Brinkmanship vs Statesmanship: Avoiding the slippery slope to war, violence

War and violence in any form, are bad for several reasons, but most reprehensible of them is the absolute degeneration of qualities that differentiate humans from animals. Empathy, compassion, kindness and such traits which facilitated human collaboration to create the world we know, is replaced with behaviour associated with feral animals. Ordinary, law-abiding, God-fearing family men go on a merciless rampage, plundering, raping and killing. We read about mobs lynching a mentally challenged victim, or a police officer brutally raping and slaughtering a child and wonder – who are these people? Are they even human?

The shocking answer is – they are as human as we are and therefore by corollary, our virtuous conduct is just a thin line away from the evil that lies latent in most of us. What makes a regular ‘next door neighbour’ transform into a rapacious demon and kill without mercy or remorse?

Trump warns McCain after his speech on 'half-baked' American foreign policy

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a warning shot after Republican Senator John McCain questioned "half-baked, spurious nationalism" in America's foreign policy.

Trump said in a radio interview with WMAL in Washington that "people have to be careful because at some point I fight back." The president added "I'm being very, very nice but at some point I fight back and it won't be pretty."

McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent 5 years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp and is battling brain cancer, offered a simple response to Trump: "I have faced tougher adversaries."

In Philadelphia last night, the six-term Republican senator from Arizona received an award for a lifetime of service and sacrifice to the country.

In addition to recalling his more than two decades of military service and his imprisonment during the war, McCain took a moment to go a step further than the night's other speakers, who lamented what many described as a fractured political climate.
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The mask is off: US President Donald Trump is seeking war with Iran

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Something extraordinary has happened in Washington. President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October — the facts be damned.

In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance with the international pact and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisers have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this. Rarely has a sinister plan to destroy an arms control agreement and pave the way for war been so openly telegraphed.

The unmasking of Trump’s plans to sabotage the nuclear deal began a few weeks ago when he reluctantly had to certify that Iran indeed was in compliance with its end of the deal. Both the US intelligence as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed Tehran’s fair play. But Trump threw a tantrum in the Oval Office and berated his national security team for not having found a way to claim Iran was cheating.

According to Foreign Policy, the adults in the room — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and National Security Adviser H R McMaster — eventually calmed Trump down, but only on the condition that they double down on finding a way for the president to blow up the deal by October.
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Game of Thrones and the cut and thrust of warring women through the ages

“Enemies to the east, enemies to the west, enemies to the south, enemies to the north. Whatever stands in our way, we will defeat it.” So says Cersei Lannister to her brother Jamie, as she considers the various threats to her reign.

The trailers for season seven of Game of Thrones promise further epic battles to decide the fate of the Seven Kingdoms. One of the key struggles will almost certainly be between Cersei Lannister, recently crowned queen of Westeros, and Daenerys Targaryen, whose ownership of several dragons would appear to give her a distinct advantage on the battlefield. Her mantra: “I was born to rule the seven kingdoms and I will.”

One of the many sources of inspiration for Game of Thrones is the Wars of the Roses, which involved several ambitious women – principally Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, Elizabeth Woodville (who married Edward IV), and Margaret Beaufort, whose son Henry Tudor would eventually take the crown – who brought the civil war to an end. The Hollow Crown, the BBC’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays about the Wars of the Roses portrayed Margaret of Anjou wearing mail on the battlefield, but what role did women really play in warfare of the later medieval period?

This partially depends upon how we define warfare. Then, as now, it was unusual to find women on the battlefield – but not impossible, think of Joan of Arc or Joanna of Flanders who donned armour to attack her enemy on horseback. But, if we think of warfare more broadly – as being waged by one society against another – then women played a significant role in the war effort.
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'Foolish daydream': North Korea's jibe at Japan's bid to grab Tok Islets

North Korea on Thursday slammed Japan for trying to lay claim to the Tok Islets by presenting them as Japanese territory in teaching materials for schools.

According to Xinhua news agency, the official daily Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary that such acts are being committed by "Japanese reactionaries with robber-like intention".

"The Japanese reactionaries persistently assert that the Tok Islets are inviolable parts of their territory and imbue rising generations with ambition for the Tok Islets. Their purpose is to use their youngsters as a shock brigade for grabbing the Tok Islets and re-invading Korea in the future," said the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea.

It also accused Japan of frequently staging combat drills for capturing the islets by mobilising the Self-Defence Forces and preparing the country for a state of war.

"No matter how desperately Japan may assert the Tok Islets belong to its territory, it can convince no one. Japan's bid to grab the Tok Islets is a foolish daydream," it said.

The Japanese government decided to write into official school textbooks that the Tok Islets are part of Japan, a claim denounced by both Pyongyang and Seoul.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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US tells North Korea it is prepared to go to war

The U.S. warned North Korea that it is ready to fight if provoked, as Pyongyang claimed another weapons-development breakthrough following its launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile a day earlier.

The regime, having demonstrated its capacity to reach the U.S. with a missile, on Wednesday touted another achievement of the test launch: It claimed that its missile warhead—the forward section, which carries the explosive—can withstand the extreme heat and pressure of re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

If true—the claim couldn’t be independently verified—that would clear another hurdle in developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach American cities.

As tensions between Washington and Pyongyang rose, Gen. Vincent Brooks, the top American military commander in South Korea, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. and South Korea are prepared to go to war with the North if given the order.

“Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” Gen. Brooks said. “We are able to change our choice when so ordered.…It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”

Earlier in the day, allied armies conducted a rare live-fire drill, launching tactical surface-to-surface missiles off the east coast of Korea—an action they said was aimed directly at “countering North Korea’s destabilizing and unlawful actions on July 4.”

The drill and tough language appeared meant to reassure Seoul after North Korea’s successful ICBM test, a significant advance.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described the development as an escalation of the threat to the U.S. It came despite years of sanctions and warnings aimed at preventing Kim Jong Un’s regime from reaching the milestone.
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The last near-century of American dominance was extraordinarily violent

John Dower is one the most preeminent historians of World War II’s Pacific theatre and the aftermath of the conflict in Asia. His book War Without Mercy (1986) described the racial component of the U.S. campaign against Japan. In Embracing Defeat (1999), he examined the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan. He has long taken a critical look at U.S. foreign policy, subjecting the vaunted ideals of America’s global pretensions to sceptical scrutiny. He’s not interested in “good wars” or “good occupations.” He describes the exercise of power, and it’s almost never a pretty picture.

In recent years, Dower has been extending his critical analysis both chronologically and geographically. Cultures of War (2010) was an initial effort to link the violence of World War II to 9/11 and the Iraq War. Now, with The Violent American Century, Dower deepens his analysis by addressing the emergence and expansion of American global power all the way up to the Obama era. Dower is particularly interested in connecting the dots between the United States that emerged victorious from World War II and the America of the 21st century that appears willing to do almost anything to maintain its status as the world’s only superpower.

Dower begins his story just at the moment when the United States is poised to become a global titan. It’s 1941, the year the United States officially entered World War II. It’s also when Time’s Henry Luce proclaimed the beginning of “the American century.” For all his talk of democratic principles and the American spirit, Luce was not naïve. He knew that America would have to use force – in some cases, overwhelming force – to establish its global position. The saturation bombing of Dresden and Tokyo followed by the nuclear attacks against Nagasaki and Hiroshima became the pivotal moments of “war and terror” on which the United States would secure its authority.
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