World War III - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 4 March 2022

Mark Armstrong — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 23:28:08 +0000

Greetings from Tyler,

Nobody dared ask the question on everyone’s lips. Both Anthony Blinken and John Kirby held press conferences this week where they took questions. They didn’t have to answer this one. How come all the devastating sanctions don’t apply to Russian oil, which the U. S. is consuming at the reported rate of 10% and Europe is absolutely dependent upon? When you talk about the Russians raking in hundreds of millions of dollars per day, what else do you want to talk about?

That’s how committed this regime is to the green nonsense. It’s proud to have stamped out energy independence with renewed regulation and impossible red tape. But the administration is not about to unleash America’s energy potential, Ukrainian tribulation or not.

Vladimir Putin is proving his harshest critics right. We hope he’s watching the coverage of the carnage in Ukraine somewhere other than Russian broadcast networks. The heartbreak of mothers with small children saying goodbye to husbands who are going to fight against the invasion… The air-raid sirens and long hours spent in basements, and almost a million women and children have had to go. We’re shown other examples of people trapped, terrified that they can’t get out. All they wanted was to live in peace. They posed no threat to Russia. But Putin thinks he has justification. He must be watching Russian TV. Or is what we’re watching an accurate analysis?

Ukraine has been described as a piggy-bank for money laundering. Some pretty big names are implicated. There’s word that the pretender’s family is hip deep. It’s a tragedy all right, with all the civilians caught in the middle. Putin doesn’t want the New World Order on his doorstep, and there’s a female member of the Ukrainian parliament, hair and make-up done with an AK in her hand saying she’s ready to fight for the New World Order in Ukraine. So who’s crazy?

But maybe somebody up the chain dropped the ball. It doesn’t help that we’ve got leadership, squinting hard at words he didn’t write with that far-off look of wonder. Let’s hope somebody knows what they’re doing, but things have gone seriously south since the disputed election. With quarantines, mask arguments and vaccination mandates, it’s as if our own government has turned inward. They’ve become more interested in lecturing us about what we better do next than managing the U. S. posture around the world. It seems patriotic Americans had already become the primary target.

Forget the real enemies of peace. They’ve had the luxury of chasing everyone around, knowing the “right” thing for everybody to do, and a lot of people, maybe a majority, bought in to it. The media preached day and night to a diminishing audience, hair on fire. It was all COVID, all the time. That and the “deadly insurrection” on January 6^th. Even with the harrowing stories, the bomb blasts and the reality of a war that could go wrong, they still bang on about vaccinations.

John Kerry is one who is actually too easy to lampoon. In fact he does it to himself, having become the caricature of a wizened diplomat. He’s really concerned that the war may divert attention from the threat posed by “climate change.” That term covers all the bases. They can never be wrong, no matter what happens. The comedy is that their posturing has some effect on the actual climate. Now that’s laughable. Buffoons don’t know when to quit. That goes double for Al Gore.

Beyond those jokers there is nothing funny about what’s taking place, played out in great detail on every media outlet. The news outfits that had fallen way out of favor now are eyewitness to the details, the rubble, the explosions and the miles long Russian convoy.

CBS has a piece playing now, about how cruel it is in Ukraine for “transgenders.” This poor guy in a blonde wig worries that his “identity” no longer matches his passport. The “rainbow” lifestyle doesn’t cut much mustard in Ukraine. They’ve made life miserable for guys like him. But don’t expect him to join any volunteers fighting the invasion. No sir. He’s a woman now, one who claims to be in fear of his life. He might just remove the wig, but that won’t work either. The music is haunting, but the dude is dancing in his kitchen to cope.

We’ve heard tell that Ukraine has been a no-man’s-land where large sums of U. S. dollars have been sent to promote things we’d rather not know about. Critics say that some notorious operators have taken advantage of the situation, and the squinter in chief is implicated. It’s a little unnerving, having the gang that can’t shoot straight in charge of whether WWIII gets touched off.

You know the situation in painful detail. A decision has been made that the U. S. will not do anything to drive Putin over the edge. He’s already made dark threats against anyone who would “interfere with his military operation.” It’s hard to understand his goals. He’s definitely destroyed his reputation. Ukraine has a lot that Russia can use, whether or not the strategic arguments are valid.

Desperate women with children are all over our media, begging and pleading for things that would likely mean the destruction of civilization. But we mustn’t upset the GREEN AGENDA. They’re so impressed with this religious ideology, though it makes no sense!

One last thought. What about the tyrants right here at home? What about the ones in Canada and Australia? At least they didn’t bomb or shoot anybody. They just made their towns and cities look like a neutron bomb went off. May we survive them all with God’s help.

Mark

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

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WW3 WARNING: ‘Israel and Iran ON BRINK of war in Syria’ claims expert after deadly strikes

Bill McLoughlin — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 10:27:41 +0000

SYRIA and Israel are heading for a war which no outside force will be able to prevent following retaliatory strikes by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) last week, a Middle East expert has warned.

The IDF’s retaliation comes after surface-to-surface missiles were fired from inside Syria towards the Golan Heights. In return, Israel launched an attack on a military site near Damascus International Airport, munition storage sites, an Iranian intelligence site and an Iranian military training camp. In a change of tactic in recent years, Israel took full responsibility for the attack after years of failing to claim responsibility for missile strikes launched against Iranian and Hezbollah positions.

Writing in his column for Arab News, Middle East commentator Osama Al-Sharif argued Israel admitting such a heavy attack would lead the two nations back into conflict.

He said: “The brinkmanship by both sides has raised the chances of potential confrontation to their highest level since 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah fought a bloody war that tested both.

“The geopolitical conditions have changed drastically, with claims that Hezbollah’s missile arsenal could now pose a genuine threat to the heart of Israel.

“What is happening in Syria is a high-stakes face-off that could easily develop into a major conflagration.

World war 3: Israel and Iran on brink of war (Image: GETTY)

WW3 news: Israel flexes muscle in Middle East (Image: GETTY)

“The reality is that no outside power has the ability to defuse a febrile situation and prevent a looming war.”

Following the Israeli attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented not just a more open and blatant stance to their aggression but also a more threatening one too.

He said: “Whoever tries to hurt us, we will hurt them.

“Whoever threatens to destroy us will bear the full responsibility.”

WW3 news: Israel and Iran closer to war (Image: GETTY)

As Mr Al-Sharif concludes, this was not just a warning the Iranian and Syrian regime’s but also to their powerful supporter, Russia.

While Russia, like the US would like to avoid another conflict in the Middle East if possible, both may not be able to control their reactionary allies.

Mr Al-Sharif added Russia’s ability to prevent hostilities Israel and Syria is in doubt while it has no chance of curtailing Iran’s attacks.

The Iranian presence combined with danger of Hezbollah is a danger to Israel and as the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel that any other attack could lead to a future regional war.

Source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1079799/world-war-3-israel-Iran-Syria-middle-east-conflict-hezbollah-missile-russia-US-rouhani

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How the U.S. and North Korea could stumble into World War III

Bryan Bender and Jacqueline Klimas — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 23:47:04 +0000

U.S. military planners are increasingly concerned that tensions on the Korean peninsula could unintentionally trigger a wider war as Trump and Kim Jong Un hurl unusually personal attacks online.

A North Korean provocation, a U.S. warning shot, malicious hackers or a simple accident could be the cause that starts a new war. | Ahn Young-joon/AP Photo

U.S. military officials increasingly worry that a mistake or miscommunication — even more than an intentional act of war — could start a nuclear conflict in Korea.

A North Korean provocation, a U.S. warning shot, malicious hackers or a simple accident could be the cause that starts a new war between two nations with a long history of tensions and suspicion.

“Miscalculation is now at a stage [that is] higher than probably any time since the Cuban missile crisis,” former Obama administration Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said days after President Donald Trump boasted on Twitter that his nuclear button is “a much bigger & more powerful one” than Kim Jong Un’s.

These are some of the potential scenarios that most worry former nuclear commanders, policymakers and experts on Korea.

‘A pure accident’
A common fear of escalation is rooted in the oft-violent history of the Korean standoff, which dates back to the 1953 armistice that halted the three years of fighting in the Korean War. The two sides have come to blows or awfully close countless times in the decades since then — often by “pure accident,” in the words of Michael Mazarr, who served as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2008 to 2010 and is a specialist on the Asia-Pacific.

In one prominent case, a U.S. Army helicopter strayed across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and was shot down in 1994, killing one crew member.

In other cases, the close proximity of opposing militaries — positioned just across from each other at the Demilitarized Zone — have come dangerously close to military confrontation by accident.

For example, in 2003, four North Korean fighter jets buzzed an unarmed American spy plane over the Sea of Japan, coming within 50 feet of the U.S. aircraft. In 2015, two South Korean soldiers stumbled on land mines planted near the DMZ by the North, and both sides separately exchanged mortar and artillery fire. North and South Korean forces also exchanged gunfire just last month when a North Korean soldier defected to the south.

Given the current tensions on the peninsula, any type of mishap or misstep could escalate quickly, numerous experts say.

Mazarr said one such scenario could be a North Korean missile test gone awry.

“North Korea launches a missile that they presume to be a test, it malfunctions and starts going toward Japan in a way that is perceived as a possible attack, so the U.S. takes out the launch pad and then it just escalates from there,” he said.

Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, a Washington think tank, also raised the prospect that North Korea could misinterpret a flyover by a U.S. bomber — a practice the Pentagon uses from time to time simply to show resolve — as a pre-emptive attack.

Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant defense secretary for East Asia, recalled such a flyover in September that traveled farther north than previous American exercises. It took place just a few days after Trump warned in a speech before the United Nations that the United States might have no choice but to “totally destroy” North Korea.

He said such rhetoric “puts normal actions in a different light,” expressing concern that in such circumstances North Korea’s military could fatally misread the U.S. flexing its military muscles.

North Korean escalation

The North Koreans have also shown a pattern of staging military provocations against the U.S. or South Korea — while gambling that they won’t trigger a wider conflict.

The most prominent example occurred in 1968, when North Korea attacked and captured the USS Pueblo, a Navy spy ship with 83 crew members, who were held in captivity for nearly a year. As recently as 2010, North Korea torpedoed and sank a South Korean warship in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 South Korea sailors.

Given the rhetoric on both sides of the DMZ, where the United States has nearly 30,000 troops, many experts fear that such a provocation could now more easily devolve into something far larger.

“They could make the miscalculation and something like 2010 happens again,” said Denmark, who is now director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “I believe the U.S. and South Korean actions would be very different than 2010.”

A limited U.S. strike

Mazarr said “the most likely route to a big war” is a decision by the United States “to take military action it believes will be small.”

Indeed, more hawkish voices in the United States have been talking up the value of launching a pre-emptive U.S. military strike — what some news reports have called a “bloody nose” attack — to curtail North Korea’s advancing nuclear program. That has set off alarms among numerous North Korea experts that the Trump administration may not fully think through the implications.

“The United States could take what it viewed as a limited military action, but it would be extraordinarily difficult to control the escalation after such an action because North Korea would be under tremendous pressure to respond militarily,” said Davenport.

North Korea, despite its large army and advancing missile and cyber capabilities, also lacks the intelligence skills to reliably gauge a relatively limited U.S. assault on its own.

“It is difficult for them potentially to distinguish a large-scale disarming strike from the beginning of an all-out war,” said Mazarr, who is now a senior political scientist at the government-funded Rand Corp. specializing in nuclear deterrence. “Such a strike would likely require attacks on air defenses, air fields, command and control facilities.”

To the North Koreans, that could be reminiscent of the beginning of the United States’ Desert Storm attack on Iraq in 1991 — leading them to conclude that American troops would soon be landing. If they believe that, Mazarr said, they might decide at some point that “you know, it’s time to launch everything.”

Then you have what quickly becomes a very big war, he added.

A cyberattack

Moniz, who now heads the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, said he especially worries about the potential for nuclear war should another malign actor do something that one side either misinterprets or wrongly blames on the other. Examples could include a hacker infiltrating North Korean or American communication systems inputting false data or rendering them inoperable and feeding suspicions that a full-blown attack is imminent.

“We have historically, of course, seen how incorrect information in both the Soviet Union and the United States led to a major risk of a nuclear exchange,” he said, citing the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

It was learned after the crisis that U.S. military officials who unsuccessfully advocated for an invasion of Cuba were unaware at the time that the Soviet Union had given orders to use battlefield nuclear weapons placed on the island.

“We have today an additional possible source of incorrect information,” Moniz added: “cyberattacks on nuclear command and control systems, which could be from a third party.”

The United States would have good reason to believe such an attack could be the work of North Korea, he said, even if it isn’t.

“We know that North Korea has developed and we have seen the impact of their development of cyberattack tools,” Moniz said. “Cyberattacks on nuclear command and control systems is something we need to get our hands around.”

Jon Wolfsthal, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who held the nuclear portfolio on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, also expressed concern about the “third-party actor” scenario.

“There’s always something that goes wrong that we don’t control — an airliner that strays over North Korean airspace by mistake, a hacker picks the wrong time to try to screw with the North Korean communication system, or the South Korean banking system, or the American radar system in South Korea,” Wolfsthal said.

Taunts without talking

Trump’s latest tweet, which responded to Kim’s claim on New Year’s Day that “a nuclear button is always on my desk,” alarmed people throughout Washington and foreign capitals — especially in South Korea, which swiftly sought to open up a new dialogue with its outlaw neighbor.

Traditionally, the United States has tried to avoid miscommunication with North Korea by using diplomats, unofficial emissaries and public and private messages to engage with Pyongyang. Such messages are first carefully distilled by multiple government agencies and allies, said retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, a former top U.S. nuclear commander.

But with Trump and Kim, he said, “you are dealing with two people who are matching wills.” And Trump is doing it via Twitter.

“It is pretty hard to go to all-out war,” Cartwright added. “But it is real easy to miscalculate in those kinds of one-versus-one dialogues.”

After the latest round of tweets, top Trump administration officials once again stressed publicly that they would far prefer a diplomatic solution to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. So did the United States Pacific Command, which would have to fight such a war, telling POLITICO that “diplomacy continues to remains the preferred course of action toward the peaceful de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

The Trump administration has also taken a step that could ease tensions somewhat, announcing Thursday it will delay an annual military exercise in the region until after the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea. North Korea has denounced those exercises as threatening.

Even so, a blunder into war always remains possible because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies understand little about North Korea and its leaders — and because their militaries communicate only rarely.

“The challenge here is how little we know about what North Korean senior leaders actually think, what they believe about U.S. intentions, what they are thinking on a day-to-day basis,” Mazarr said. “They don’t have the kind of published military doctrine that you could look at with Russia or China to sort of say how would they react to certain circumstances.”

In contrast, the U.S. and the Soviet Union set up what Mazarr called “a lot of buffers” during the latter years of the Cold War, establishing procedures for mutual communication, military-to-military discussions and personal relationships among diplomats.

With North Korea, “if there were a helicopter that went down or a boat that had entered the wrong zone at the wrong time or some training crew with their mortar going in the wrong direction, there is no way to communicate quickly or reliably that that is a mistake,” Wolfsthal said.

He added, “When we make outlandish threats, the North Koreans are going to be a little more on edge, and they have a very strong incentive to use their nuclear weapons first.”

The threats that Trump and Kim are lobbing add unnecessary fuel to an already dicey situation, say those with direct experience managing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“Words matter,” said retired Air Force Gen. C. Robert Kehler, who oversaw the American nuclear arsenal as commander of the U.S. Strategic Command from 2011 to 2013. “And the U.S. has always been cautious in our rhetoric involving nuke weapons in particular.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/06/north-korea-nuclear-war-264526

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