Invading South Korea

Starved of food, North Korea is on the brink of collapse, and in its desperation threatens an invasion of its South Korean neighbours.

Reports from the country reveal Kim Jong-un has built a replica of the South Korean presidential palace to train his troops for an invasion as tensions escalate.

And with America pledged to defend the South in case of attack, the West faces a war that will cost $1billion to fight and cause $1trillion worth of damage.

Former Whitehouse adviser Victor Cha described how a North Korean invasion would play out in his book, The Impossible State. 

Special forces would invade first in a series of predawn airdrops and shore landings, sabotaging power stations, communication networks and bridges in order to "paralyse the population".

Then "the largest artillery force in the world" would pound the South Korean capital Seoul with shells at a rate of 500,000 per hour — leaving its people only 45 seconds to take cover.

An arsenal of 600 chemically-armed missiles would cripple airports, making escape impossible, while 100 more trained on Japan would slow the arrival of US reinforcements.

Any forces that do attempt to cross the Tsushima Strait into the South face waters infested with Kim's submarines, all of them told to torpedo American supply ships.

In the meantime 700,000 North Korean troops and 2,000 tanks would pour across the border, with invasion tunnels discovered as deep as 475ft down — some capable of shifting 30,000 fighters an hour.

With millions fleeing, the road networks would be impassable, leaving defensive forces helpless as the enemy races across the 50 miles between the border and the capital.

And the battlefield would be polluted with up to 5,000 metric tons of chemical agents, including nerve gas, mustard gas, choking and vomiting agents, and perhaps even weaponised diseases.

It would take South Korea and its American allies several days to neutralise the enemy artillery, his book reveals, leaving hundreds of thousands dead.

He writes: "Short of dropping tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield it would be impossible to neutralise all of this without the North first inflicting major damage on Seoul."

Ultimately superior technology means the US and South Korea would win, "but not without four to six months of high-intensity combat and many dead," says Mr Cha.

 The obsolescence of DPRK equipment and training does not mean they are rendered harmless.

"No matter how old the gun or artillery system is, it can still fire on Seoul and do damage — [but] it does mean they will ultimately be defeated by US-ROK combined forces."

End of Arab League

When it comes to multiple nation states hooking up in a buddy up of sorts - Arab League is a pitiful joke.

Founded in 1945 in Cairo when Egypt was an anti-imperial beacon, the Arab League helped make the careers of such 20th-century titans as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Houari Boumedienne. Many of the Arab League’s leaders rallied the masses against British and French colonial rule and dispatched their armies in successive waves against Israel. These days it can barely gather the energy to choose a new head.

Earlier this year, Egypt insisted on yet another retired foreign minister, an uncharismatic septuagenarian and a relic from the sclerotic Mubarak era cast aside within weeks of the Arab spring.  Qatar, openly petitioned for an alternative. Better a candidate closer to the Arab mean age of 22, they reasoned, than another ancient cat with zero pull in the League. None, however, was forthcoming, and Mr Gheit was elected unopposed.

The Arab League’s first battle, for Palestine in 1948, was an ill-co-ordinated rout. Successive attempts at uniting members and joining forces against Israel quickly unravelled. But now something seems rotten not just in the institution but the ideology it represents. “The league is obsolete,” says Khairallah Khairallah, a veteran Arab opinion-writer from Lebanon. “It was built to respond to the 1940s and we’re now in the 21st century. The idea of Arab nationalism is dead.”

Economically, the promise of an Arab free-trade zone never materialised. Less than 10% of the Arab world’s trade is between Arab states. Politically, Israel, its first rallying cry, no longer offers much glue. The boycott on the Zionist entity has more traction in Europe than in much of the Middle East, and some Arab states make it easier for Israelis to enter than Palestinians. Foreigners are seeping back militarily, too. America rules Iraq’s skies, non-Arab neighbours encroach on its turf and the Kurds all but rule themselves. To cap it all, Britain is set to reopen its first naval base east of Suez later this year, in Bahrain. At the Arab League’s last summit one leader lamented that their language was the only thing Arabs still had in common.

Even that now seems under threat. After six decades of Arabisation programmes, the former French colonies in north Africa are abandoning the effort. To the chagrin of its Islamist prime minister, Morocco is reintroducing French as the language of tuition for science and maths. Algeria has declared Tamazight, the indigenous Berber tongue, an official language, and might yet render it in a Latin script. The former British colonies in the Middle East seem to be doing much the same with English. A survey by ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, a Dubai-based PR company, last year confirmed that young Arabs in the Gulf use English more frequently than Arabic.

The Arab League is not alone in wrestling with the end of an age of heroes, and the erosion of multilateral ideology by resurgent nationalism. But unlike the European Union, it has failed to find a mechanism for managing rivalry. Too paralysed by sectarian and regional differences, it has stood by as its members were engulfed by war. The former standard-bearer of anti-colonialism looked to European powers to sort out the mess, and in Libya even called on Western powers to send in warplanes. So dejected was Morocco at the prospect of hosting another stillborn summit in March that it cancelled its invitations.

Perhaps the Arab League’s only real use these days is as a retirement home for Egypt’s politicians.

Existential Threats of al Qaeda and ISIL

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical ThreatsProject (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute conducted an intensive multi-week exercise to frame, design, and evaluate potential courses of action that the United States could pursue to defeat the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. The planning group weighed the national security interests of the United States, its partners, its rivals, and its enemies operating in or influencing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.

It considered how current policies and interests are interacting in this complex environment. It identified the minimum endstates that would satisfy American national security requirements as well as the likely outcomes of current policies. The group also assessed the threat posed by al Qaeda and ISIS to the United States, both in the immediate and long term, and tested the probable outcomes of several potential courses of action that the United States could pursue in Iraq and Syria.

ISW and CTP will publish the findings of this exercise in multiple reports. This first report examines America’s global grand strategic objectives as they relate to the threat from ISIS and al Qaeda. It considers the nature of those enemy groups in depth and in their global context. 

 

The second report will define American strategic objectives in Iraq and Syria, along with those of Iran, Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and will articulate the minimum required conditions of military-political resolutions to conflicts in Iraq and Syria. The final report will present the planning group’s evaluation of several courses of action.

 

The key findings of this first report are:

• Salafi-jihadi military organizations, particularly ISIS and al Qaeda, are the greatest threat to the security and values of American and European citizens. ISIS and al Qaeda pose an existential threat because they accelerate the collapse of world order, provoke domestic and global trends that endanger American values and way of life, and plan direct attacks against the U.S. and its partners.
• Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group. This al Qaeda affiliate has established an expansive network of partnerships with local oppositions groups that have grown either dependent on or fiercely loyal to the organization. Its defeat and destruction must be one of the highest priorities of any strategy to defend the United States and Europe from al Qaeda attacks.
 
• ISIS and al Qaeda are more than terrorist groups; they are insurgencies. They use terrorism as a tactic, but these organizations are insurgencies that aim first to overthrow all existing governments in the Muslim world and replace them with their own, and later, to attack the West from a position of power to spread their ideology to all of humanity. Separating the elements of ISIS and al Qaeda that are actively working to attack the West from the main bodies of those groups fighting in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia is impossible. All al Qaeda groups and ISIS affiliates seek to take the war into the West to fulfill their grand strategic objective of establishing a global caliphate, albeit according to different timelines.   
 
• Current counter-ISIS and –al Qaeda policies do not ensure the safety of the American people or the homeland. The primary objective of the U.S. government remains protecting the homeland and the American people, including safeguarding American values both in the homeland and abroad. The activities of ISIS and al Qaeda interact with the policies of Russia, Iran, and China to endanger the international systems upon which American safety and freedom depend. Any strategy to counter ISIS and al Qaeda will require coalition partners. However, there is no natural coalition of states with common goals that can readily work together to resolve this problem. The U.S. must lead its partners and ensure the continuation of existing guarantors of international security such as NATO.   
• American and Western security requires the elimination of ISIS and al Qaeda regional bases and safe-havens. Salafi-jihadi groups independent of al Qaeda and ISIS form a base of support from which the enemy draws strength and resilience. ISIS and al Qaeda use the extensive safe haven and infrastructure of locally focused Salafi-jihadi groups to help plan,
  

North Korea's EMP THreat

A big H-Bomb could blast New York or Los Angeles into rubble. But an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack could blackout the North American electric grid and all the life sustaining critical infrastructures for months or years, according to the Congressional EMP Commission, killing up to 90 percent of the American people through starvation and societal collapse. 

And it may very well be  a threat from North Korea 

During their 2004 demarche, the Russian generals warned the EMP Commission that North Korea could develop a Super-EMP nuclear weapon "in a few years." A few years later, in 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, of a device that looks suspiciously like a Super-EMP weapon. Because the North Korean device had a very low yield, about 3 kilotons, most experts dismissed the nuclear test as a failure, despite claims by North Korea that the device worked as planned.

However, a Super-EMP weapon would have a low-yield, like the North Korean device, because it is not designed to create a big explosion, but to convert its energy into gamma rays, that generate the EMP effect. North Korean overt nuclear tests in 2009, 2013, and now in 2015 all had low yields, in the neighborhood of 3-10 kilotons.

These tests were hailed as successful by North Korea, but dismissed as failures by many in the West, despite warnings from the EMP Commission and others that North Korea is developing a Super-EMP warhead:


South Korean military intelligence has repeatedly warned the press that Russian scientists are in North Korea helping develop a Super-EMP nuclear weapon.  

In 2010, according to some reputable European analysts, radio isotope data indicates North Korea may have conducted two clandestine nuclear tests of a very low yield nuclear device of sophisticated fusion design, consistent with a Super-EMP weapon.  

Traces of tritium, the fuel for an H-Bomb, have been detected in some North Korean low-yield tests, consistent with a Super-EMP weapon.  

North Korea's access to tritium, harder to obtain than deuterium and other H-Bomb fuels, indicates they are more sophisticated than commonly credited in the West, or are getting help from someone.  

In 2012, a military commentator for the People's Republic of China told a Hong Kong journal that North Korea has Super-EMP nuclear warheads.

In 2011, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Ronald Burgess, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that North Korea has weaponized its nuclear device into warheads for arming ballistic missiles. This confirms that North Korea's nuclear tests were, in fact, successful. The North Koreans would not arm their missiles with duds.

European intelligence agencies concluded that North Korea armed with nuclear warheads Nodong missiles capable of striking Japan in 2009. The CIA's top East Asia analyst publicly stated that North Korea had successfully miniaturized nuclear warheads for missile delivery in a 2008 interview.

So North Korea now has missiles armed with nuclear warheads, of mysterious design.

In April 2013, during the worst ever nuclear crisis with North Korea, when Kim Jong-Un was threatening to make a nuclear strike against the U.S., the North orbited a satellite on the optimum trajectory to evade U.S. missile defenses and, if the satellite concealed a warhead, to project an EMP field over the 48 contiguous United States.

North Korea is a mortal nuclear threat to the United States – right now.

North Korea has labored for years and starved its people so it could develop an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the United States. Why? Because they have a special kind of nuclear weapon that could destroy the United States with a single blow.

Such is the fruit of President Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework" with North Korea that he promised would terminate their nuclear weapons program.

By the way, Iran and North Korea are strategic partners pledged by treaty to share scientific and military technology. Iranian scientists reportedly have been present at North Korean nuclear tests. And North Korean scientists are in Iran, helping them develop long-range missiles, and perhaps their "final solution" for America.

WoW!!

WoW - the Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.

Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t)

Council Winners

• *First place with 2 2/3 votes!–Stately McDaniel Manor–Progressives: Bayoneting Their Wounded
• Second place with 2 votes – Joshuapundit–When The Cannibals Eat Their Own…
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –Bookworm Room – The infantile Left
• Fourth place with 2/3 votes –Fausta’s Blog – Mexico: Investigators call it quits
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Puma By Design – Parents demand privacy protection after school approves transgender bathroom use
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Right Planet – Baofeng UV-5R Counterfeit Cable Madness
• Fifth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Nice Deb – Bizarre New Super PAC Ad Has Kasich Winning the Nomination at Convention

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 votes! –Andrew McCarthy – First, Let’s Get the Facts on Saudi and Iranian Involvement in 9/11 submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place with 1 2/3 votes –PJ Media: Klavan On The Culture –UnAmerican ESPN submitted by Stately McDaniel Manor
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Ben Shapiro/The Daily Wire –10 Signs You’ve Joined The Trump Cult submitted by Nice Deb
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –38 Pitches/Curt Schilling–The hunt to be offended…submitted by The Watcher
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Richard Fernandez/PJ Media – The Surprising Weakness of Invincible Institutions submitted by Fausta’s Blog
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Carolyn Zelikow/Market Urbanism – Richard Florida Should Replace The Term ‘Creative Class’ With ‘Country Club submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Fifth place with 1/3 votes – The Other McCain –Feminism: It’s about SCIENCE submitted by The Razor

See you next week!

The Coming Gaza War

Both Little Satan and Hamas claim not to want another battle, but both are getting gussied up for one.

Gaza has yet to recover from the destruction of the last war with Israel in the summer of 2014, when more than 178,000 houses were destroyed or damaged, which makes any upcoming war between Israel and the Palestinians seem too early and premature.

After a flurry of contentious statements in February, the situation calmed in March as both Hamas and Israel stopped talking about a possible fourth Israeli-Gaza war, and both showed a desire to quiet their people and reassure them that no confrontation would break out anytime soon.

The Israeli plan for a potential war against Hamas in Gaza received wide media coverage in the Palestinian and Israeli press. It calls for each Israeli battalion to kill as many Hamas members as possible and thwart the movement’s moves and goals. The IDF has developed a strong defense and attack system capable of protecting the Gaza envelope and minimizing the threat of mortar shells, while the Israeli air force would launch an extraordinary and efficient offensive.

Abu Mujahid, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, told Al-Monitor, “The resistance in Gaza is preparing itself for the worst in its upcoming confrontation with the Israeli army. We take the IDF threats to launch a new war against Gaza very seriously. We have growing speculations that the Israeli enemy has begun the countdown for a new aggression against Gaza, and the resistance is getting prepared around the clock in order not to give the Israeli army a chance to launch a sudden attack.”

A Palestinian security official in Gaza told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, "Hamas’ and Israel’s declaration of their unwillingness to go into a military confrontation anytime soon might face three factors that may eventually lead to an outbreak of this confrontation.

The first is the misunderstanding from both parties due to their field efforts on the Gaza-Israel borders; the second is the increased escalation in the West Bank, most recently the operation in Jerusalem on April 18, which wounded 20 Israelis; and the third is the resistance in Gaza feeling that the blockade is tightening with no alleviation initiatives in sight.”

The End Of A Saudi Alliance?

Is Great Satan's Allied Hook Up with Whahabbi Arabia dang near null and void?

These days, when the United States and Saudi Arabia look at the region, they see two completely different landscapes and conflicting sets of interests. Riyadh sees a series of conflicts that the United States must resolve and a series of failing states that it must rehabilitate. The Saudis would like a commitment from Obama to defang Iran, change the balance of power in the Syrian civil war to the detriment of Bashar Assad and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How did the U.S.-Saudi relationship go so badly astray? It wasn’t that great to begin with. There has always been something incongruous about an alliance between a liberal democracy and a traditional monarchy relying on austere Islam and petrodollars to sustain itself. During the Cold War, the two sides’ antipathy toward the Soviet Union concealed all these differences.

In the post-Cold War period, the Saudis’ massive oil reserves and the need to deal with Saddam Hussein deflected attention from the core contradictions that long bedeviled this relationship. The September 11th tragedy, and the revelation that 15 out of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, jolted the relationship once again, but that too was soon forgotten with America’s renewed focus on Iraq, as the long insurgency and reconstitution of post-Saddam Iraq took front page.

Today, the administration does not see an adversary whose containment requires Saudi support. Iran once would have filled that role, but Washington is preoccupied with sustaining its arms control agreement with Tehran. The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once caused the United States to seek out Arab stakeholders, but such lofty ambitions no longer obsess Washington as they once did. And as the global energy markets change, the United States grows more energy independent, and Saudi oil becomes a less relevant staple crop, the lure of petroleum is increasingly not enough to sustain an alliance always built on a shaky foundation.

Moreover, suspicions that the Saudis have been two-faced in the fight against terrorism—especially over the kingdom’s alleged support of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist terrorists—are once again in the forefront.

Nor should the Saudis take any comfort from the idea that changing the occupant of the White House early next year will change this serious misalignment of interests, or substantially alter America’s policies.

As the Middle East undergoes another vulnerable and violent transition, it will do so largely without America. It remains to be seen whether the 21st century will be an American century anywhere else in the world, but it’s not going to be one in the Middle East. U.S. politicians on both sides are tired of expending precious resources to stabilize a region coming undone.

44's making a futile trip. The United States and Saudi Arabia no longer see anything the same way.