Mick Hartley

Michael Ezra at Harry's Place links to John Pilger's latest at the New Statesman. Ezra's concern is Pilger's take on the Gulf of Tonkin incident and its role in the Vietnam war, but this was what caught my eye:

On 20 May, South Korea announced it had "overwhelming evidence" that a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors. The US keeps 28,000 troops in South Korea, where the public has long supported détente with Pyongyang.

On 26 May, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, flew to Seoul and demanded that the "international community must respond" to "North Korea's outrage". She flew on to Japan, where the new North Korean "threat" eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of the Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with popular opposition to America's permanent military occupation of Japan. (On 2 June Hatoyama resigned, having failed to move a US military base in Okinawa.) The "overwhelming evidence" is a propeller that "had been corroding at least for several months", reported the Korea Times. In April, the director of South Korea's national intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. And the head of South Korea's military marine operations said, "No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place." The reference to an "accident" suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two.

To the American media, North Korea's guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam's guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. But, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, North Korea has nuclear weapons, which helps to explain why it has not been attacked, not yet: a salutary lesson to other countries, such as Iran, currently in the cross hairs.

The reason that the South Koreans initially played down the North Korean connection, as anyone who followed the story will know, is that they wanted to make absolutely sure of their facts before making accusations in what was – still is – an extremely volatile situation. The idea that the American government and media are trumpeting the guilt of the North Koreans despite evidence that the Cheonan "struck a reef and sunk in two" is plainly absurd.

Nice too to see Pilger encouraging the spread of nuclear weapons to protect against attack from the US imperialists. There's responsible journalism for you.