Section 24 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 March 08 Saturday.
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Yes, George Bush is going to attack North Korea. The evidence is that the American military is right now busy making plans to pull its troops back from the border with North Korea, and maybe to withdraw them from the Korean peninsular itself.

At the moment, the American troops currently stationed in South Korea are jammed right up against the border with the North. So George Bush can't nuke the North Koreans. Because if he does, then North Korea's Kim Jong Il will use his artillery and kill thousands and thousands and thousands of American boys. And, as we all know, American lives are precious.

So the plan is this:-

(i) Bush withdraws the American troops, who right at the moment are effectively Kim Jong Il's hostages.

(ii) Bush attacks North Korea, possibly with nukes.

(iii) Having been attacked, Kim Jong Il counterattacks, and kills thousands and thousands and thousands of South Koreans. This is not a problem for George Bush, because Korean lives are worthless in Washington.

(iv) Having demonstrated that he's evil, Kim Jong Il then becomes a legitimate target for total destruction, so George Bush sends his bombers in to slaughter however many North Koreans it takes to force North Korea to surrender.

There's an alternative plan, a Plan B (my psychic powers are telling me this) which is pretty much like the plan above. In fact, steps (i) and (ii) are identical. Then, however, Kim Jong Il cheats by refusing to attack South Korea. At that stage, George Bush declares, "Well, we know the guy's evil anyway, and he could attack, so we need regime change in North Korea," and the slaughter continues as per the original plan.

If you ask George Bush, he will say, "No, I have no such plan, but we want to reserve all our options." (This is pretty much what Colin Powell has been saying about the North Korean problem recently.)

But there's really no point asking George Bush what he's going to do because nothing that comes out of his mouth can be trusted.

I was going to say this:-

"Right now, George Bush is saying that he hasn't yet made a decision on whether to attack Iraq, which is the largest lie that has yet been told by anyone in the entire course of the Twenty-First Century, as it's very plain that he made the decision to attack Iraq months ago."

But I won't say that, because I've been busy all day - this entry was written in trains and in my lunchbreak and so forth - and I haven't had time to watch TV or cruise the Internet. So I don't know whether George Bush has finally come clean and said, "Yes, I aim to run this man Saddam Hussein down and kill him, and I'm not leaving him an exit door. This man is going to die. And I don't care how many collaterals it takes."

However, it's certainly true that even within the last week George Bush has been saying that he hasn't yet made a decision on whether to attack Iraq, and that's a lie of whale-thumping proportions.

Regardless of what George Bush does or doesn't say, by now, the George Bush theory of international politics is very clear, and it's very simple:-

"Make peace on Earth. Bomb the planet!"

That being so, there's one very simple recipe for understanding what the Bush regime is planning: watch the troop movements.

I've been reading the International Herald Tribune and it seems that the Bush regime has been making its plans to pull its troops out of the Korean peninsular pretty sneakily, being careful not to say anything to the government of South Korea, where the troops are being hosted.

However, the South Koreans have now found out what's being planned, and they're petty upset about it. The logic is pretty obvious. Removing American troops from South Korea means that George Bush will have a free hand to go to war with North Korea which means that (knowing George Bush) he will go to war with North Korea.

And, naturally, South Korea does not want a war which will (in all probability) leave thousands and thousands of South Koreans dead, particularly not when people in this part of the world generally expect that the long-term outcome of the problem on the Korean peninsular will be (ultimately) the unification of the two Koreas (following the model of the unification of East Germany and West Germany).

The recent elections in South Korea were won by Roh Moo-hyun, who belongs to the Millennium Democratic Party. Today's International Herald Tribune quotes National Assembly member Song Yong Gil, who belongs to Roh's party. Song Yong Gil does not want any American troop movements until the current problems with North Korea have been sorted out.

Today's (Saturday/Sunday) edition of the IHT (as published in Japan) says, on page three, this:-

Song shared a view, increasingly heard here, that any American plan to move U.S. troops from near the line with North Korea may mean that the United States intends to attack North Korean nuclear facilities against the wishes of the South Korean government.

Well, the American military is certainly studying how it could redeploy American troops - that from Donald Rumsfeld, America's Secretary of Defense. And these guys are surely far too busy to be getting involved in any purely theoretical exercises. So the probability is that the troops will move and that war will follow. With reference to the passage quoted above, judging by the Bush regime's track record, Song's "may mean" should read "means".

I'm sitting here typing this up in a room which has a view of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. The view makes me think of the weather. The prevailing winds in Japan come from the general direction of China - that is to say, from the general direction of the Korean peninsular.

These days, the winds sometimes bring to parts of Japan a sprinkling of the same yellow sand which sometimes afflicts Beijing with sandstorms. The wind will also bring to Japan, presumably, Japan's share of the Korean fallout.

And I find myself starting to become a little curious about exactly what kind of weapons George Bush plans to use in North Korea, and exactly what will drift downwind with the weather, all the way from Korea, drifting with the ashes of so many human futures all the way to the shores of Japan.

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Section 24 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 March 08 Saturday.
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Today there was a demonstration in Tokyo against war in Iraq. Forty thousand people demonstrated - that's quite a few for Japan.

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Section 24 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 March 11 Tuesday.
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Another really clear dry day here in Yokohama. Mount Fuji is white with snow, stunningly clear. It's true that the view of the mountain is framed by some of the ugliest buildings on the planet, but, hey, a view is a view. The sky is clear blue. Yesterday we had the same sky, the same mountain view. But, while we were having breakfast, there was a kind of whisper from the hurricane.

"Look! Helicopters!"

And so they were, big machines, each with two horizontal rotor blades, the kind of machines sometimes used to carry troops into combat. And, in all probability, they were exactly that, on some kind of training mission. Yokohama is in Kanagawa prefecture which is home to a number of American military bases.

Later, there was another cry:-

"Hugh! Kerosene!"

And so it was - the kerosene-selling truck, sliding past our house with the loudspeaker turned right down, so it was inaudible from inside the house.

I grabbed an empty kerosene can and sprinted down the road. Fortunately, the kerosene-selling truck stopped just thirty seconds down the road, intercepted by another customer.

So the kid driving the truck pumped kerosene for me while the happy kerosene-selling music played from the loudspeakers, and I paid for it, 900 yen for eighteen liters - I'm sure that a while back the same amount of kerosene was only 750 yen.

Another whisper from the hurricane.

Right now Salam's blog is very interesting to read, coming to us live from Baghdad, Iraq. Salam blogs about the practical day-to-day side of the lead-up to the war, like buying a big stock of petrol to run the electric generator, then burying the petrol in the backyard so the house doesn't turn into a bomb.

The picture is pretty clear: everyone in Baghdad is stocking up with kerosene, and presumably a certain proportion of them will be buying petrol as well. And pretty soon some three thousand American bombs and missiles will impact on this largely civilian city.

Here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, one of the amenities we enjoy is American military radio, Eagle 810, broadcasting on the 810 AM frequency. This station carries a pretty good mix of stuff, and yesterday I was listening to Retro Cafe (music from the '60s, '70s and '80s) while I was ironing my shirts.

Spliced into the music show was a little snippet of Jay Leno, who was talking about the three thousand precision-guided devices which the Bush regime intends to use to attack "the Iraqi leadership". He asked a question, which went something like this:-

"If they're precision-guided, why do we need three thousand of them?"

It was a joke, and the audience laughed. I laughed too. I thought it was pretty good joke.

But, after the laughter, the blood. Three thousand missiles targeted on Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein + two sons + top generals does not sum to three thousand.

The best-case result seems to be that the city gets trashed. The worst-case result is that the city burns. Now and again, while I do the laundry, write my reports, proofread curriculum material and prepare my lessons, my thoughts drift back to Salam in Baghdad, and I find myself thinking of all that kerosene in the house, and of the petrol waiting in the backyard.

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Section 24 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 March 11 Tuesday.
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On William Safire, who thinks America's military stance regarding North Korea is a good thing:-

William Safire popped up in today's International Herald Tribune, as published in Japan, on page 8, in an opinion piece with a small headline "The Iraq debate II" and a larger headline "No, the UN is paralyzed, as usual".

Safire's opinion piece is mostly about North Korea. The American military, it seems, is planning to pull its forces out of South Korea (or at least withdraw them from the border region) to give the USA a free hand in any air war against North Korea.

William Safire gives this policy a gung ho yes, writing:-

America's strategic interest in this post-Security Council era is to let the strong South defend its territory while Washington makes it clear to weapons traders in the North that their illicit nuclear production is vulnerable to air attacks from a nation soon to show its disarmament bona fides in Baghdad.

That readiness will bring about what diplomatists call a "fruitful regional, multilateral negotiation." No war needed. No Security Council obfuscation necessary. Allies like Australia, Japan and the Philippines, neutrals like South Korea and Indonesia, and non-allies like China and Russia will find it in their national interest to enlist North Korea and the United States in talks to react to the starving and to starve the reactors.

Apart from giving the guy top marks for alliteration, this is wrongheaded, and catastrophically so.

If the United States were just to walk away from this part of the world - "Sayonara, you're big kids now, sort out your own problems" - then that would be fair enough. But that's not what is happening. What is happening is not United States disengagement.

Instead, what is happening is that the Bush regime is planning to take a step back from South Korea so that the USA can begin an air war against the North.

Safire's breezy "No war needed" statement is nonsense. The Bush regime's "surrender or die" policy is a recipe for war, not peace. Why? Because the Bush policy is to leave no way out of the killing bottle.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein apparently does not believe that he has any realistic chance of saying alive if he leaves Baghdad, and for North Korea's Kim Jong Il the prospect of leaving Pyongyang is probably unimaginable.

If you take a Class A Warlord like Saddam Hussein and tell him "Surrender or die" then his reaction is quite likely to be, "Okay, I'll die then." That's what Hitler did in Berlin. No surrender for him. And Hitler was not the only Nazi to choose the suicide route.

Assuming that Bush targets North Korea's Kim Jong Il in the same way that he's targeted Saddam Hussein, we're going to get a similar reaction, which means we're going to get (in all probability) a war on the Korean Peninsular. Maybe some time this year or maybe a little later, depending on how long it takes to withdraw American ground forces.

The obnoxious part of this is that any war on the Korean peninsular is quite possibly going to mean massive casualties amongst South Koreans, particularly if Kim Jong Il takes a stab at seizing the South Korean capital, Seoul, just across the border from North Korea.

What is really weird, to my mind, is Safire's notion that "Allies like Australia, Japan and the Philippines, neutrals like South Korea and Indonesia, and non-allies like China and Russia" are going to get involved in fixing the North Korean problem.

To start with, I'm from New Zealand, and, from an Australiasian perspective, the notion that Australia might think that it has a strategic interest in North Korea is hallucinatory. Australia (legitimately, I think) sees the next potential military threat as coming (if from anywhere) from Indonesia.

As for Japan, well, history has poisoned relations between Japan and Korea. The thought of Japan (the former imperial power) getting involved in the Korean problem would not sit well with either North Korea or South Korea. Safire's notion that Japan and South Korea would get together to sort out the North Korean problem is a bit like the idea that India and Pakistan would buddy up together to sort out problems on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Philippines? Indonesia? Both those countries have their own internal problems. Both are engaged in dealing with insurgencies of one kind or another, and both are faced with the problem of possible fragmentation. I think they've got enough problems of their own without going looking for any others.

China and Russia, well, I don't know, because I don't have any strong sense of how those two countries operate. But my guess is that neither country feels threatened by North Korea, so they will do nothing, except that China will toughen up the border it shares with North Korea, in an effort to stem a potential influx of refugees.

I see the future as being this:-

1. America attacks Iraq. Saddam Hussein dies.

2. On the Korean peninsular, the US military withdraws its ground forces from harm's way.

3. George Bush then gives Kim Jong Il an ultimatum which boils down to "Give up your nukes or die."

4. North Korea's Kim Jong Il looks at what happened to Saddam Hussein and thinks, "Gee, if I give up my nukes, I die." So he makes some stupid threat, like, "Back off or I'll push the magic button which will split the planet Earth in half," or something equally outrageous, which George Bush ignores because he knows it's an empty threat.

5. George Bush says, "Well, he hasn't given up his nukes, so we've got to nuke him." (By this time the financial damage of the Iraq war will be so painfully clear that it will have become apparent that America is too broke for anything but a nice, quick, cost-efficient nuclear war.)

6. George Bush nukes North Korea - probably just the North Korean nuclear facilities and the artillery along the border.

7. Kim Jong Il's power structure starts to totter, so he plays the only card left to him, which is the militarist-nationalist card, the "We must defend the motherland against the American aggressors" card, and he attacks South Korea, which by this time is empty of Americans.

8. South Koreans die.

9. George Bush bombs North Korea.

10. North Koreans die.

11. North Korea collapses.

12. George Bush declares victory.

It's hard to see an alternative route into the future, because George Bush has already decided that Kim Jong Il has to go, and Kim Jong Il knows it.

Of course, this story has a happy ending. North and South Korea get united, and form one stable, logically coherent country, and a thousand years from now nobody will care less how many dead bodies George Bush had to walk across to lead us to the happy ending. I mean, these days, who gets seriously worked up about the historical depradations of Genghis Khan or Atilla the Hun?

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