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More Korean War is “Worth it?” To Whom?

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Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fig...
Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fight North Koreans holding the city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Speaking to CNN on the possibility of resuming hostilities in the nearly 70-year-old Korean War (in uneasy ceasefire since 1953), US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says “all the damage … would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security.”

Worth it, Senator Graham? To whom?

The last period of open war on the Korean peninsula cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million lives, including nearly a million soldiers on both sides (36,516 of them American) and 2.5 million civilians in the North and South.

What did the American taxpayer get in return for three years of fighting, tens of thousands of Americans dead, and nearly $700 billion (in 2008 dollars)?

Well, that taxpayer’s government got to decide who’s in charge of part of the Korean peninsula, which, last time I checked, is not a US state or territory.

And that taxpayer’s government got the opportunity to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more of that taxpayer’s money to garrison the North-South border along the 38th Parallel for 65 years. That excludes the off-peninsula costs of the US “security umbrella” covering other Pacific Rim nations.

And that taxpayer’s government got a convenient bugaboo to scare the bejabbers out of that taxpayer with any time peace threatened to break out.

Stability? Well, sure, if what we’re talking about is guaranteeing that the welfare checks continue to reliably arrive in the American military industrial complex’s mailboxes. But apart from that, continued saber-rattling on either side of some of the most militarized acreage on Earth — the so-called “Demilitarized Zone” — is pretty much the definition of instability.

National security? Not so much, if for no other reason than that North Korea never has represented and does not now represent a credible military threat to the United States. If it ever does come to represent such a threat, it will be because the US continues, at the urging of demagogues like Lindsey Graham, to involve itself in the affairs of people thousands of miles away who do not welcome such involvement.

So far, the Korean War hasn’t delivered any benefit of note to the American people, especially in the areas of “stability” or “national security.”

America’s long misadventure on the Korean peninsula has only been worth it to US “defense” contractors and the politicians they own. Yes, Senator Graham, I’m looking at you.

The sooner the US government notifies the South Korean government that America is going home, the better.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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America’s Democracy Hypocrisy

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In late February, Venezuela’s government began accepting presidential candidate registrations and announced a snap legislative election for April. The country’s opposition denounces the process as a sham and Maduro as a dictator, both of which may be true.

Oddly,  a third voice — the US government — also weighed in. Per US state media outlet Voice of America, “the United States, which under President Donald Trump has been deeply critical of Maduro’s leadership in crisis-torn and economically suffering Venezuela, on Saturday rejected the call for an early legislative vote.”

Given the perpetual public pearl-clutching over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, that’s some major league chutzpah.

The US State Department wants “‘a free and fair election’ involving full participation of all political leaders, the immediate release of all political prisoners, credible international observation and an independent electoral authority.

Let’s take that one at a time.

Participation of all political leaders? In some US states, it’s harder for a third party to get on a ballot than in, say, Iran.

The immediate release of all political prisoners? Last I heard, US president Donald Trump hadn’t pardoned (among others) Leonard Peltier.

Credible international observation? The US proper committed to admitting international election observers in the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe’s 1990 Copenhagen Document, but many US states forbid international observers or, for that matter, local observers who aren’t affiliated with one of the two ruling parties.

Electoral authorities? The two ruling parties control them all and routinely use them to suppress threatened competition, as do pseudo-private entities like the Commission on Presidential Debates, which makes giant illegal (but government approved) in-kind contributions to the Republican and Democratic candidates in the form of televised candidate beauty pageants which exclude the opposition parties.

Writing in The Atlantic, veteran election meddler Thomas O. Mela — formerly of the US State Department, the  US Agency for International Development,  the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House — argues that election meddling is different when the US does it, because … well, “democracy.”

Mela asserts a “difference between programs to strengthen democratic processes in another country (without regard to specific electoral outcomes), versus efforts to manipulate another country’s election in order to sow chaos, undermine public confidence in the political system, and diminish a country’s social stability.”

The US government spends a lot of time and money (USAID’s budget alone is about one-tenth the budget of the entire Russian government) on foreign election meddling, and somehow “democracy” always gets interpreted as “whatever outcome the US government prefers at the moment.”

Perhaps we should get our own democratic house in order instead of, or at least before, presuming to tell the rest of the world how democracy does or should work.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Who’s on Third? Not John Kasich

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Libertarian Party Logo
Libertarian Party Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I don’t think either party is answering people’s deepest concerns and needs,” Ohio governor John Kasich said in a February 25 interview on ABC News’s This Week. “I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow but I think over time do not be surprised if these millennials and these Gen Xers begin to say, ‘Neither party works, we want something new.'”

The idea smacks of special pleading by Kasich, who ran a lackluster campaign for the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination and got sent home by his party’s primary voters in favor of Donald Trump. His supporters (with no discernible discouragement from him) are talking him up as a possible 2020 candidate on a third party ticket.

Maybe not tomorrow, governor Kasich — and certainly not yesterday.

In 2014, Kasich and Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jon Husted, actively conspired to deny Ohioans third choices — Libertarian Party nominee Charlie Earl for governor and Steve Linnaberry for Attorney General — accepting an illegal $250,00 in-kind donation from a GOP activist  in the form of attorney bills for legal action to remove Earl  and Linnaberry from the ballot.

The only reason John Kasich suddenly thinks fondly of third parties is because he fell short of his own party’s top slot. Back when he thought the sky was the limit for himself, he couldn’t stand the idea. Sore loser much?

 

He may be right that a third party is coming, but not for the reasons he wants one. He’s enamored of the notion that what Americans REALLY want in a political candidate is a “centrist” like John Kasich, Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton. In other words, a candidate like those who keep losing presidential elections.

The winners of recent elections have been candidates who moved away from the center — ever so slightly in a “progressive” direction like Barack Obama in 2008, or falsely but loudly in a “populist” direction like the Tea Party’s 2010 congressional class or Donald Trump in 2016.

The problem with the major parties is not that they’re not “centrist” enough, it’s that their candidates run as something different and then move to the center after they win.

Americans clearly want change, not the same old stuff in louder packaging. We don’t agree on what kind of change, but it’s obvious to most of us that something just isn’t working.

There’s already a third American political party, based on ideas that work every time they’re tried. It’s the party Kasich did his damnedest to hide from the voters of Ohio: The Libertarian Party.

There are other  third parties, too, if freedom isn’t your touchstone. The Green Party. The Constitution Party. The oldest third party in existence, the Prohibition Party.

But they’re not the kind of third parties John Kasich has in mind. They’re parties whose supporters want to actually take America in new directions. John Kasich wants to paint a racing stripe on his broke-down ideas and sell us a jalopy with four flat tires and no engine as something “new.”

Sorry, John. No sale.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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