HOWARD EPSTEIN: THE CROCODILE. FEED IT OR BLEED IT
It is becoming plain, that, finally, the US intelligence community is showing some intelligence. The threat of a devastating attack by the USA on Kim Jong Un’s North Korean rogue state is palpable and possibly imminent – but the need for it has been foreseeable for a very long time.
What can have taken them so long? Three days before Obama was replaced in the White House by Trump, I published an article here entitled: “Time To Nuke North Korea, Mr President”. I wrote:-
“Hidden in plain view … North Korea, whose imminent threat to the Continental United States will soon be causing people up and down the West Coast to ask how everything they know got to be directly threatened by a slave nation which specializes in just two things: famine and the development of deliverable nuclear war-heads.
Get Out of That One, Donald
Whereas by careful communication and negotiation most issues can be defused, with North Korea there is no one normal with whom to communicate, much less negotiate. Kim Jong Un, the corpulent, third generation Kim, heartless, child-like (like from a horror movie) tyrant, who has been fixated on atom bomb tests and missile systems, is now expected to be able to produce fifty nuclear warheads, and an intercontinental ballistic missile system to deliver them, within a handful of years. The Pentagon no longer frets about if but when.
Then I asked: “Will Trump do it? Will he defang the North Korean nuclear capability? A million might die. But if he leaves it, ten million might die, or a hundred million. Agonizing choice. How could the Americans have been so stupid to let things go so far?”
Here we are, just eight months later, with the threat of a nuclear holocaust in Guam or Japan (or even Chicago) utterly real and, still, there are those who think that diplomacy might work – as did Chamberlain with Hitler. Only Churchill – regarding Hitler from 1933 – saw, and said, for years as a lone voice in the British House of Commons, that the sooner you stop feeding the crocodile, the greater are the chances that its last meal will not be you. Those crocodiles. Destruction is in the nature of the beast.
I continued:-
Here is the Siamese-twin question. How was Israel so stupid as to allow Hezbollah to build up its missile numbers to 10,000? Then to 50,000? Then to 120,000? [Today, eight months on, it is reckoned to be 160,000!] That is as criminal an appeasement as was practised by all those British politicians of the 1930s who were not Winston Churchill, the lone voice that spake what was to come.
Now, with who knows how many missiles in silos all over Lebanon, one day someone in Hezbollah is going to look at the Best By date on that arsenal and go scurrying down the steps to Nasrallah’s bunker, screaming: “Hey, Hassan. If we don’t use them this week, we might not be able to use them at all.” At that point, we had better got a load of Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow interceptors in stock, because we are going to need every one of them, and probably more than that, too.
Time was that Israel created border towns to establish its borders. Now military planning for the next war begins with the evacuation of our border towns. (Maybe San Diego has a similar fate in store.) But hang on a moment. If Hezbollah can reach every part of Israel with its rocket arsenal (and Kim can reach most of America) is evacuation any more than a vacuous suggestion, intended to make the people think that those who have been supposed to protect them have not been suffused with wishful-thinking rather than post-Churchillian hard-headedness?
Of course no-one wants war but, if it is inevitable, then everyone wants the war with the fewest possible number of casualties. Which one is that? You ask. The earliest one of course.
The grim calculus works equally in the Mediterranean region as in the Pacific.
Talking of numbers reminds me that the Euros are collecting their dividends on their fifty year investment in Sunni terrorism – big-time. Cash has been poured into the ever-open gullets of Arafat and Abu Mazen (we are still awaiting the nom de paix of the Rogue of Ramallah) for half a century now. The first tranche was digested into their private bank accounts and the very considerable balance was used to develop street terrorism in their laboratory called Israel. Now, the New Normal of blowing up and mowing down the innocents – a paradigm financed by Europe – has leeched back to the source of the funds.
The Grim Reaper now calls for Europeans on an almost weekly basis and no-one asks how a generation of young Muslim men got to see their nihilistic lifestyle merely as something common-place that Sunnis do to westerners. The answer is plain: from their first sentient moment they saw Palestinians doing it to Jews. Jews. Crusaders. They are all the same to a generation reared on snuff movies (nightly news broadcasts), in which they get up to snuff and the infidel gets to be dismembered.
Some investment. Some dividend income-stream. The Palestinian/Sunni Terrorist crocodile did not just heave into view like Hitler (whom the German establishment thought it could control). It was hand-reared by the Europeans. It took a bite out of Ma’alot, out of Quiryat Shemona, several out of Netanya, far more than we can count out of Jerusalem and many other Israeli cities – and no-one in Europe told Arafat: “Hey, you. The supplicant. Israel is a democracy. We will stop supporting you if you do not change your ways.” On the contrary, the money and the blood kept a-coming. As indeed, it does today.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
© Howard Epstein – August 2017
