Okinawa is a prime target: U.S. doesn’t want peace

• The US military has occupied Okinawa for the last 73 years and currently controls about 20% of the island for the Pentagon’s 32 bases.  Back in the early 1980’s then Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone used to say that Japan was “an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US”.  He was essentially talking about Okinawa – the Japanese mainland has some US bases but not nearly as many as here.  Most Japanese on the mainland don’t feel the heavy military boot print the same way that the Okinawan people do.

• The situation on Okinawa is made particularly dangerous because of the aggressive actions in the region by Washington.  As North and South Korean leaders prepare to discuss peace on the Korean peninsula Washington is doing its best to sabotage those talks.  One example is the forced April 23 deployment of even more THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system components in Soseong-ri (melon farming community) in South Korea.  Hundreds of farmers and their supporters blocked the road for 11 hours as the US Army attempted to aggravate the already tense situation on the Korean peninsula by deploying these systems that are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning.  The THAAD radar gives the US the capability to detect Chinese and Russian missiles giving the Pentagon an advantage in a war with those two nations.  It seems clear to me that Washington is not willing to make any peaceful concessions to North Korea in order to come to any agreement.  The US also views the Korean peninsula as another “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for Pentagon military installations.

• Similarly, the recently completed Navy base on Jeju Island, South Korea in Gangjeong village has already seen a series of US and NATO member Navy warships porting at the base.  The US has been pressuring the South Korean government to sign agreements that would allow NATO member warships to permanently dock on Jeju Island.  This indicates that the US views Jeju as a strategic port in the current ‘pivot’ of US-NATO into the Asia-Pacific region to encircle China and Russia. April 28, 2018 will mark the anniversary of 4,000 consecutive days of courageous people's struggle against the US navy base in Gangjeong.

• If the US truly intended to offer a friendly and peaceful hand to North Korea (as it hypocritically demands that they dismantle their nuclear weapons program) then the Pentagon would not have just days ago launched a Minuteman III nuclear capable-missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.  The missile was fired into the Pacific where it landed at its target at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.  The message to China, Russia and North Korea is clear – ‘We can launch nuclear missiles anytime we wish but the rest of you better not try.  We are the big dogs here and intend to control the Asia-Pacific region – challenge us at your own peril’.

• Also, in recent days US-NATO military ‘advisers’ have been seen in Ukraine where they are training and equipping the Army of the puppet government that was installed in Kiev following the CIA orchestrated coup d’etat in 2014.  Since that time the right-wing government now under US-NATO control has continuously attacked their Russian speaking fellow citizens living in the eastern region of the country (called the Donbass) right along the Russian border.  By creating chaos and instability there the US-NATO justify expanding their own military operations near Russia – something that was totally unthinkable during the Cold War.  In those fragile times if the US-NATO had tried to do what they are doing today it would have led to nuclear war with the former Soviet Union.  This story is not reported by the mainstream media.

• We can clearly see that Okinawa and South Korea would be prime targets in a US instigated war with China and Russia.  I have no doubt that Washington-London-Paris-Brussels are doing everything possible to prod and poke Moscow and Beijing.  The message is you either submit to western control or you face this growing military threat of US-NATO ‘full spectrum dominance’.  Russia and China have repeatedly been saying ‘We do not want war but we are not going to get on our knees.  We’ve seen what you’ve done with your chaos creation in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and are not going to allow this to continue.’  These dangerous and destabilizing provocations could lead to World War III.  Now is the time for peace loving people around the world to resist the US-NATO imperial project.

Bruce