warship, eliminating the possibility of an accidental detonation of its magazine. Some then speculated that a mine, perhaps left floating after the Korean War, tore apart the Cheonan. South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency then reported that divers had recovered torpedo fragments from the sea bed. So the sinking had to have been the result of a recent — and deliberate — act.
And who was responsible? One of the torpedo fragments bore North Korean markings. Moreover, the recovered parts were identical to those depicted in a blueprint of a torpedo in a North Korean marketing brochure. Investigators also found traces of a mix of explosives used by communist-bloc countries, including North Korea. Other evidence, analyzed by a group of specialists from six nations, pointed to the only plausible culprit: Pyongyang.
So what will the United States, required by treaty to defend South Korea, do about the sinking? Just hours after the incident, Washington leaned on President Lee Myung-bak to stay quiet and forego retaliation for the ghastly crime. The Obama administration has so far failed to label the torpedo attack an act of war. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that North Korea had already been punished merely because it had further isolated itself from the international community by committing the horrific act.
...
States like Kim’s Korea, however, may look at Washington’s so-far inadequate response to the Cheonan incident and believe that a future act of nuclear terrorism just might go unpunished. If so, deterrence could fail.
How could that happen? It would take weeks — and perhaps months — to conclusively determine the source of fissile material used by nuclear terrorists. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the home of “cutting-edge forensics,” can find a particle that is out of place and measure things that weigh no more than a femtogram, 0.000000000000001 of a gram. Its technicians can look at the smallest speck of uranium and find out how it was formed.
But the IAEA’s near-magical work takes time, just as it took time to establish responsibility for the Cheonan’s sinking. Intelligence analysts knew within hours that the North Koreans used a torpedo to sink the vessel, but detective works requires patience — in this case, more than seven weeks — to find, analyze, and present evidence.
As hours turn into days, days into weeks, and weeks into months, the certainty of a retaliatory response decreases. In our complex world, there is always a reason not to act, and those reasons grow stronger over time. In the Cheonan case, we are already hearing the calls for South Korea to move on and consider “the broader issues.”
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Deterrence looks like it might fail soon. The Cheonan incident could convince Chairman Kim and other potential aggressors that they will pay no price for committing horrible acts. Even in such a clear-cut circumstance as the sinking of the South Korean frigate, the international community is having trouble imposing punishments on the aggressor.
When responsibility is murkier, the urge to retaliate will be even more muted. And that can give ideas to terrorism-sponsoring states. Take Iran, for instance. As the Islamic Republic builds its links with al-Qaeda and accelerates the enrichment of uranium, we have to wonder whether the mullahs think the slow — and uncertain — response to the sinking of the Cheonan will make nuclear terrorism a possible option for them.
So there is a lot riding on Washington’s response to the sinking of the Cheonan. This is not just about South Korea.
WASHINGTON -- It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.
It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.
That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.
They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).
They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."
They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)
Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the U.S. retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.
"Defensive measures are very difficult and limited," said Lieutenant General Park Jing-e in response to WorldTribune's question at the show-and-tell on Thursday put on by South Korea's Defense Ministry on the episode in the West or Yellow Sea in which 46 sailors lost their lives. "The most effective way to destroy the submarine is to destroy it when it's identified at the port."
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In the end, said the report, "The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine." There was, it said "no other plausible explanation".
All of which may be of great interest but of less than great impact if the Chinese refuse to buy it. A Chinese diplomat was notably absent from the Defense Ministry briefing to which diplomatic and military officials were in attendance. All a Chinese official in Beijing was reported as saying was the whole affair was "unfortunate" - a response that Korean officials find more than a little upsetting.
The words of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, a soft-lining former foreign minister for South Korea who led its attempts at reconciliation with the North in previous government in Seoul, were not all that encouraging. He called the investigation "troubling", not exactly a call for UN action.
Under the circumstances, all General Park could say when asked what the South would do to prevent further attacks was that "our plan is to reinforce submarine measures by establishing a submarine detection system in areas that are vulnerable to such infiltration". That response was less than reassuring, considering that he also acknowledged, in this case, "We were not able to expect that a submarine once seaborne was going to infiltrate our waters."
This is a standoff in which it's wise to expect the unexpected. The sense, though, is the North has made a fundamental point. There's not much South Korea will do beside engage in threats and words while China makes up for the losses in trade, aid and diplomatic sympathy.