RUTHFULLY YOURS

North Korea used both the Agreed Framework and the NPT as camouflage to cheat and proceed with its covert nuclear weapons program. Nuclear weapons are apparently an integral part of North Korea’s strategy eventually to reunify the Korean peninsula under North Korean communist rule.

According to Hwang Jang-Yop, highest-ranking North Korean defector in history, North Korea’s goal is to remove American military forces from South Korea. Once that withdrawal is achieved, the North would use its nuclear arsenal to deter Japan and the U.S. and prevent these two key South Korean allies from coming to the defense of the South once the North invades it.

Arms control, since the height of the Cold War, has cut both the U.S. and Russian strategic deployed arsenals by nearly 90% and thus can hardly be described as part of any “arms race” that might have compelled North Korea to build nuclear weapons.

The idea that the U.S. deciding to replace aging nuclear systems, some half-century after the last modernization, is somehow perpetuating an “arms race” is without foundation.

“Military critics” are already anticipating how to disembowel critical elements of the U.S. military — especially its aging nuclear deterrent — when the defense budget will be unveiled by the administration and sent to Congress February 9, 2016. In two recent essays, for instance, Gordon Adams, previously at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, and Lawrence Korb, at the Center for American Progress, are both calling for dismantling the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

“Western societies have moved from being self-confident, to being remorseful, to being crippled by self-flagellation. Unfortunately, it has now gone so far throughout politics, the media, universities and schools that the position is almost certainly irredeemable. It will need some mighty kind of backlash to right the ship. More likely it is that the Islamists will take over and all those rights that women and LGBTIs thought they’d won will disappear overnight; and in very unpleasant ways. Oh golly gosh, if only we’d known.”

The West’s political and purported moral leaders have traded self-confidence for guilt-stricken contortions borne of the compulsion to apologise. As we debase ourselves and recast traditional virtues as vices, Islamists are laughing their heads off — and ours too, sooner or later
For Quadrant readers who do not pore over letters to the editor of The Australian, it really is a worthwhile endeavour. The views of the writers vary, of course, but nonetheless, on balance, they strike a commonsense conservative chord which one can only wish the editor(s) would consistently emulate. This is the best recent example, in my view, published on January 29 from Ewan McLean, who lives in Avalon in NSW. It makes me want to go visit.

“Here we have senior army officer prostrating himself to the PC brigade only to be beaten over the head with handbag of one of his transgender subordinates. Stop the world, I want to get off.”

I watch Foyle’s War on TV. In most of the episodes he is a senior police officer in Hastings in England during the Second World War. It doesn’t matter that I might have seen an episode two or three times before. If it is on, I generally watch. Foyle epitomises common decency and commonsense. He is also ahead of his time on social issues – being non-judgemental, for example, when his son’s friend and fellow pilot in the RAF is revealed to be more interested in his son than in his own girlfriend.

I wondered what Foyle would have made of the ‘Australian of the Year’ saga and decided that the character and his times are so far apart from the contemporary world that it is completely ridiculous to contemplate such a question. He could not have made head nor tail of it. He would have thought it was a music-hall skit, a bizarre one at that.

Here we go again. In violation of a stack of United Nations sanctions resolutions, North Korea has just launched a rocket into space. Pyongyang is describing this latest blast-off as a satellite launch. But the requisite technology is also useful for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, which is almost certainly what’s really going on. This launch comes just a month after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, which Pyongyang advertised as a hydrogen bomb — meaning a weapon of even greater destructive power than the atomic bombs North Koreas has been testing since 2006.

In plain English, what does this portend? North Korea is working on long-range missiles that could deliver a nuclear strike on the United States. At the very least, such weapons could greatly enhance North Korea’s leverage in its longtime racket of nuclear extortion. There is also the deeply unpleasant possibility that at some point North Korea might use such weapons. There is also the growing danger that other countries (Iran comes to mind), observing the relative impunity with which North Korea has been pursuing its missile and bomb projects, will be quite rationally inclined to follow suit — or perhaps purchase Pyongyang’s presumably advancing nuclear missile technology and wares.

What are President Obama and his team doing about this? Secretary of State John Kerry has denounced this weekend’s test launch as — you guessed it — “unacceptable,” calling it “a major provocation.”

“It was very difficult above all when they said, ‘Become Muslim or we’ll cut your head off.'” — Rev. Jacques Mourad, Syriac Catholic priest, Syria.

“The only reason they [Muslim authorities] let you go is when they torture you to death…. They don’t want you to die in prison, it’s not their responsibility, so they send you home to die.” — Helen Berhane, gospel singer, Eritrea.

“[I]f they fear that people are offended by being surrounded by Christian symbols, then perhaps those [Muslim] people applied for asylum in the wrong country.” — A speaker for the Progress Party, Norway, on being asked to remove crosses from Christian camp sites to accommodate Muslim asylum seekers.

Hostility for Christmas was on full display. On Christmas Day, Muslims in Bethlehem, as documented here, set a Christmas tree on fire and greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with a hail of stones; in Belgium, Muslim “refugees” set fire to a public Christmas tree; in Nigeria, Muslim jihadis attacked churches during Christmas mass and killed at least 16; in the Philippines, on Christmas Eve, Muslim jihadis slaughtered 10 Christians to “make a statement;” in Bangladesh, churches skipped Christmas mass, due to assassination attempts on pastors and death threats against Christians; in Indonesia, churches were on “high alert,” with 150,000 security personnel patrolling; in Iran, Christians celebrating Christmas in homes were arrested; and three Muslim countries — Somalia, Tajikistan, and Brunei — formally banned any Christmas celebrations.