Gross miscalculation
by digby
I repeat this because it's important: In the wee hours of November 9th, while still in a state of shock, I filed my election story for Salon and I said:
We wake up today to a fundamentally different world than the one in which we woke up yesterday. The nation our allies looked to as the guarantor of global security will now be led by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flimflam man. Things will never be the same. And we have no idea at the moment exactly what form this change is going to take, which makes this all very, very frightening.
It was the fear of major miscalculation that kept me up for days and still has me waking with a start from time to time. This latest "testing" of North Korea and the dropping of the Mother of all Bombs and Syrian airstrikes as Trump gets schooled by the Chinese leader while gobbling chocolate cake at his golf club is very unnerving, to say the least.
Raw Story reports:
Sue Mi Terry once worked for the CIA as an analyst covering Korea and she’s deeply troubled by what she’s seeing coming out of President Donald Trump’s administration when it comes to North Korea...
“If this president is weighing, for whatever reason, some type of novel, newly aggressive military action toward North Korea, what are the options and what are the likely consequences?” host Rachel Maddow asked.
“He could weigh an option of intercepting a missile or an option of striking a nuclear test site,” Terry explained. “But I honestly don’t think it’s going to follow through with this. This is a problem with that policy because you’re putting yourself in a bind, either you have to back down or you have to lose your credibility, or now you’re stuck on a ledge and risk a military option, which is very, very risky. North Korea is not Syria or Afghanistan. It’s going to have to be devastating consequences. North Korea will retaliate to any kind of military option.”
She went on to explain that North Korea has 70 percent of its ground forces and 50 percent of its air and naval forces deployed within 100 kilometers from the DMZ. There are millions of people in Seoul and many are American troops.
“This is why I just don’t think this kind of policy — it’s not a smart idea,” she continued. “It’s a gross miscalculation.”
I guess we're relying on Kim Jong Un's maturity and rationality to avoid a disaster.
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