War

With the departure of the U.S. from the global playground, some of the resident kiddies are becoming large enough in their own minds to start thinking of rectifying some borders, paying back some debts, or simply correcting the destined order of succession.

In North Korea, L'il Kim was apparently preparing to name one of his sons as heir-apparent, when one of his close allies died at the untimely age of 80 in a car accident. To me this seems suspicious. A car accident? In North Korea? Where did they find the second car?

According to pundits who follow the goings-on in N.K. this is a big upset to the planned succession, since L'il Kim needed all the help he could get to make his continuation of the dynasty stick. Makes you wonder if sinking that South Korean patrol boat was done to yank the military's leash at a time when some brigadier might be thinking of a regime change.

Over in the Med, the Turks, being more impressed with the Iranians than the Americans, have offered a military escort of the next ship attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. I expect this will end badly for the Turks, and the next move is for Turkey, who is a member of NATO, to run to the rest of NATO, that being western Europe, except France, plus the U.S., pointing out that the NATO charter says that an attack on one is an attack on all, so everybody, U.S. included, is now obliged to go to war with Turkey against Israel.

I'm not seeing that go over very well, as right now, nobody in Europe has either the inclination or the budget to go to war. The U.S. 6th fleet is also in a position to interpose itself between the erstwhile combatants and inform them both that there will be no war today, and tomorrow isn't looking very good either. This presupposes that someone from the pentagon informs the CinC that the only thing worse than having an oil spill named after him would be having a war named after him.