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Pardon My Skepticism

North Korea is pledging to stop enriching uranium, and the United States is pledging to supply the communist paradise with 240,000 tons of food over the next year.  One smart thing the U.S. is doing is not giving the North Koreans rice, which could be easily diverted to feed the military.

I see a few reasons why North Korea is making this deal

  1. They have no plans whatsoever to follow through on this pledge.  Maybe they’ll shut down their enrichment program for a few months so they can get some food out of the Americans.  Maybe they’ve opened up new facilities we don’t know about and won’t even shut down at all.  
  2. They have enough enriched uranium to fulfill their weapons needs for a while, and are taking advantage of that by suckering the U.S. out of a quarter of a million tons of food.
  3. They have another source of enriched uranium, such as Pakistan.  No, that couldn’t happen. There’s no way that Pakistan would provide help to North Korea when it comes to nuclear weapons.  It’s not like there’s a large country between them that’s friendly to both of them and could allow a railcar full of uranium to travel to Pyongyang without being on a plane or boat that could be intercepted or something.
  4. I don’t know.  Maybe Kim Jong Il gets religion and starts being a smart statesman instead of a bugnuts crazy dictator.  Maybe in this season of peace he’s truly starting down the road to nuclear disarmament and international cooperation.
Guess which one I don’t think is likely.
The other three I’d say are a toss-up.  I’m not sure how easy it would be for them to create a new enrichment program without us finding out about it, but it could be done.  I think it’s a good bet that the North Koreans have a big pile of weapons grade uranium buried deep and quiet, or that the Pakistanis are continuing their stellar non-proliferation work by keeping them supplied in U-235.
I see exactly one reason the U.S. is making this deal:
  1. We’re a bunch of suckers and President Obama and his crew need something to point at during the campaign to say they have an achievement in getting North Korea to stop making nuclear weapons.  I shouldn’t give the president too much crap for this, though.  The last three presidents have been just as moronic when dealing with North Korea.
Remember, they’re halting enrichment, not dismantling anything.  Either when we piss them off or they have a need for more home-grown uranium goodness, they’ll crank it up.  I’ll give them style points if they use a little waste heat from the centrifuges to heat up some food with “A gift from the American people” printed on the box.

Update – Fox News is reporting that Kim Jong Il has died.  No details yet, but my guess is that right about now every swinging Richard in I Corps is putting on his battle rattle and doing a quick PMCS of his vehicle and weapons.  As for what this means, if true, for this deal is anyone’s call.

Okey Dokey

The Pakistani Prime Minister has expressed the opinion that after the accidental bombing of Pakistani border post by NATO forces that Pakistan should require a more equal, read expensive, footing with the United States.  He feels that the United States does not respect Pakistan.  Imagine that, he believes that we don’t respect a country that harbored the architect of the mass murder of our civilians, regularly supports the Taliban, has spread nuclear weapons knowledge and technology to North Korea and Iran, and has soaked us for billions in money over the past decade.

My interpretation:  We are unhappy because you shot up a border post that we were letting bad guys use to shoot at you, so we want more money or we’ll keep the beans and bullets sitting at the border crossing until the tires rot, you pay up, or the entire load is stolen.

My response:  Go for it.  Shut down those supply routes and continue to support the guys who are killing civilians along with our soldiers.  We’ll just shut down the money pipeline (bribe is such a harsh word, isn’t it.  So is blood money) and y’all can go piss up a rope.  Hey, just to show that we’re good guys, we’ll go through the files of the Defense Department and the CIA and publicize all of the messed-up things y’all have done for the past 50 years that you really don’t want your “masses” knowing about.  We’ll, of course, sanitize the documents and indemnify our own people who took part in them so that the only people drug through the street by their heels will be someone from Pakistan.  How about we publicly identify members of your intelligence service that have provided support to our enemies since 9/11/2001 and we’ll put a nice price on their head.  How’s that sound, sparky?

I’m sure that we can come to some sort of mutually agreeable deal with the ‘Stans to the north of Afghanistan, and if we chip in enough information and money, Russia would be more than happy to work with us on transhipment of cargo.  I’m sure that if we gave them information on all of the Chechens and other douchebags, they’ll let us push trains of supplies right across the Rodina.  Honestly, I’ll pay a premium to do it just so that we can quit messing with your little paradise.

Good luck, guys.  Hope to see you on the History Channel soon as a “What Happens When You Try To Play Both Sides Of The Fence” show. 

This is my shocked face

After the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan was a bit butt hurt over not being consulted.   Apparently, in an effort to mend a few fences with our ‘allies’ in Karachi, the U.S. government shared intelligence on a few Taliban/Al Qaeda facilities and personalities with the Pakistani intelligence service.  But when Pakistani troops raided these locations last week, they found them empty.

Now, I’m not saying that the insurgents were tipped off.  I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that between the OBL raid on May 2 and the Pakistani raid that grew out of our shared intelligence on June 4 that the bad guys all decided to move and take their bomb factories with them.  Only a paranoid racist that dislikes both the Pakistanis and President Obama on a personal level would think that someone gave the terrorists a warning.  I’m sure that our allies in the war on terror just cashed the check that came with the intelligence, spent the money on nursery schools and ice cream factories, and were very diligent about their information and operations security.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a Nigerian prince who wants me to send him a check in exchange for the deed to the Brooklyn bridge.  Something tells me I’m more likely to get a profit out of that than to continue our continued flushing of $100 bills in Pakistan.