Photograph Source: Matt Johnson – CC BY 2.0
Joe Biden has his own Douglas MacArthur moment, and should replace the head of US Strategic Command, Adm. Charles A. Richard, just as Harry Truman fired the insubordinate commander of the US war in Korea.
Truman biographer David McCullough reports that in November 1950, Gen. “MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the ‘state of war’ imposed by the Chinese, then to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.” MacArthur then urged that the US “‘sever’ Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, ‘the by-products of atomic manufacture,’ all along the Yalu River.” In April 1951, President Truman fired MacArthur, replacing him with Gen. Matt Ridgeway.
Adm. Richard wrote in the US Naval Institute journal Proceedings that the US must, “consider the possibility of great power competition, crisis, or direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer.” The language is more nuanced than MacArthur’s, but just as genocidal. “We’ve assumed strategic deterrence will hold in the future, but as the threat environment changes, this may not be the case,” he said in an interview, as if discussing the strength of a dike and not the death of millions. This terror-mongering must not be allowed to grow deeper roots at StratCom.
Adm. Richard claims China intends be a “strategic peer” of the US, and that China is “aggressively challenging international norms and global peace using instruments of power and threats of force…,” according to Bill Gertz, in the Washington Times. Yet China’s “near peer” nuclear arsenal totals 350 warheads, while the Pentagon’s stock of 3,800 warheads is 10 times its size. The recent report by Simone Chun points out the Elephant in the Room here, counting 290 US military bases surrounding China in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and the Pentagon’s request for an astounding $27 billion budget increase in its military buildup there.
The admiral’s psychological projection regarding “instruments of power and threats of force” shows an imbalanced or willful blindness to the millions that are being or have been devastated, maimed, dismembered, or killed by US warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. China hasn’t crossed another state’s border since its 1951 crushing, 300-mile push-back against MacArthur’s forces in North Korea.
“We’ve assumed strategic deterrence will hold in the future, but as the threat environment changes, this may not be the case,” Adm. Richard alleged speaking to the Washington Times. “While [China] has maintained a ‘no first-use’ policy since the 1960s — contending it will never use a nuclear weapon first … This policy could change in the blink of an eye,” he says. But why would it? China’s no first-use policy absolutely reduces tensions of all kinds, an accomplishment that Mr. Biden and Strategic Command could share by finally making the same pledge — now a bill in Congress.
Like with Gen. MacArthur before him, there is a kind of madness in Adm. Richard’s speech. There is no reason whatsoever for China to reverse its “no first-use” pledge, except in the minds of the irrationally paranoid. US Strategic Command used to be run by Gen. George L. Butler who speaks more soberly about the Bomb. Gen. Butler said in Sept. 1999, “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror” that are “morally indefensible” — a description that now applies to Adm. Richard himself, whom the president should relieve of duty.
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John Laforge | Radio Free (2021-04-26T08:55:02+00:00) Biden’s MacArthur Moment. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/26/bidens-macarthur-moment/
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