hankyoreh

Graphic provided by jaewoogy.com

In January 2020, a US military drone attacked and killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran decried the attack as an “assassination,” but then-US President Donald Trump said the US had “terminated” Soleimani, while an American official used the expression “targeted killing.”

Given its political motivation, Soleimani’s killing was an assassination, but the US has studiously avoided that word, and with good reason. Assassinations were outlawed in the US after the public learned about a CIA plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and other key foreign figures in the 1970s.

Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the CIA tortured terrorism suspects in secret prisons called “black sites.” A report on torture that the Senate published in 2014 details horrific torture, including waterboarding, threats of sexual torture, beatings and suspending people with their hands tied above their head.

The CIA insisted that such behaviors weren’t actually torture, but “enhanced interrogation.”

Many innocent civilians, including children, died while the US was waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US describes their deaths as “collateral damage,” emphasizing the fact that such civilian casualties were unintended.

This semantic quibbling is designed to obfuscate the horrendous slaughter of civilians.

The Obama administration’s policy toward North Korea was called “strategic patience.” But in reality, the policy was neither strategic nor patient.

The US sat on its hands as it waited for North Korea to bend the knee. In the end, that just gave the North time to strengthen its nuclear weapon and missile capabilities.

Waiting on the sidelines and hoping things will improve isn’t strategic patience; it’s simply incompetence.

The Biden administration’s North Korea policy can be seen as occupying the middle ground between Trump’s pursuit of a grand bargain and Obama’s strategic patience. The Biden administration has kicked the ball for resuming dialogue into North Korea’s court.

“To some, that sounds like a return to the Obama-era policy of ‘strategic patience’ — just without saying as much,” wrote Josh Rogin, foreign policy and national security columnist for the Washington Post, in a column on May 5.

Here’s hoping the Biden administration doesn’t return to that incompetence.

By Kwon Hyuk-chul, editorial writer

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]