Here we go again

June 20:

“We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains sent back today, already 200 got sent back,” Trump told a crowd of supporters during a rally in Duluth, Minnesota.

  Reuters

Today:



Yes, like those thousands and thousands of people, including ancient, ancient parents of soldiers who begged him to bring their sons home, right?

Remains believed to be those of 55 American servicemen were flown out of North Korea on Friday, the first visible result of President Trump’s efforts to bring the American war dead home 65 years after the end of combat in the Korean War.

[...]

An American Air Force C-17 Globemaster cargo plane carrying the remains landed later at Osan Air Base south of Seoul, the South Korean capital. Hundreds of American service members as well as a military honor guard lined up on the tarmac to mark the return of the fallen troops.

As the honor guard and the troops stood at attention, 55 small coffins containing the remains were individually carried out of the plane by dress-uniformed soldiers and loaded into six vans. Each of the boxes was wrapped with the United Nations flag, the flag that American troops fought under in the Korean War.

  NYT

Of course, you're asking yourself: How do we know those are actually US soldier remains? And well you should.

The remains flown out on Friday were the first handed over since a joint effort by American military experts and North Korean workers between 1996 and 2005. The group collected the remains of what were believed to have been 220 American soldiers.

[...]

From Osan Air Base, the remains will be transferred to the Hawaii-based Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, where painstaking forensic work will be carried out to identify them. Remains that were returned in the past from North Korea were found to be mixed with those of unidentified individuals and even with animal bones.

Speaking of the Korean War, there's a pretty good documentary streaming on Netflix: "The Battle of Chosin".

Also, I wonder about the remains of the 400 South Korean refugees the US massacred at No Gun Ri.  Were they returned to their families?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 8/1:  Along with over 55 boxes, the North Koreans provided only one military dog tag as sole information on the identification fo the remains in those boxes.  There are approximately 7,700 missing US servicemen from the Korean War.

Pence Redux

Noting that Trump had recently ordered a missile strike against Syria, the vice-president, who is in Seoul at the start of a tour of Asia, said: “North Korea would do well not to test his resolve.”

Pence, standing alongside South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, said Washington’s commitment to its ally was “iron-clad and immutable”, and repeated that “all options are on the table” – including military action – to forestall North Korea’s quest to produce a nuclear weapon capable of striking the US mainland.

Any use of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang, he added, would be met with “an overwhelming and effective response”, a day after the regime conducted a failed missile launch.

[...]

“President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change,” he said.

“We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable.”

Pence said Trump was hopeful China would cooperate, adding: “But as the president has made very clear, either China will deal with this problem or the United States and our allies will.”

  Guardian

Actually, I don't think he mentioned allies.

“My father served in the Korean war with the US army, and on the way here we actually saw some of the terrain my father fought on alongside Korean forces to help earn your freedom,” Pence said in an address at Camp Bonifas. “We are grateful to all of those who each and every day stand in the gap for freedom here at the DMZ. It is a testament to the unshakeable bond between our people.”

I wonder if his father played any part in the slaughter of  hundreds of South Korean refugees.

China’s foreign ministry spokesman said that tensions needed to be eased on the Korean peninsula to resolve the situation. “As declared repeatedly, the current state of the Korean peninsula is highly complicated and highly dangerous,” Lu Kang said in a briefing, responding to a question over North Korea’s failed missile launch.

“The point we have consistently made is that each country involved should refrain from behaviours that provoke one another and fuel their tension further and that they should make efforts to ease the tense situation on the Korean peninsula.”

That's not how we roll. Not any more.

Despite its failure, Sunday’s missile launch was seen as a test of Trump’s resolve after the president warned that he had not ruled out military action against North Korea and sent a US aircraft carrier battle group towards the peninsula.

It's also possible that it was in response to Trump's beligerant remarks about North Korea. You're not supposed to take any measures to defend yourself from the might and will of the United States. You're supposed to cower and shake.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why Do North Koreans Hate Us?

This is from a March 2015 article in the Washington Post.

For years, North Korea has taught schoolchildren to bayonet effigies of U.S. soldiers. Under its young dictator, Kim Jong Un, the government has suggested it was prepared to nuke Washington, Austin and Southern California. More than 40 years ago, Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” who founded the family dictatorship that rules North Korea, said there was “no secret” about his country’s behavior: “What is most important in our preparations [for war] is to educate all the people to hate U.S. imperialism.”

  WaPo

So, Americans are their ragheads.

Like all dictatorial regimes, the Kim family dynasty needs an endless existential struggle against a fearsome enemy.

Like all dictatorial regimes AND empires.

The hate, though, is not all manufactured. It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.

The story dates to the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force, in response to the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, bombed and napalmed cities, towns and villages across the North.

[...]

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. [...] After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.

Although the ferocity of the bombing was criticized as racist and unjustified elsewhere in the world, it was never a big story back home. [...] War reporters rarely mentioned civilian casualties from U.S. carpet-bombing. It is perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war.

[...]

State media warn that, sooner or later, the Americans will strike again.

Not to mention the fact that rather than allow Korea to be independent and choose their own form of governance after the Japanese surrender of WWII, the US and Russia divvied it up between themselves.

And not to mention the No Gun Ri massacre.

Declassified military documents recently found in the US National Archives show clearly how US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield.

[...]

Just weeks after the conflict had begun, up to two million refugees were streaming across the battlefield; they clogged the roads and the UN lines.

Under pressure and fearing North Korean infiltration, the US leadership panicked. Soon command saw all civilians as the enemy regardless. On 26 July the US 8th Army, the highest level of command in Korea, issued orders to stop all Korean civilians. 'No, repeat, no refugees will be permitted to cross battle lines at any time. Movement of all Koreans in group will cease immediately.'

[...]

In August 1950 there were orders detailing that refugees crossing the Naktong River be shot. Later in the same month, General Gay, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division [...] actually ordered artillery units to target civilians on the battlefield. And as late as January 1951, the US 8th Army was detailing all units in Korea that refugees be attacked with all available fire including bombing.

[...]

A total of 61 separate incidents involving the killing of civilians by US forces are now logged with the South Korean authorities.

[...]

On the very day that the US 8th Army delivered its stop refugee order in July 1950, up to 400 South Korean civilians gathered by the [No Gun Ri] bridge were killed by US forces from the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Some were shot above the bridge, on the railroad tracks. Others were strafed by US planes. More were killed under the arches in an ordeal that local survivors say lasted for three days.

[...]

'The floor under the bridge was a mixture of gravel and sand. People clawed with their bare hands to make holes to hide in,' recalls survivor Yang Hae Chan. 'Other people piled up the dead like a barricade, and hid behind the bodies as a shield against the bullets.'

Corroborating the Korean survivors' testimony are the accounts of 35 veterans of the 7th Cavalry Regiment who recall events at No Gun Ri.

[...]

'There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill 'em all,' recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman. 'I didn't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all.'

  BBC

And it wasn't reported in the US until autumn of 1999.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.