The Drums Of War, Con't

The Trump regime continues to indicate that war with North Korea is coming, and soon.

The White House has grown frustrated in recent weeks by what it considers the Pentagon’s reluctance to provide President Trump with options for a military strike against North Korea, according to officials, the latest sign of a deepening split in the administration over how to confront the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un. 

The national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, believes that for Mr. Trump’s warnings to North Korea to be credible, the United States must have well-developed military plans, according to those officials. 

But the Pentagon, they say, is worried that the White House is moving too hastily toward military action on the Korean Peninsula that could escalate catastrophically. Giving the president too many options, the officials said, could increase the odds that he will act. 

Just so everyone understands what's going on here, our military leaders are convinced that if they work up more tactical plans for striking North Korea, Trump will use one of them, because the outcome will be the strategic mistake of a shooting war with North Korea that will kill millions on the Korean peninsula and will almost certainly threaten Japan, and draw China in as well.

The tensions bubbled to the surface this week with the disclosure that the White House had abandoned plans to nominate a prominent Korea expert, Victor D. Cha, as ambassador to South Korea. Mr. Cha suggested that he was sidelined because he warned administration officials against a “preventive” military strike, which, he later wrote, could spiral “into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.”

But the divisions go back months, officials said. When North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in July that experts concluded was capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States, the National Security Council convened a conference call that included Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

After General McMaster left the room, Mr. Mattis and Mr. Tillerson continued to speak, not realizing that other participants were still on the line. The officials familiar with the matter overheard them complaining about a series of meetings that the National Security Council had set up to consider options for North Korea — signs, Mr. Tillerson said, that it was becoming overly aggressive. 

For now, the frustration at the White House appears to be limited to senior officials rather than Mr. Trump himself. But the president has shown impatience with his military leaders on other issues, notably the debate over whether to deploy additional American troops to Afghanistan.

Trump is a raging child with nuclear weapons.  The Pentagon doesn't want to give him any more access to their toys, because they're afraid he'll order their use.

But before you feel sorry for the men and women in uniform fielding Trump's questions, remember this country has been giving our military roughly half-trillion dollars every year for decades, all while American conservatives kept saying we're broke.

Meanwhile, if this report from South Korean news outlet Hankyoreh is to be believed, we're already deep into "wag the dog" territory.  Josh Marshall:

I’d say we need to know more about. Quickly.

From a South Korean paper, flagged on Twitter by The Washington Post’s Tokyo Bureau Chief …

Indeed, White House National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North “might help in the midterm elections.”
The Post’s Anna Fifield identifies the paper Hankyoreh as “left-wing” and that it is the only paper currently reporting it. I don’t know more about the source. But this sounds like something we need to know more about very quickly. The report suggests Trump may see such a move not simply in the context of the standard efforts to help in a midterm election but to ward offer facing the prospect of impeachment or actual investigations under a Democratic congress.

I mean it's so obviously knuckle-headedly belligerent that it strains credibility that the Trumpies would actually say this, but at this point maybe this is the kind of thing they do say, and this is a diplomatic leak to try to get the people of South Korea some help before a couple million of them get shelled into oblivion.

Hell, maybe the quote is manufactured completely, but the fact is it's not implausible that this administration has diplomats and advisers who would say this, and this is a last-ditch effort to try to get somebody to put the brakes on the Tangerine Tyrant before the butcher's bill comes in at seven figures.  I'm not sure which is more terrifying, that this actually happened, or that South Korea is scared enough to make this up.

Either way, we need to have a serious discussion about what's coming down the pike here.