Unfortunately for the Americans, when it comes to making things explode they themselves are hardly innocent. Trump’s recent bombardment of Afghanistan and Syria is a case in point. Maintaining considerable armed forces on the Korean peninsula and making a lot of threatening noise about an “armada” is another. To thus accuse the North Koreans of “provocation” is akin to me objecting to foul language after donning a t-shirt with “I like violence” written across the front and brandishing a knife at complete strangers. It simply makes no sense.

You’ll be lucky to find much in US foreign policy that makes sense, however. The popular media doesn’t help. Spurning any semblance of objectivity at every turn, much of the western press would have you believe that the DPRK is populated by people who are simply insane, all marching in unison to the whims of their stereotypical Bond villain of a leader. The at times racist narrative, so eagerly lapped up by swathes of the freedom loving public, is simplistic to the point of being painful. All the same it persists.

The grotesque level of artificially maintained ignorance in the United States—which presidents share, in particular an ignoramus maximus like Trump or Bush2—is literally a crime of complicity in the innumerable depredations of the US global empire.

Let’s get a few things out in the open. The DPRK is not the aggressor here. Their nuclear program is hardly in the final stages, and given the recent news of yet another failed test it seems unlikely Pyongyang will be able to develop a reliable mid-range ICBM for some time. Their conventional forces, although sizeable, are also generally in possession of somewhat antiquated technology. Aside from a few outbreaks along the border with the south, the DPRK has never actually engaged in open conflict with any power, at all, since the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War. All in all this is not a country that’s looking for a brawl for the pure sake of it.

The same cannot be said for others. Since the birth of the DPRK the US has attacked numerous countries across the globe, killing literally millions of people, including fighting a major conflict on Korean soil just five years after using WMDs on Japanese cities. Ever eager to safeguard democracy, the US currently has well over a hundred thousand troops stationed in myriad parts of the world, with over twenty thousand in South Korea itself. American nuclear weapons are able to decimate entire nations at will, with the “progressive” President Obama having pouring over a trillion dollars into their redevelopment and enhancement. All in all this is a nation well accustomed to violence.

Constant disinformation about foreign issues and pervasive jingoism have stunted the empathetic imagination of most Americans. How would THEY react if a huge superpower had killed up to 1/3 of their population and flattened all their cities and infrastructure? Considering the obsession with 9/11, which involved less than 3,000 victims, we can only imagine the magnitude of their psychic wounds. But such elementary sense of fairness is lacking when judging North Korea or similar nations devastated by US attacks.  

The hard truth is that the DPRK has been under myriad sanctions by the US for the vast bulk of its existence, with the fixation on the recent nuclear issue being a sideshow to gloss over an ongoing policy to ostracise, isolate and generally defame the DPRK as a habitual, indeed pantomime, villain. The fact that Korea has been divided by an invading force is rarely scrutinised, nor are the frequent attempts to intimidate Koreans into obedience, from incessant military drills to proposals to withhold food aid and potentially starve millions of people. The current tensions can only be understood within the context of this very unequal, very predatory, context.

A Troubled Past

History matters. The standard narrative on the Korean War of 1950-53 is that the United Nations was forced to commit military forces only after the malevolent Kim Il Sung ordered an entirely unprovoked assault on the south. Like so much else when it comes to both politics and history, the mainstream perspective is convoluted, if not just entirely wrong. The truth of the matter is that, after initial division between north and south in the wake of the defeat of the Japanese occupation, skirmishes between Seoul and Pyongyang had been going on for some time, with the former having carried out several notable (and distinctly hostile) incursions.

Spurning any semblance of objectivity at every turn, much of the western press would have you believe that the DPRK is populated by people who are simply insane, all marching in unison to the whims of their stereotypical Bond villain of a leader.

For historians such as David Reynolds, some one hundred thousand Koreans had already been killed in border fighting and uprisings in the south prior to the outbreak of formal hostilities. Indeed, analysts have gone as far as to hypothesise that the situation in 1950 degraded so rapidly precisely due to the ROK assault on the north Korean town of Haeju, something that prompted the DPRK to consider redoubled measures against an increasingly aggressive neighbour.

Chinese soldiers during Korean conflict. High motivation, iron discipline and numbers neutralized the US-led attack and its igh-tech weapons.

The US were also not about to let a golden opportunity slip by. After losing influence across much of East Asia with the defeat of the pro-US Kuomintang in ’49 (itself a deeply corrupt and authoritarian entity with a propensity for massacring its own people) Washington found itself looking for opportunities to regain lost ground. A reunified Korea under western influence seemed like an eminently desirable scenario. Korea could not be allowed to unite on its own terms, given US fears of left-wing success in national elections. The outbreak of hostilities on the peninsula were too good an opportunity to pass up.

The Americans moved fast. Refusing to wait for authorisation from an already fractured UN Security Council, the US committed itself to an extensive and protracted campaign, ultimately overrunning much of northern Korea before being driven back by the intervention of substantial Chinese forces. In the process, the US inflicted numerous war crimes against the general population, with the air force targeting civilian and military centres with well over six hundred thousand tons worth of bombs and thirty thousand tons of napalm.

By the end of the war, General MacArthur’s order to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, and factories and cities and villages” had been carried out. Much of the DPRK, alongside swathes of the ROK, were in ruins, with US aerial bombardment ensuring the vast majority of urban areas were decimated and their populations either dead or displaced.

Pyongyang was effectively levelled, having gone from being home to some half a million citizens in 1950 to having just two structures left intact three years later. In the south, Seoul changed hands a total of four times in just nine months, with its “liberation” ensuring only the capital building and a railway station were left intact. Over twenty percent of the northern population is believe to have been killed, many of them civilians blown to pieces or immolated in napalm during the incessant pulverisation of their homes. Well over a million southerners also lost their lives.

“We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both,” claimed one young American officer, Curtis LeMay, “we killed off over a million Korean civilians and drove several million more from their homes”. This was no idle boast. In ’52, William Douglas, himself Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, visited the war-torn nation to see such sights first-hand, remarking “”I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe; but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea”.

Massacre at No Gun Ri

No Go Ri scene in film "A Little Pond".

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]eath from above was only one side to the punishment inflicted upon the troubled nation. On the ground, American soldiers soon developed a sense of brazen contempt for the indigenous population, engaging in myriad acts of thuggery against civilians unlucky enough to get in the way.

Those suspected of harbouring political sentiments out of style with the southern authorities found themselves in hot water, with some one hundred thousand potential dissidents being murdered over the course of the conflict. Mass killings and the wholesale slaughter of entire prison populations by ROK security forces were not unknown.

South Korean investigators disagreed with Pentagon findings, saying they believed 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. (military.wikia.com)

The plight of war refugees was unsurprisingly harsh. In fact it was here that US ground forces carried out one of their most notorious actions of the entire war, slaughtering several hundred civilians being forcibly driven from their homes around the village of No Gun Ri.

Many of the inhabitants of this region had already found their homes set alight, with one particular group being “evacuated” by American troops also in the habit of beating up and occasionally shooting individual Koreans for presumed infractions. Aside from the casual murderousness of the GIs, the refugee’s journey south was uneventful until the middle of the next day when, finding themselves bereft of their gracious escorts, they were suddenly attacked by US aircraft.

The villagers, dazed and frightened, attempted to flee the bombs and bullets only to inadvertently approach positions manned by US soldiers. The response from the troops was to open fire, apparently being ordered to remain on alert for “civilian clad” infiltrators attempting to pass through American lines. Whatever their reasons, the soldiers hosed the panicked column with machine gun, rifle and mortar rounds, killing a sizeable amount of civilians and causing others to flee.

Australian soldier meeting local kids. The Brits and their dominions were dragged, as usual, into the American imperial assault.

Seemingly not content, US soldiers then rounded up survivors and herded them under a nearby bridge, in the process shooting several deemed too badly hurt to be moved. After forcing some three hundred persons into confinement in this way, the Americans opened fire yet again, ripping in to the Koreans from both sides of the bridge with small arms and artillery.

“We was holding that rail-road bridge to keep them from coming across that,” claimed one Melvin Durham of F Company, 7^th Cavalry, himself cited in the seminal text, The Bridge at No Gun Ri. “But those people – there was women, children, old people – we had to eliminate them…our orders was to start opening fire and when we did, there wasn’t nothing standing but a couple of cows. We fired for about an hour, an hour and a half.”

Durham and company weren’t messing around. Few of those trapped under the bridge survived the onslaught, with entire families, infants and elderly included, dying among the detritus of shattered masonry and pulverised flesh. One strapping young patriot, clearly with a mind for America’s glorious colonial roots, claimed “it was like an Indian raid, back in the old days. We just annihilated them”. Another, this time a staff sergeant, likened the action to a “feeding frenzy…guys were shooting because they hadn’t shot before, and they had permission to shoot…it’s like ‘Hey, shoot at anything that moves out there.’”

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Additional orders issued to other US army and air units were clear enough. One such memo, detailed in the 2002 documentary “Kill ‘Em All”, declared officers had “complete authority in your zone to stop all civilian traffic. Responsibility to place fire on them (and) to include bombing rests with you”. Another more direct order instructed units that  “all refugees are fair game. Refugees will be considered (the) enemy and dispersed by all available fire including artillery.”

One reluctant soldier, having the temerity to display something of a conscience when it came to such directives, recalled an unusual morale boosting technique from his commanding officer. Rather than grappling with the ethical complexities of murdering innocent people, the officer in question instead held a gun to the soldier’s head, demanding that he “kill ’em…or I will kill you myself” and begrudging him for “disobeying a direct order”.

Others were not so restrained. “There was a lieutenant screaming like a mad man to fire on everything,” recalled one Joe Jackman, himself a war vet present at No Gun Ri. “Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was. Eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em.”

In addition to mass bombardment and repeat atrocities, the US had other joys in store for Korea. After the Chinese had crossed the border in late 1950 and defeated the US Eighth Army in open battle, the use of atomic weapons became a serious possibility. Clearly irked by the audacity of the Chinese, General MacArthur entertained an ambitious plan to target both Korean and Chinese cities with WMDs, in the process ideally creating a belt of irradiated wasteland between the two nations that would deter any further meddling from Beijing.

He wasn’t playing games. “I would have dropped thirty or so atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria,” claimed the General, in an interview published after his death. “(I’d) spread behind us, from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea, a belt of radioactive cobalt…it has an active life of between sixty and one twenty years. For at least sixty years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. My plan was a cinch.”

He was probably right. Fortunately his scheme was never approved. Yet such heroics were not to be confined to east Asia. Just three years after the end of hostilities in Korea, the Cold War was still heating up, with the US preparing an extensive list of targets for nuclear bombardment in multiple countries. Ranging from locales as disparate as Warsaw and Beijing, the Americans cited major urban zones as priority targets for destruction, with the total elimination of their high civilian populations the desired outcome.

One small problem presented itself. Given the nature of the weapons to be deployed, the possibility of collateral damage in allied states was a sizeable possibility. Such a scenario doesn’t appear to have caused too much worry for US strategic planners, however, with East Berlin soon being targeted by over ninety atomic weapons as part of a policy of “systematic destruction” that would have also wiped out allied West Berlin and devastated swathes of Europe. The well-being of their own partners, not to mention the lives of millions of men, women and children in multiple nations, from Germany to China, were eminently expendable in the face of US interests.

A cheap shot would be to argue that this is all “ancient history”. Of course, those making such a claim are almost certainly safely ensconced within the US itself, always way out of the line of fire and comfortable in the precedent that catastrophic violence is something that Americans inflict on foreigners rather than the other way around.

Claims that such matters are “history” also make the crass assumption that there is a point of sudden disconnect between US policy then and now, itself a rather clumsy notion that ignores the reality of American aggression over the past several decades. Planning to murder (and in the case of Korea actually doing so) millions of people isn’t something that can be conveniently dismissed by uttering tired maxims such as “forgive and forget”. The current belligerence directed towards Korea highlight this.

Again, history matters. DPRK citizens today make frequent mention of the Korean War. In some instances many families will yet retain a living link to that conflict, with scenes of horrific suffering and sweeping destruction a yet present memory. Even those without relatives around to recall the 1950s will be reminded of the tender touch of US foreign policy every time they go outside, with the near total levelling of many urban centres ensuring that most buildings in modernity are merely decades rather than centuries old.

It would be a serious mistake to assume this finds no echo in Korean politics. Every time news hits of the latest US offensive abroad, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, Koreans will be further reminded of their own painful past. The continued presence of sizeable American military forces on the Korean peninsula won’t help. Washington’s redoubled threats and moronic macho talk about “looking for trouble” won’t help either.

Declarations from Pyongyang as to sovereignty, retaliation, self-reliance and military prowess will, however, make sense to a people long accustomed to either being the underdog or facing outright annihilation. There is nothing “crazy” about this. Only the most deluded of western cynics could claim Koreans resent the western powers purely because of “state propaganda”. The reality is right there for them to experience. It’s been there for decades. It’s about time this was fully understood.

As throughout much of its war-obsessed history, the United States is currently engaged in military conflict – or threatening such action – across a broad contested terrain.   In the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Washington has resorted to its familiar global modus operandi: sending off barrages of missiles and bombs, much of it hitting civilian populations and resources needed for their survival.   Death tolls mount, the largest numbers lately in the protracted battle for Mosul.   Heavier casualties are being visited upon non-combatants in Yemen, thanks to U.S.-backed Saudi aerial savagery.

We have been told by the media that President Trump has apparently relaxed the rules of warfare, thus allowing civilians to be more easily victimized the midst of armed conflict.   Innocent noncombatants are being made increasingly vulnerable to ravages of the largest and most aggressive war machine in history.  That, however, would be a serious misreading of the situation: Trump, like Obama, the Bushes, and Clinton before him, is simply operating within an historical pattern of imperial war making for which rules of engagement matter little, if at all.    There is no deviation from the norm.

In fact Pentagon elites insist nothing has changed in their methods of warfare – and they are right.   While the U.S. accuses, threatens, and attacks others for their (real or imputed) transgressions, its own apparatus of mass destruction continues with few legal or moral constraints.  In particular, Washington long ago turned aerial terrorism into a normalized mode of technowar that reduces civilians to dispensable objects.

In recent weeks U.S. aerial bombardments in Syria alone have reportedly killed several hundred people, mainly civilians.   Daily raids in Iraq, mostly targeting ISIS in Mosul, have accounted for more than 3000 civilian deaths, according to AirWars sources.    To believe this is a departure from the past – or that civilian casualties are simply an inevitable by-product of combat – is to ignore the American history of savage warfare, which since World War II has meant bringing horrendous death and destruction from the skies.

There is actually nothing “indiscriminate” about this savagery: all too often it has been planned, deliberate, systematic – and discriminate.    Moreover, the U.S. has far surpassed any other nation in the production, deployment, and use of WMD, its military doctrines now as in the past embracing the virtues of weaponry designed to bring mass destruction.  Consider that WMD comes in four distinct types: nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional (mainly saturation bombing).    We could add to this list economic sanctions of the sort the U.S. (through the United Nations) imposed on Iraq during the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.  As the U.S. resorted to sanctions continuously in the postwar era – targeting Iran, Cuba, Yugoslavia, North Korea, and Russia as well as Iraq – the civilian death toll (well past a million) has far exceeded that from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons combined.

Yet it is conventional warfare that has brought the greatest destruction, for both combatants and civilians – and it remains the most imposing threat today.    The WMD threat arrives in the form of strategic (alternatively saturation, area, carpet, or scorched-earth) bombing, introduced by the British and Americans during World War II and refined across the decades.   Worth noting is that the U.S. is the only nation to have manufactured, stored, deployed, and used all five types of WMD.

In densely-populated centers like Mosul and Raqqa – and where hundreds of drone strikes are carried out – efforts to distinguish between combatants and civilians are virtually impossible; large numbers of civilian dead and wounded tolls are inevitable.   That has never deterred U.S. military decision-makers at the Pentagon or in the field, whatever “rules” are set forth in the Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) or international statutes.    From World War II to Korea, Indochina, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and beyond, this carnage is alternately blamed on mistakes, inescapable “collateral damage”, intelligence failures, enemy use of “human shields” – all while boasting of the latest “precision weaponry”.   Unfortunately, the U.S. military rarely conducts genuine investigations into the devastation it produces, and for good reason: it does want to come face-to-face with its flagrant war crimes.

Since late 2014 U.S. (or Coalition) planes have carried out more than 20,000 strikes in Iraq and Syria, resulting in an estimated 70,000 “militant” deaths – a number that surely includes civilian losses that will never be known and based on a calculus that is routinely understated.  According to AirWars, at least 3325 civilians were killed from a total of 566 air strikes in the region, but that is only where evidence is clearly available.  Meanwhile, recent non-combatant deaths in Mosul alone have reached more than 2500, as reported by AirWars.  Important civilian objects – residences, public buildings, markets, etc. – have been repeatedly hit with high-explosive weaponry.  The bombing raids have only intensified.

What is taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria replicates a familiar disregard for long-established international law, as even the corporate media unwittingly acknowledges by attributing a “loosening of rules” to the out-of-control Trump.   California Representative Ted Lieu recently sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis seeking clarification of American global behavior: “The substantial increases in civilian deaths caused by U.S. military force in Syria and Iraq brings into question whether the Trump administration is violating the Laws of War.”  Trump is indeed violating such laws – specifically the 1949 Geneva Protocol prohibiting wanton attacks on civilians – but, as noted, he is simply following deeply-entrenched American practices.

For more than a century American imperialism has been fueled by a combustible mixture of national exceptionalism, militarism, racism, and pursuit of global supremacy.  Civilian inhabitants and their necessary supports have never stood in the way of these powerful forces, even where it has meant resort to WMD.    Demonized Asian populations have been mercilessly targeted, with impunity – and unbelievably savage consequences.   Looking at the apparent willingness of the Trump administration to consider nuclear warfare on the Korean peninsula, with its unthinkable horrors, we can readily see that little has changed over the decades.

As Washington looks to reassert economic, political, and military leverage in the Asia-Pacific region – the so-called “Asian Pivot” to contain China – escalating U.S. threats should be taken seriously.   Whether conventional or nuclear, the Pentagon is poised to strike first against North Korea.  For several months, indeed years, the U.S. has done everything short of all-out war to intimidate and subvert the Kim Jung Un regime: large-scale military exercises, economic sanctions, cyberattacks, new troop deployments, constant threats of attack.   There is much talk in Washington and the media of “preemptive war”, including efforts to “decapitate” the regime.   A supposedly impenetrable missile-defense system (THAAD) is being installed across South Korea.

Koreans already know far more than they would prefer about the horrors of mass destruction emanating from the U.S.   What can only be called a war of annihilation, carried out by the U.S. to secure battlefield victory over endless stalemate, in the face of strong Chinese and North Korean forces, left a death toll on the peninsula with estimates reaching as high as five million, nearly 80 percent civilian.   Political, legal, and moral constraints were routinely tossed aside, as American military culture eagerly took up the World War II code that mass killing of civilians was legitimate – actually vital – to the kind of war of attrition the U.S. had waged against the Japanese.

When the U.S. Army was forced into a perilous retreat in fall 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered his air force to destroy “every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, town, and village” in Korea.   Food sources and water facilities were systematically targeted and obliterated.   Nonstop raids, employing napalm and other incendiary devices, left the main centers of human life (including the capital Pyongyang) in smoking ruins.   Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, in their eye-opening book The United States and Biological Warfare, write: “As it had been in World War II, strategic bombing was extended to the mass destruction of civilian populations, and as in World War II the reservations that the U.S. had about saturation bombing of Europeans in that earlier war were not extended to Asians.”

In December of 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed President Truman’s readiness to use atomic bombs in Korea to avoid further stalemate or defeat.   This “option” was retained throughout the war, finally to be jettisoned by President Eisenhower in 1953.  White House and Pentagon officials also favored employing both chemical and biological weapons in a theater where mass destruction was already far advanced.

In fact the U.S. did launch a phase of biological warfare in Korea, a criminal project the warfare state has tried to keep secret.  Evidence uncovered by the Koreans and Chinese revealed a U.S. military campaign to disseminate a wide variety of deadly biological agents, hoping to create epidemics, panic, and social breakdown in the north.  In late 1950 large outbreaks of plague, cholera, smallpox, and encephalitis were reported in Pyongyang and several provinces, according to Endicott and Hagerman.   This was part of a scorched-earth policy U.S. troops employed as they retreated southward throughout 1950 and 1951.

Endicott and Hagerman add: “The U.S. had substantial stocks of biological weapons on hand.  Moral qualms about using biological or atomic weapons had been brushed aside by top leaders and biological warfare might dodge the political bullet of adverse public and world opinion if it were kept secret enough to make plausible denial of its use.”  Moreover, Washington had not signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning such weaponry.  Later investigations and reports found the U.S. guilty as charged, a finding naturally dismissed by Americans as “Communist propaganda”.

The Pentagon’s biological program was kept intact until early 1953.   Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force was busy destroying every Korean target in sight, including agricultural fields and hydroelectric dams, dropping an endless supply of fragmentation bombs, napalm, and high-explosive devices.  In August 1952 Pyongyang was leveled by a series of saturation-bombing raids.  Still unable to break the military stalemate, the USAF transferred a large stock of atomic weapons to Okinawa as it prepared for a new phase of warfare that, fortunately, was never set in motion.

Embracing the great benefits of WMD, the U.S. military was able to revitalize its strategy of total war, understood by many at the summits of power as God’s work.   General Matthew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander, could say in 1951: “The real issues are whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism . . . [and] whether we are able to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.”  Before Korea, the God of a privileged imperial nation had similarly blessed the American takeover of the Philippines at a cost of several hundred thousand lives – and before that the massacre of Indian tribes (by Andrew Jackson’s troops) at Horseshoe Bend and (by Colonel John Chivington’s marauders) at Sand Creek, among many other atrocities.

An imperialist ideology that embellished, even celebrated, warfare against civilians reached its first methodical expression during World War II.   In the Pacific, this meant a war of annihilation against the Japanese, who at that time stood for the “Asian masses” or “hordes”.    In such a war everything was permissible, starting with the deliberate and ruthless obliteration of entire cities, including those with little or no military significance. Saturation bombing launched by waves of the most technologically-developed warplanes raised barbarism to new levels.  Admiral William Halsey, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, vowing revenge for Pearl Harbor, promised that Japanese would henceforth be spoken only in hell while ordering his personnel to “kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”  (Worth noting: only military targets were hit at Pearl Harbor.)  The remarkable American hatred of Japanese was destined to produce, in John Dower’s words (War without Mercy “a spellbinding spectacle of brutality and death.”

On March 9-10, 1945, U.S. planes dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, with the aim of destroying the city; at least 100,000 civilians were instantly killed.   Aerial terrorism then turned to Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and more than 60 other cities, targeting mostly defenseless civilian areas with vengeful frenzy.   A few cities remained – Hiroshima and Nagasaki among them – until they were obliterated by the new superweapon developed at the Manhattan Project, leaving another 150,000 dead amid unimaginable mass destruction.

There could be no justification for such criminality.   A.J. Grayling, in his book All the Dead Cities, surveyed the history of strategic bombing and concluded that World War II pilots should have refused orders to carry out such raids.   (None in fact did.)  General Curtis LeMay, architect of the firebombing attacks on Japanese cities, later conceded: “If we had lost the war we would all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”   Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals moved to exclude that very possibility, so aerial mass murder was exempted from wartime culpability.

World War II set in motion an elevated trajectory of imperial atrocities that would continue throughout the postwar years.   While nations were generally expected to follow international law and wartime rules of engagement, and the vast majority have chosen to do so, the U.S. simply took another path: contempt for the norms of universality.   To this day Washington steadfastly refuses participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC), understandably fearing prosecution of its own government and military personnel for war crimes.  The plain fact is that American elites can routinely launch wars against peace and target civilian populations without even the pretense of any legal rationale.

Less than a decade after the Korean War the U.S. commenced a new phase of barbarism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, dropping eight million tons of bombs compared to the two million tons dropped on all countries in World War II.   This was equivalent to 640 Hiroshimas.   Saturation bombing was perfected beyond its usage against Japan and Korea:  B-52s systematically carpet-bombed large zones, followed by a torrent of anti-personnel weapons including cluster bombs, white-phosphorous, and a specially-upgraded napalm.   By 1974, the U.S. military had dropped seven bombs for every person in Indochina.   As for napalm, a staggering 373,000 tons was unleashed in Vietnam, compared to 32,000 tons in Korea.

In Vietnam, the Pentagon relied heavily on chemical warfare:  roughly 6500 flights to spray Agent Orange and other toxic agents were carried out between 1962 and 1971, the intent being to destroy crops and foliage.   Operation Ranch Hand contaminated more than 31,000 square kilometers, poisoning at least four million people and leaving hundreds of thousands afflicted with cancer, lung diseases, and birth defects.  Such warfare could never distinguish combatants from civilians, nor did the U.S. military command make any real efforts to do so.

In more recent decades, civilian death tolls resulting from U.S. military operations in the Middle East and beyond have easily surpassed one million.   Harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and others could have reached that same figure.   Aerial bombardments have devastated large, densely-populated areas of Iraq, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libra, and Syria.    Weapons “upgraded” with depleted uranium (DU) have left a toxic legacy in Iraq and Serbia, overwhelmingly harming civilians.

Back to Korea:  the Trump administration says it has “lost all patience” with North Korean leaders and their “reckless behavior”, and has (again) “opened the door” to military attack while seemingly holding out prospects of diplomacy that, however, depend on rigid stipulations.   Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that for any talks to occur North Korea would first have to “exhibit good faith commitment” by jettisoning its nuclear program – a complete non-starter.  Given such imperial arrogance, can mounting confrontation be avoided?

With all that is at stake – perhaps one million people killed within the first day or so of a new Korean War, vast urban centers decimated, a potential nuclear exchange – rational leadership might be expected to retreat from such a nightmarish scenario and consider a more peaceful modus vivendi.   (For the U.S., a peaceful option is exactly what is “off the table”.)     From the standpoint of Washington, “rational” pursuits are also imperial pursuits and imperial pursuits generally lead to military pursuits, as history demonstrates.   Technowar managers are not especially sensitive to the prospects of massive civilian losses.  Normal behavioral assumptions therefore do not apply to U.S. war calculations, whoever occupies the White House.