Few Americans will recall the 1983 invasion of a small Caribbean nation thousands of miles from North Korea. But in fact, this conflict set the stage for the nuclear standoff today. It intensified the animosity between the two countries, sending North Korea on a quest for nuclear weapons to combat what it saw as a looming American threat.
In October 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. The Kim family regime that controls North Korea saw this invasion as an early warning sign: If the United States could perceive even a small spice island as a threat, so too could it eventually train its sights on North Korea. Without an effective deterrent, any regime perceived as a threat would be little match for American military might.
.. Shortly after establishing diplomatic relations with Grenada in 1979, Kim Il Sung offered large amounts of free technical and agricultural assistance to Bishop’s regime. From sending tractors and cement to helping build the national stadium in the capital city of St. George’s, North Korea spared no expense in assisting its Grenadian allies.
.. The North Koreans also provided a large cache of weapons to Grenada. According to documents captured by American military forces during the invasion, when Bishop visited North Korea in April 1983, the two countries signed a secret military agreement. North Korea’s “free offer of military assistance” gave the Grenadians 12 million U.S. dollars worth of weapons and ammunition
.. President Ronald Reagan justified his decision to launch Operation Urgent Fury by citing the presence of 600 American medical students in Grenada and a military coup that took place six days before the invasion. Reagan argued that the coup, which deposed Bishop and brought even more radical Stalinists to power on the island, threatened to destabilize the entire Caribbean region.
.. After observing the swift destruction of the Grenadian revolution, Kim Il Sung feared that Reagan would launch an invasion of North Korea similar to Operation Urgent Fury and overthrow his government in a matter of weeks. Reagan’s strict anti-communist policy and his increased commitment to the U.S.-South Korea military alliance — Reagan had ratcheted up joint military exercises on the peninsula — unsettled Kim Il Sung.
.. In a 1984 conversation with East German leader Erich Honecker, Kim Il Sung lamented, “Every year the American armies conduct a major military exercise. They conducted these exercises even before the Reagan era, but since Reagan took office this has grown.” Kim Il Sung also fretted to Honecker that Reagan would never withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea and the American military presence would impede his plans for the reunification of the Korean peninsula. Kim Il Sung perceived Reagan’s combination of staunch support for South Korea and militant rhetoric, on top of the invasion of Grenada, as a sign that North Korea might be next.
.. He knew that just as Grenada’s military could not match the powerful United States military in battle, neither could his military stop a U.S. invasion. He knew that he needed a far greater deterrent to keep the Americans at bay and protect his regime. Thus, three years after the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the North Korean leadership established a Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry, which formally declared Kim Il Sung’s intention to develop a nuclear weapons program.
.. North Korea will never abandon its nuclear weapons program, because it believes that without it, nothing would deter an American invasion aimed at regime change. North Korea will not even establish a dialogue with the United States if the Trump administration insists on Kim Jong Un dropping his nuclear weapons program.
Bungled Collusion Is Still Collusion
Donald Trump Jr.’s e-mails discredit the ‘nothingburger’ argument the president’s supporters have been advancing for months.
.. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the Communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election?
.. One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.
.. This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.
.. Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, Eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.
Sheriff Joe
Joe Arpaio is tough on prisoners and undocumented immigrants. What about crime?
Arpaio wasn’t eloquent, but he spoke in short, quotable bursts, and he pummelled opponents with gusto. He promised to crack down on crime and to serve only one term. He won the Republican primary, which is traditionally all one needs in Maricopa.
.. The voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of Army-surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded by barbed wire, in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. “I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste-disposal plant,” he told me. Phoenix is an open-air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty-five degrees. Still, the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents, until Tent City jail held twenty-five hundred inmates, and he stuck a neon “vacancy” sign on a tall guard tower. It was visible for miles.
.. Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me.
.. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network.
.. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”
.. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody—whom the Sheriff calls, with persuasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime—kept occurring to him.
.. The chain gangs’ tasks include burying the indigent at the county cemetery, but mainly they serve as spectacles in Arpaio’s theatre of cruelty. “I put them out there on the main streets,” he told me. “So everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash, and parents say to their kids, ‘Look, that’s where you’re going if you’re not good.’ “ The law-and-order public loved it, and the Sheriff’s fame spread.
.. He decreed that all of his inmates—there are now roughly ten thousand of them, double the number when he took office—must wear pink underwear.
.. But the Sheriff has never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his jails, never apologized to victims or their families. In fact, many of the officers involved have been promoted.
.. Remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county board of supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the sheriff’s office.
.. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena, demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its Web site in the previous two and a half years, sheriff’s deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men for, they said, violating grand-jury secrecy. (The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.)
.. Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public-comment period at a board of supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct—for clapping.
.. Arizona is also full of retirees from the Midwest and the Northeast—Sun City is in Maricopa County—and these elderly Americans are, by and large, not completely delighted to find themselves among folk, mostly poor and brown, who don’t speak English. The state is home to an array of nativist groups
.. In the world according to Sheriff Joe, almost every problem in America these days can somehow be traced back to “illegals.”
.. The public-health specialist said gently, “Surgical masks do nothing to combat this virus.”
Arpaio erupted. “This is my press release! I’m the sheriff! I have some knowledge! I’m not just some little old sheriff!”
.. Arpaio, with his inhuman energy, had probably escorted hundreds of camera crews and reporters through his beloved tent jail. Many had been appalled, and produced unflattering stories. Plenty of others had simply served up the Toughest Sheriff shtick with relish
.. Gascón, who was an assistant police chief in Los Angeles before taking the Mesa job, three years ago, has had great success in crime reduction in Mesa, using the CompStat crime-mapping model, developed by William Bratton in New York and Los Angeles. But his first challenge in Mesa, he told me, had been to gain the trust of minority communities, particularly Latinos. “They need to believe that you’re ethical and honest, that you’re not the enemy,”
.. In Los Angeles, he had seen what happened when that trust was broken by corrupt officers.
.. The plan was to raid the Mesa city hall and the public library, to look for undocumented janitors who, according to the sheriff’s office, were suspected of identification theft. Gascón was not notified beforehand. (Arpaio claims that he did inform someone at Mesa police headquarters about the raid.) A Mesa police officer spotted a large group of heavily armed men in flak jackets gathering silently in a downtown park. Gascón, when I asked about the episode, took a deep breath. “It was a very, very dangerous scenario,” he said. “In my entire law-enforcement career, I have never heard of anything close to this.” His officers managed to identify the armed men, but then had trouble getting a straight story from them. The raid eventually went forward, monitored by the Mesa police, and resulted in the arrests of three middle-aged cleaning women.
.. But Janet Napolitano, President Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, has a history with Arpaio. She was the U.S. Attorney for Arizona when conditions in Arpaio’s jails were first investigated by the Justice Department, in the mid-nineteen-nineties. Her performance then was memorably weak. Despite receiving a devastating federal report on brutality inside the jails, she held a friendly press conference with Arpaio in which she announced the settlement of the case against him and, according to the Arizona Republic, passed the time “trading compliments with the sheriff.”
.. Then, when she ran for governor in 2002, Arpaio returned the favor by crossing party lines—Napolitano is a Democrat—and making a last-minute campaign commercial for her that, by all accounts, helped her eke out a victory,
America, Pearce often says, has been “invaded,” and the Fifth Column that abets this invasion is, he told me, an unusual alliance of “big business, folks with thick checkbooks on K Street, the corporate oligarchy,” and “anarchists and seditionists.”
.. There is also the awkward fact that Arpaio came late to the issue of illegal immigration. Indeed, he for many years publicly assumed the same attitude toward immigration-law enforcement that most local police chiefs do: more serious crimes deserve precedence.
.. “Arpaio was not like this before,” she told me. “He was flamboyant. But I don’t know this guy.”
..
For Wilcox, the last straw came this February, when Arpaio marched more than two hundred undocumented immigrants, shackled together, to a new tent jail, parading them before news cameras. Arpaio had staged prisoner marches before. In 2005, he forced nearly seven hundred prisoners, wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip-flops, to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink-handcuffed together, to a new jail. When they arrived, one prisoner was made to cut a pink ribbon for the cameras. This elaborate degradation, which is remembered fondly by Sheriff Joe’s fans, was ostensibly in the name of security—the men were strip-searched both before and after the march. But Arpaio also told reporters, “I put them on the street so everybody could see them.” He marched another nine hundred this April.
.. “It’s like a big joke to him,” she said. “He has no idea the harm he’s doing—to children, families, communities.”
.. Arpaio seemed jealous. “The Republic did a poll last week, ‘Who’s your hero?,’ and I beat out Tillman,” he said. He meant Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals football star who joined the Army Rangers and was killed in Afghanistan. “I beat out all these guys. I’m not bragging. I’m just saying.”
.. “Every time he goes to the tents, it’s like a rock concert. Everybody wants his autograph. They’ll have him sign toilet paper, anything.”
.. The two-day raid netted only nine suspected illegal immigrants, but reportedly produced a high volume of traffic tickets, including charges for “improper use of horn.” Jiménez noted that the raid came in the middle of an election campaign. “He used our community to get media attention,” she said.