Friday, March 29, 2013
Is North Korea Preparing a Bloody Easter Sunday?
UPDATE: NORTH KOREA SAYS 'STATE OF WAR' EXISTS WITH SOUTH
Is North Korea preparing an Easter Sunday sneak attack on South Korea?
Possibly.
The Kimist regime, which has threatened to "liberate" South Korea--and to attack the United States with nuclear weapons--is fanatically opposed to Christianity. Of an estimated 200,000 prisoners in North Korea--including political prisoners and people considered politically unreliable--70,000 of them are believed to be Christians. (Click here to read about the prison camps.)
About 30% of South Koreans are Christian. Although Easter Sunday is not celebrated in South Korea as publicly as Christmas, the holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as described in the New Testament is certainly observed by South Korean Protestants and Catholics.
Easter Sunday isn't a federal holiday in the U.S. But the holiday is important--the greatest feast in the Christian calendar. And the local Easter egg hunt and White House Easter Egg Roll are cherished traditions for millions of Americans, including secular Christians and many non-Christians.
So, North Korea could be planning to violently mar the holiday for South Koreans and Americans. The mad dictatorship seems bent on provoking conflict at some level.
Connect the Dots
And, at the risk of being boringly repetitious, it must again be said that instigating crisis and conflict in Northeast Asia is in the interest of Pyongyang's partner in nuclear/missile crime--Christianity-hating, Islamist Iran--which, for starters, aims to drive the U.S. from the Middle East. Long term, the new Nazi Germany seeks its adversary's actual destruction along with Israel's annihilation--a world, as Iranian leaders openly muse, "without America and Zionism."
Not for nothing, as Foreign Confidential has repeatedly asserted, have Iranians observed every North Korean nuclear and major missile test.
The times are perilous; to pretend otherwise seems downright suicidal.
POSTSCRIPT: Assuming the North does not attack this weekend, the period from April 15, which is the birthday of North Korea's founder and "Eternal President," Kim Il Sung, to July 27, the day the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953--called a "Commemorative Day of War Victory" in the North--is almost certain to be an especially dangerous time.
PPS: Regarding the "state of war" announcement, can the U.S. be sure that the North's 28-year-old dictator knows his military's real power? How do we know he is being told the truth by his generals and advisers? Could it be that that they are lying to him--telling him, for whatever reasons, that their country is capable of actually defeating the U.S. in a nuclear war--and that he is ignorant, or insane, enough to believe the lies? Stranger things have happened.
This much is certain: Washington is in uncharted territory. There has never been an escalation like this one in the nuclear age. The Cuban Missile Crisis came close to blowing up the planet. There is no way of knowing where the new Korean crisis will lead.
Players Begin Savage Moves for Post-Assad Power Grab
Syrian Stage Set for Intra-Islamic Struggle for Power
By Clare M. Lopez
"Intelligence Preparation of the Environment (IPE)" is a military term for analyzing the operational environment, including the adversary and his potential courses of action. The corollary to the IPE process is taking action to help shape that environment in ways advantageous for one's own side and detrimental for the enemy. Such action may be military, but also includes intelligence and psychological operations.
This is what's going on in Syria right now. Bashar al-Assad's regime is going to fall and the only question left is, "How soon?" The forces that will savage one another to succeed him in power in Damascus are beginning to make moves that are calculated to improve their position in the immediate post-Assad period.
Key players are being either removed from the chess board or strategically placed on it. For example, on March 19, 2013, the Turkey-based Syrian National Council (SNC) elected Ghassan Hitto, a senior member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, as head of an interim opposition government for Syria. Hitto was profiled in an extensive report by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report (GMBDR) later the same day.
An American Connection
The GMBDR notes that Hitto is a founding member of the Muslim Legal Fund of America and has served as Vice-President of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Dallas-Ft. Worth chapter and Secretary-Treasurer of the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine (AMELP), another name under which the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP) operated in the U.S.
CAIR and the IAP have been identified by the U.S. Department of Justice (in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding trial) and the FBI as part of the Hamas infrastructure in the U.S.
Further, the SNC leadership also includes another senior member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network who would now be one of Hitto's colleagues, Louay Safi, who (when not acting as an advisor and lecturer for the Pentagon) served as Executive Director of the Leadership Center for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), acknowledged by the Muslim Brotherhood itself as one of its "organizations," as well as Research Director for the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), another Muslim Brotherhood front group.
The response from the Syrian Free Army (SFA) to Hitto's election was not long in coming. They rejected it, asserting that they do not recognize the Qatar-backed Muslim Brother as the legitimate choice of the anti-Assad coalition.
Shortly thereafter, on March 24, 2013, Moaz Khatib, likewise closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (he was the former Imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus), but more closely backed by the SFA, announced his resignation (now apparently since then rescinded as Khatib took the Syrian seat at the Arab League meeting on March 27, 2013).
Saudi Interference
Khatib, an early opponent of the Bashar al-Assad regime, had been selected in November 2012 to head the Western and Gulf-backed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. Thus, Khatib remains in the fight despite what is described as interference from Saudi Arabia and complaints that unnamed Western nations have been channeling weapons to parties that support their own interests.
In between the Hitto election and the Khatib resignation, a massive explosion inside a Damascus mosque on March 21 killed at least 42 people, including one of the most important remaining Sunni clerical figures still supporting the Assad regime. The suicide bomber who killed Sheikh Mohammad Said Ramada al-Bouti, age 84, removed an influential figure in Sunni Islam and one whose support had been critical to providing religious legitimacy to Assad.
As if the mosque bombing and these moves at the top of the Syrian Opposition Coalition were not confusing enough, somebody tried to assassinate Col. Riad al-Assad, one of the top leaders of the Syrian Free Army, on March 24.
Col. Al-Assad has been described as opposed to the al-Qa'eda (Jabhat al-Nusra) and Muslim Brotherhood militias, which, despite forming a dominant part of the opposition fighting forces, openly tout their plans for a post-Assad Syria that involve establishment of an Islamic sharia-compliant regime.
Grenades and Disinformation
The grenade attack on al-Assad's car did not succeed in killing him, but he had to have one leg amputated after being evacuated to a Turkish hospital for treatment. A flurry of false reports that made the rounds on the internet on March 24 and claimed that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had been assassinated likely was a well-executed information operation, designed to cover Col. Al-Assad's successful evacuation.
The net effect of these events is to position the Qatar-Turkey-and-U.S.-backed Muslim Brotherhood forces firmly in line to control the post-Assad period. The effective removal from the chess board of Sheikh al-Bouti and Col. Al-Assad in particular, and the election of Hitto as the SNC's interim president, all point to IPE moves that marginalize (or remove) any who would stand in the way of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover.
While it is not known at this point who is responsible for the assassination attempt against Col. Al-Assad, a cui bono analysis points to an outcome that aligns most closely with the one preferred by the Qatar-Turkey-U.S. alliance.
This is deeply troubling on a number of counts: First, that the U.S. is not taking the lead to selectively support those elements of the SFA that do not seek another Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Islamic regime in the Middle East; and second, that the U.S. is actively supporting elements of the Syrian opposition that have made no secret of their intent to install another sharia-compliant Islamic regime in Damascus once Assad is gone.
Syria is poised for the next stage in its seemingly endless civil war, which is, in fact, an intra-Islamic struggle for power between the forces of Shi'a and Sunni Islam. While the anti-Assad opposition more or less hung together during the two-year fight to oust him, those factions are now beginning to make the chess board moves that will define the post-Assad scramble for succession power among themselves. If these early moves are any indication, that scramble promises to be savage.
US Official: 'N. Korea No Paper Tiger, Danger is Real'
US Warning as N. Korea Vows "War of Liberation" Against South
A United States official seems to agree with Foreign Confidential. As this blog has repeatedly asserted, the North Korean threat is extremely serious. Dismissing or downplaying the threat would be worse than foolish.
Read more.
The unthinkable can happen, as 9/11 proved most tragically and horrifically. A North Korean attack on some South Korean target seems increasingly likely, if not imminent; and the fighting could easily escalate into a full-blown conflict.
Which would be in Iran's interest. North Korea's proliferation partner would like to see the U.S. embroiled in a new foreign war--at the very least, a prolonged crisis of sufficient duration and complexity so as to afford Iran yet more time to achieve its strategic objective of becoming a nuclear-armed power.
Not for nothing have Iran and North Korea jointly developed and test-fired cargo vessel-based ballistic missile launch systems. Not for nothing have they threatened to attack U.S. bases and interests in their respective regions, the Middle East and East Asia, and the U.S. homeland itself. Iran has even boasted that it is capable of attacking the U.S.--meaning ships and/or coastal cities--from the Gulf of Mexico.
Not for nothing have Iranians have been present at every major North Korean missile and nuclear test.
That the partners in nuclear and missile crimes are so brazen--that they do not appear to fear Washington even in the face of its awesome military might--is arguably most disturbing. The New York Times reports the following:
A photo released by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Friday showed Mr. Kim conferring with his top generals on what the agency called “plans to strike the mainland U.S.” A military chart behind them showed what appeared to be trajectories of North Korean missiles hitting major cities in the United States.
North Korea also said its leader, Mr. Kim, “finally signed the plan on technical preparations of strategic rockets of the K.P.A., ordering them to be standby for fire so that they may strike any time the U.S. mainland, its military bases in the operational theaters in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in South Korea.” K.P.A. stands for the Korean People’s Army.
Kim Min-seok, the South Korean spokesman, said the North’s “unusual” public announcement of such plans was partly “psychological.” Many experts and South Korean officials doubted that North Korea has such long-range missiles, much less the know-how to make a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on such rockets.
But other analysts believed that the North’s new KN-08 missiles, which were put on public display last April, were indeed intercontinental ballistic missiles, although they and Musudan have never been test-launched before. They wondered whether North Korea might use the current tensions as an excuse to launch them.
In short, a major provocation by the North, or a series of provocations, is in the works. Shooting of some kind could start at any time.
In this reporter's opinion, the period from April 15, when North Korea will mark the birthday of the country's founder and "Eternal President," Kim Il Sung, to July 27, the day the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953--called a "Commemorative Day of War Victory" in the North--will be especially dangerous.
Increased Activity Detected at N. Korean Rocket Sites
Increased activity at North Korean rocket sites just hours after the combat readiness order….
Read more.
The situation is fraught with danger.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Increasingly Clear that Iran 'Won' the Iraq War
Ten years after … a total disaster, a complete waste of life and treasure. The United States succeeded in creating an Iranian satellite.
Read more.
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