Augn San Suu Kyi

Crisis in North Korea – What a Surprise….

Readers of Guilt By Association know the role played by the power of association when well-timed crises are used to advance a global agenda—specifically to ensure that Israel retains military dominance in the Middle East, its monopoly on nuclear weapons and its refusal—along with Axis of Evil member North Korea—to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel long ago mastered this craft as evidenced by its ongoing ability to avoid compliance with agreed-to terms of the Roadmap. Thus it came as no surprise to see a crisis in North Korea just as the pro-Israelis who induced the U.S. to invade Iraq intensified efforts to expand the war to Iran.
After years without a serious incident, both Iran and North Korea detained U.S. journalists over a six-week period in 2009. In early February, National Public Radio’s Roxanna Saberi was detained by Tehran. In mid-March two female employees of Current TV, founded by Al Gore, were detained by Pyongyang and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

In early April, North Korea launched a rocket capable of reaching Hawaii, suggesting a threat to the U.S. Meanwhile Tel Aviv upped the pressure on Washington to shut down Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting a threat to Israel. Six weeks later, Pyongyang announced a nuclear test, its first since 2006. Meanwhile Israel insisted that Iran not be appeased or—like North Korea—it would pose a nuclear threat.

When President Obama advanced his proposed engagement with Iran, a Twitter-catalyzed crisis around Iranian elections made such diplomacy unlikely or, at the very least, ineffective. Meanwhile attempts failed to rekindle six-party talks with North Korea, making engagement unlikely and diplomacy ineffective.

Discrediting the U.N.

Simultaneously, the peace-brokering role of the U.N. was sidelined as its credibility continued a steady decline since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Though U.S. war-planners chose not to protect Baghdad’s famous antiquities museum, ensuring widespread looting, the Oil Ministry was captured intact, securing the evidence required to prove U.N. mismanagement of Iraq’s food-for-oil program—with Iran oil-trader Marc Rich again a major player.

This program offered relief from a U.N. embargo for the sale of Iraqi oil to buy food and medicine. In September 2005, an 18-month probe of the $64 billion program found that Saddam Hussein benefitted from kickbacks and oil-smuggling profits, with lucrative commissions paid to the people in between. Findings of lax U.N. oversight were worsened by charges that Koji Annan, son of Secretary General Kofi Annan, profited from insider information and access.

The discrediting of both the U.S. and the U.N. began in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell was dispatched by war-planners to the U.N. Security Council to vouch for the veracity of intelligence—since proven false—about Iraqi biological weapons. Then high-profile U.S. Senate hearings, chaired by Senators Carl Levin and Norm Coleman, put the food-for-oil scandal in the public eye, further damaging the U.N.’s credibility and effectiveness.

With the U.N. and its leadership at their weakest in recent memory, Israel pressed Annan for a Holocaust memorial at the U.N. and for a day to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in the Congress, lobbied reluctant nations. On January 24, 2006, the U.N. saw the first ever prayer service on its premises—the Jewish hymn for martyrs—followed by the Israeli national anthem.

Fast-forward to June 2009 and a cargo ship departed North Korea enroute to Myanmar trailed by a U.S. warship that, under a U.N. resolution, could not use force for interdiction. Pyongyang portrayed any interference as an act of war and assembled 100,000 marchers to denounce the U.S. while its leaders promised, if provoked, to “wipe out” the U.S.

A month earlier, Myanmar elections were thrown into crisis with the arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her May 27th detention enables avoidance by the ruling junta of the open elections promised in 2010 as part of the “roadmap to democracy.” In a well-timed incident, the Nobel peace laureate was taken into custody for violating the terms of her house arrest when she allowed an intruder to stay at her home for two days after he swam to her compound.

The intruder, American John Yettaw, claimed he was on “a mission” to warn her that she would be assassinated. He swam over a mile to her heavily guarded compound using cardboard flippers and plastic containers for flotation. Described by a member of Suu Kyi’s staff as “a nutty fellow,” Yattaw covered the distance carrying the book of Mormon, the ‘revealed’ text of a Zionist sect whose devotees are called “Latter Day Saints” and “The Lost Tribe of Israel.”

With another totalitarian regime (Myanmar) potentially gaining access to nuclear technology, Tel Aviv gained another “associative” case it can cite to oppose Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile an election crisis catalyzed another rallying cry for regime change in the Middle East—in Iran.

U.S. credibility in the Middle East was undercut months ago when Dennis Ross was appointed State Department special envoy to Iran. A senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, a think tank founded by the Israel lobby, he has since been promoted to senior director of the National Security Council. Americans can only hope that—in that position—he will be closely monitored by those committed to restoring the national security of this nation.