FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Trump Asserts That Obama Considered War against North Korea

Feb. 17, 2019 (EIRNS)—In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on Feb. 15, President Donald Trump asserted that former U.S. President Barack Obama had considered launching a “surgical” missile strike against North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. “I believe [Obama] would have gone to war with North Korea,” Trump said. “I think he was ready to go to war. In fact, he told me he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.”

Trump also reasserted that if he had not been elected and Hillary Clinton were in the White House, the U.S. would have been at war with North Korea.

Trump cited a 90-minute conversation he had with Obama in November 2016 when he became President-elect, in which Obama told him that North Korea would be the new administration’s toughest foreign policy challenge.

Obama’s lackeys jumped in to claim that Trump was lying, with former CIA director and would-be coup plotter John Brennan telling NBC News that Obama was never on the verge of starting any war with North Korea. He was followed by similar comments from Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, in Twitter.

Britain’s Guardian reminds its readers that according to Bob Woodward’s recent book Fear: Trump in the White House, Obama did consider a strike against North Korea, asking the National Security Council if a preemptive missile strike combined with cyber attacks could wipe out the Pyongyang’s entire nuclear arsenal.

Interestingly the Guardian also reminds its readers that early in the Obama Presidency, his administration saw the creation of a U.S.-led coalition to conduct airstrikes and establish the Al-Tanf military base in Syria without authorization from the Damascus government. They point to fears back in 2014 that heightened tensions with Russia over Crimea’s referendum to reunite with Russia, there were fears that there could have been a U.S.-Russian military conflict had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 U.S. presidential election.