this is the main reason the US government is demonising n. korea and iran:

they want to put their antiballistic missile systems right on Russia's and China's borders in order to:

1) shoot down russian and chinese ICBMs during the launch phase when these missile are very heavy with fuel and moving relatively slowly.  the americans cannot shoot down these ICBMs when they are coming downwards. 

2) these US ABM missiles can be very quickly converted into offensive nuclear missiles via software programming so the US offensive nuclear missiles can hit russian and chinese targets, not in 30 minutes, but in 5 to 10 minutes.

This is why russia and china are  objecting to the deployment of american ABM systems on their borders, in Romania and Poland, and in South Korea.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47875.htm

 

 

 

There are only three systems in the world that can intercept ICBMs

The Russian A-35 anti-ballistic missile system, used for the defense of Moscow, whose development started in 1971. The currently active system is called A-135. The system uses Gorgon and Gazelle missiles with nuclear warheads to intercept incoming ICBMs.

 

The U.S. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD; previously known as National Missile Defense – NMD) system has reached initial operational capability. Instead of using an explosive charge, it launches a kinetic projectile.

The system is a dual purpose test and interception facility in Alaska, and in 2006 was operational with a few interceptor missiles. The Alaska site provides more protection against the nuclear threat from North Korean missiles or launches from Russia or China.

 

Israel's Arrow 3 system entered operational service in 2017. It is designed for exo-atmosphere interception of ballistic missiles during the spaceflight portion of their trajectory, including those of ICBMs.[1] It may also act as an anti-satellite weapon.

Wiki

i am getting the link OK.

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Barbarism and Shame: Why the US Refuses a Korea Peace Treaty

By Finian Cunningham

September 22, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - The Korean crisis is a powerful lens on American barbarism, past and present. Despite Washington’s self-righteousness and pretensions of virtue, the modern history of Korea is an especially powerful lesson that destroys the American national mythology.

Listening to President Trump’s conceited rhetoric about wiping out North Korea has an eerie resonance with the rhetoric of President Truman. Truman launched into the Korean War more than six decades ago with same arrogant, mythical presumptions of American virtue and self-ordained right to use overwhelming military force.

For reasons of political self-preservation, Washington must live in denial of historical reality. US leaders out of necessity have to construct an alternative, fictional narrative for their nation’s conduct. Because if historical reality were acknowledged, the rulers in Washington, and the whole edifice of presumed American greatness, would implode from the endemic moral corruption. 

The Korean War (1950-53) has been described as the most barbaric war since the Second World War. Up to four million people were killed in a three-year period. The US air force dropped more tonnage of bombs on the country than was dropped during the whole of its Pacific War against Japan.

Despite this massive and barbaric effort in Korea, the first war of the incipient Cold War turned out to be a source of potentially crippling shame for the US. This risk of shame to the American mythical self-image of virtue explains why the Korean War has become known as the “forgotten war”. It would also explain why present and past US governments prefer to bury their responsibility to end the conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

Sixty-four years after the end of the Korean War, the United States continues to refuse to sign a peace treaty with the other main belligerent party – North Korea. Indeed, the issue is not even publicly addressed by Washington, which shows how far removed political awareness of American responsibilities is.

Yet, the signing of such a peace treaty by the US is essential to establishing a viable framework to resolve the current and recurring security crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

The Korean War came to an end in July 1953 with the declaration of an armistice, or truce. The armistice was never formalized into a legally binding peace treaty, largely due to American intransigence not to do so. The absence of a peace treaty is almost unique in the history of modern warfare.

Technically, therefore, the Korean War is not over. It is simply on pause. So, when US military exercises are conducted with its South Korean ally – several times every year – the war drills are plausible grounds for North Korea to fear a resumption of large-scale hostilities.

As former US ambassador to South Korea, James Laney, has stated: “One of the things that have bedeviled all talks until now is the unresolved status of the Korean War. A peace treaty would provide a baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s legitimacy and its right to exist.”

The looming question is: why does the US government and its military leaders not sign a peace treaty with North Korea?

One reason is that the ongoing state of war on the Korean Peninsula provides the US with important strategic advantages – too important for it to forfeit by concluding a peace treaty with North Korea. Lucrative weapons sales – decade after decade – for “protecting” allies in South Korea and Japan is a boon for the US military-industrial complex that drives its economy.

With the presence of 70,000 US troops in Japan and South Korea and the regular positioning of aircraft carriers, missile destroyers and nuclear-capable warplanes, the ongoing low-intensity conflict with North Korea gives the US a politically acceptable cover to project military power for economic influence in the vital, resource-rich region of Asia-Pacific.

The installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and the Aegis anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan – allegedly to “protect from North Korean aggression” – is also an important strategic gain for Washington to exert leverage over China and Russia. Indeed, this may be the main strategic objective.

These economic and military strategic issues have been broached elsewhere in a recent article as to why the US is more interested in maintaining conflict on the Korean Peninsula than pursuing peace.

What is worth considering here is the legacy of the Korean War as to why the US continues to bury that conflict as a “forgotten war”. What is it about the Korean War which seems to make it unpalatable for Washington to publicly acknowledge?

The Korean War can be seen as the first major test of US moral and military authority in the Cold War. We must remember that a mere five years after the Second World War, the US had staked its image on presenting itself as the “leader of the free world” against the Soviet Union and “evil communism”. In Western political mythology, the US had gloriously won the Second World War, defeating Nazi Germany and saving Europe from totalitarianism. The actual much bigger achievement of the Soviet Union in defeating European fascism was – and still is – conveniently downplayed by Western official narratives.

Soon the evil of Nazi Germany was recycled to be projected on to the Soviet Union and world communism. The supposedly Christian, democracy and freedom-loving United States was presented as the noble defender of the “free world” against “the evil of communist expansionism”.

When the civil war in Korea erupted in June 1950, the US-backed southern administration led by Syngman Rhee claimed that it was communist aggression by the north with the support of the Soviet Union and communist China. The year before, Mao had just successfully won China’s civil war against the US-backed Chiang Kai-Shek forces which fled to Formosa (Taiwan).

From the US point of view, steeped in Cold War ideology of Red Menace, the war in Korea looked like another domino falling to world communism.

The origins of the war are murky. American claims about North Korean aggression are belied by the fact that the US-backed Rhee regime in Seoul had carried out countless acts of aggression against the de facto northern state led by Kim Il Sung (grandfather of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un).

In any case, Korea became a paramount test for presumed US global authority. President Truman had already declared the Truman Doctrine of “defending the world from communist aggression”.

Arguably, the US had no justification for entering the war. It railroaded the newly formed United Nations for a mandate to intervene “on behalf of the UN”. The facts suggest that the conflict in Korea was one of national self-determination between, on the one hand, competing socialist factions popular in the north and in the south, and on the other hand, the US-backed autocratic regime of Syngman Rhee. The latter’s hold on power was shaky due to US imposition immediately following the Second World War. Rhee’s dictatorship, comprising military trained under the previous Japanese fascist colonial regime (1910-45), had carried out mass executions of suspected “communist supporters – with American support. It was deeply unpopular and would inevitably have been overthrown in the ferment of anti-colonial movements that were sweeping Korea and the world in the post-Second World War era.

In other words, the Korean War was an unnecessary slaughter that was fueled by US interference and ideological presumptions of leadership against “evil communism”.

During the Korean War, the US unleashed barbarism with new technological weapons, writes American historian Jeremy Kuzmarov.

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It was the first war when napalm incendiary bombs were used in large scale in a scorched-earth tactic of indiscriminately destroying villages and civilians seen as “guerrilla sympathizers”. Farms, crops, cattle, dikes and dams were also pulverized by American B-29 bombers. The entire country was obliterated in order to “save it” from communism.

American actions were a monumental violation of the Geneva Convention which had only just been signed in 1949, forbidding the indiscriminate killing of civilians. The ink was barely dry when American forces were running rivers of blood all over Korea. The communist guerrillas also reportedly carried out atrocities. But in no comparable way to the scale that the US was committing.

How was US conduct in Korea any different from the genocidal “total war” concept of the Nazi Third Reich? Exactly, there was none, if the truth were told.

General Curtis Le May, the head of the US air force in Korea who earlier had masterminded the firebombing massacre of Tokyo during the Second World War, later candidly admitted that there was nothing left to bomb in Korea. He reckoned that US forces killed up to 30 per cent of the North Korean population. Even then, the US generals were actively considering dropping atomic bombs, including on China, which they considered as the real power behind the North Korean guerrilla army.

Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet Union did indeed lend crucial military support to the North Korean side. Newly innovated Soviet MiG jets reportedly had a curtailing effect on the American B-29s. But Beijing and Moscow’s involvement only came after the US weighed into what was a national struggle.

In the end, despite its declarations of moral virtue and Christian righteousness, the US was fought to a standstill. The three-year, backward-and-forward war finally stopped at the 38th parallel, which the US military government had earlier demarcated in 1945. Korea was not “liberated” from godless communism. The northern Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stands today as a reminder of defiance to US pretensions.

In the course of the war, the US Commander General Douglas MacArthur, was sacked by Truman over his failures and insubordination. It was a shameful outcome for MacArthur who had been adorned as a “war hero” for the Pacific victory over Japan. He had been one of the US generals advocating the atomic bombing of China.

Almost a decade later, the Vietnam War also became another episode of American barbarism and use of genocidal hi-tech weaponry. But by then, as American historian William Blum points out, there was a popular anti-war movement in the US, which exposed many of the crimes and falsehoods perpetrated by Washington.

The Korean War was different though. It was largely supported at the time by a US population which had bought into the official mythology of America as “the defender of the free world”. The Korean War was supposed to be the baptism of noble America, the alleged emerging “victor of the Second World War”, the presumed protector against evil totalitarianism.

But the Korean War destroyed that myth in the most searing way from the slaughter and barbarism that the US inflicted on a peasant army seeking national unity and independence. And for all its military might and “divine pretensions”, the US was fought to a standstill, if not an inglorious moral defeat.

Such is the shameful legacy of the Korean War for American national mythology that one suspects that this is a major reason why US authorities, the government, the Pentagon and the dutiful corporate-controlled news media would much rather prefer to forget the whole despicable episode. Simply put, it has to be erased from consciousness because it would be so otherwise jarring to American presumptions of exceptional virtue.

That is why the all-important issue of a peace treaty over the Korean War is not signed by the US. It is simply too shameful a subject to even revisit in the slightest way.

And yet, fiendishly, making a formal declaration of peace is crucial to resolve the ongoing conflict on the Korean Peninsula, one that could so easily escalate into a global catastrophe involving nuclear weapons.

Tragically, and heinously, the refusal to bear responsibility for the violence and suffering caused in Korea is why the current Trump administration presumes the “right” to go to war on North Korea. This American presumption is woefully ignorant of history and infused with a disturbed messianic zeal.

Trump and his officials arrogantly threaten North Korea with “annihilation” because the United States has never been held to account for its crimes in Korea (or elsewhere for that matter).

Signing a peace treaty would be an important step towards long-overdue American accountability. A step that the arrogant American rulers refuse to take – because they can’t admit the shocking reality of their enormous crimes.

This article was first published by Strategic Culture Foundation -

 

 

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 Do you agree or disagree with the article?  -  Please read our  Comment Policy before posting - It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on other ICH community members or authors of articles posted on this website. Click here to comment on our Facebook page   Comments (15)

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jrlauder 1p · 1 day ago

Thank you. Very comprehensive commentary. This has confirmed much of my thinking about North and South Korea and the USA. Reply+8

redracam 89p · 1 day ago

Interesting perspective that the shame of it all prevents reparative action.
I think the US, Israel and Friends (UK, DE, FR) have "objectives" that they do not lose sight of; Syria is a case in point. Just when you think that the Syrians are actually getting rid of the terrorist nut jobs funded by the exceptional crew it now looks as if a new front will open with the same 'objective"' - to balkanize and weaken nation states in the Middle-East.
Finian Cunningham is absolutely correct from a propaganda-narrative point of view - Korea, Vietnam etc. cannot be justified because of the facts. However, the objectives of the exceptional crew are what drive them not the shame of being unmasked politically. (IMHO) Reply1 reply · active 1 day ago+5

MathewNeville 71p · 1 day ago

" to balkanize and weaken nation states in the Middle-East." was/is the neocon/israeli PNAC agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New... Reply+16

Stes2011 96p · 1 day ago

There's an ironic beauty in the eloquence with which Mr Cunningham chronicles the ugliness of America's atrocious war crimes. Thank you, sir. Reply+4

MossadMan 52p · 1 day ago

It's time nations that won't sign the Statute of Rome, such as USA and maybe Russia who may have left, are thrown out of the UN Security Council. Maybe they should be thrown out of the General Assembly as well.
Australian FM Bishop addressed the GA backing the Trump line. It's a time warp of Blair in the House of Commons and Powell in the UN denouncing fictional Iraqi WMD. The GA should have taken this opportunity to rise up in their seats and sing ''Let's do the time warp again.'' Reply+6

DavidChu123 89p · 1 day ago

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters:

This MOST seminal talk given by President Putin about one year ago is a MUST watch and learn video:  ;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo

The WHY as to why the Yankees are doing what they do against North Korea and Iran is very simple (besides the blatant and obvious and very clumsy attempt to sell billions of dollars of weapons to their lapdogs) to put their ABM or antiballistic missile systems right on Russia's and China's borders for two reasons:

1) To be able to shoot down Russian and Chinese ICBMs during their LAUNCH phase when these missile are very heavy with fuel and moving relatively slowly.  Yankee ABMs CAN'T shoot down Russian and Chinese ICBMs when they are coming downwards.  The Yankee "hit the bullet with a bullet" approach does NOT work during the TERMINAL phase of ICBMs.

2) As Putin warned in this video, these Yankee ABM missiles can be very quickly converted into OFFENSIVE NUCLEAR missiles via software programming.  Now, these Yankee offensive nuclear missiles can hit Russian and Chinese targets, not in 30 minutes, but in 5 to 10 minutes!

This is WHY Russia and China are up in arms about the deployment of Yankees ABM systems on their borders, in Romania and Poland, and in South Korea. Reply1 reply · active 1 day ago+1

participant2943 83p · 1 day ago

Why have they been unable to persuade the rest of the world to help them remove these deadly genocidal weapons, using sanctions, cyber war, whatever is necessary to behead and disembowel the international demons? Reply+1

dl66 2p · 1 day ago

The US will never sign a Peace treaty with NK. From the US/Japan security treaty article 4 I understand the US would have to pull out of Japan if US/NK sign a peace agreement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Treaty_B... Reply+1

kombabulla 99p · 1 day ago

Must Know
Franklin D. Roosevelt tells all, before he dies. Incredible! http://tinyurl.com/y7aoupfx Reply+2

robertjb2 26p · 1 day ago

Dealing with the insane megalomania.. .https://canadianviews-ymo.ca/nato-the-decomposing-corpse/ Reply1 reply · active 1 day ago+1

kombabulla 99p · 1 day ago

robertjb2
Could not link up with your video try using http://tinyurl.com/ Reply+3

Know_the_truth 93p · 1 day ago

I have just been reading some interesting facts about the state of American healthcare. Apparently hospitals there can charge patients $500 for a stitch, ONE STITCH, so supposing someone has a great big gash that requires several stitches to close it up how much would that set that person back ?, it doesnt stop there, how about $800 for an IV bag of saline solution that cost the manufacturer $1 to produce ? Its no wonder the whole populationare turning to "medical" marijuana to ease their pains. This is one SICK country and they are trying to infect europe with the same sickness, the NHS in the UK is slowly on its way to being privatised by the tories and labour neocons, want to talk about barbarism ? This is the real barbarism coming from a government that just upped defence spending by an additional $80 billion to a whopping $700 billion while decent healthcare is unafordable for the vast majority. Reply1 reply · active 1 day ago+2

kombabulla 99p · 1 day ago

Sad state of affairs indeed
Concur 100% Reply0

localplato 1p · 1 day ago

Normally,I would not have bothered to comment on this article,but what changed my mind is a report in the ICH by the news agency Routers in the news section. And I quote: " Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is growing increasingly hostile towards the Rohingya in India, with Home Minister Rajnath Singh calling on Thursday for their deportation as illegal migrants". It is my firm conviction that while the western 'Christian media never misses an opportunity to highlight the role of 'Hindu nationalism' in their narrative of the troubles in these parts, It has been very coy in reporting about the developments in North Korea as primarily due to the frustration of the Christian American state in not being able shove Christianity down the throats of all Koreans so that their long time dream of setting up a Christian nation in the mainland Asia ever remaining a dream .After failing in China to make it Christian under Chiang Kei shek as the Time magazine founder editor visualized, Korea was the last hope to attain this dream. In other words the war in Korea is a religious war waged by the American Christian State against an 'heathen people in Korea. The more the western Christian controlled media tries to hide this fact the more will be its shrill claims about others' religious intolerance. Reply+3

ethanallen24 78p · 1 day ago

Perhaps the leadership of South Korea and their counterparts in the North will jointly come to the conclusion that the most direct solution to the heightened tension is for South Korea to order the immediate departure of all American military personnel. Reply 

 

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"That is why the all-important issue of a peace treaty over the Korean War is not signed by the US. It is simply too shameful a subject to even revisit in the slightest way."

Its the UN that went to war in Korea and its the UN that would have to sign a peace treaty ...

Well boys and girls what is the answer to your problems? How do you intend to fix these horrible atrocities ( as you say) by the USA? Amazing how many are now condemning Trump and his team - but where were you prior to the Presidential Elections? Well most of you were putting the boot into Hillary Clinton ....you now seem to have what you've wanted. You seem prepared to believe anything that is anti Trump and anti "mainstream"...but please, Iran, Nth Korea, China....bastions of civil rights and freedom????? Yeah right. 

Trump should move over and let Ivanka take over. Clever girl and great looking too.

Btw if you're ever at Trump Towers, try their steak, hard to beat!

When Trump called Kim Yung Un "rocket man" I knew he had gone too far.

No matter what he thinks of him personally Trump needed to bite his tongue.  These words were not in the draft speech presented to him to give to the UN...he put them in himself.