North Korea: What to do?

3. The third period is from July 1953 until the present. The U.S. crimes during this period are primarily crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. U.S. forces and surrogate southern Koreans carried out thousands of skirmishes and raids against northern Korea's territory and shipping, and extreme repression in southern Korea symbolized by the Kwangju massacre of May 18, 1980.

Thousands of deaths were caused by U.S. encouraged, supported and condoned violence by ROK military and police personnel.

Economic interference by the U.S. and a devastating blockade calculated to create conditions to destroy a major part of the northern Korean population, radically reduce available food, medicines, health care and medical capacities causing widespread malnutrition, weakening of the population, increasing susceptibility to diseases, illnesses and epidemics.

Chronic food shortages, hunger and periodic famine contribute to a reduced life expectancy of more than six years in the 1990's. Among children under 5 years of age the death rate increased from 27 per 1,000 live births to 48 per 1,000, or 77%, and among infants from 14 to 22.5 per 1,000 live births or 60%.

The percentage of the population with safe drinking water has dropped 30% in recent years. Vaccination coverage for diseases like polio and measles fell 40% between 1990 and 1997. Dysentery, iodine deficiency and vitamin deficiency are among many serious health problems for children. Per capita income in the north dropped from $991 U.S. per year in 1991 to $457 U.S. in 1999. All these figures were reported by A.P. on May 15, 2001.

Over this period of 48 years, unlawful U.S. policies and actions have caused many hundreds of thousands of deaths in Korea leaving it to be one of the most isolated and impoverished nations, as a result of external forces on earth.

http://www.iacenter.org/Koreafiles/ktc_indictment.htm

You cant compare WW2 and the persecution of the Jews to the situation in Nth Korea, that's ridiculous.

Smart nukes eh!

Yeah, I'm guilty of the armchair general bit, but I'm not down with either the nuclear part or the gung-ho part. War should always be an absolute last resort.

There is also no shortage of armchair pacifists who in effect rule out war

"A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit or stand on his arms and legs and hold him down; and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin, -- that is, with an inch circumference, -- is simply thrust into his jaws and his jaws are thrust back, and, if possible, a wooden log or stone is put under his head or neck, so he can be held more firmly. In the case of very old men I have seen their teeth fall out, -- I mean when it was done a little roughly. He is simply held down and then water is poured onto his face down his throat and nose from a jar; and that is kept up until the man gives some sign or becomes unconscious. And, when he becomes unconscious, he is simply rolled aside and he is allowed to come to. In almost every case the men have been a little roughly handled. They were rolled aside rudely, so that water was expelled. A man suffers tremendously, there is no doubt about it. His sufferings must be that of a man who is drowning, but cannot drown. ... I did not stop it, because I had no right to.... Major Geary was about sixty yards away. --Lieutenant Grover Flint; S. Doc. 331, 57 Congressional 1 Session (1903), page 1767-1768

FBM wrote:

Yeah, I'm guilty of the armchair general bit, but I'm not down with either the nuclear part or the gung-ho part.

War should always be an absolute last resort.

I wonder how the slaves of communism woud feel about that ?

FBM wrote:

Yeah, I'm guilty of the armchair general bit, but I'm not down with either the nuclear part or the gung-ho part. War should always be an absolute last resort.

Agreed, but that is a far cry from the position so often taken that it should never be a resort.

There is also no shortage of armchair pacifists who in effect rule out war as a last resort by insisting on attempting failed first second and third resorts ad infinitum or including surrender as the penultimate resort.

Sending a foreign army into a country to "liberate" it's people just does not work.

Is it your aim to make up for quality by sheer volume ?

This is probably nothing, but the military air traffic has been non-stop all day. (I live/work under a military flight path.) It's probably just troops returning to their bases at the end of this latest firing exercise. Nothing unusual in the local news.

DECEMBER 8, 2010 12:00 A.M.
Save the North Koreans!

The U.S. must undermine this barbarous regime.

If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so?

In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question:

Quote:

If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire?

Quote:

The answers are too obvious, the questions merely rhetorical. And therein lies a very great irony. At long last a genuine spirit of transnational benevolence has arisen, fulfilling the highest hopes of the rare pioneering globalists of the 19th century and before. No longer does this disinterested benevolence abruptly stop at the boundaries of state, nation or culture. Instead it now encompasses all of life both animal and vegetal across the entire globe, with only one exception: Homo sapiens.

Luttwak overstated how good animals have it, alas. But his point was well taken. And to America’s credit, it wasn’t long after Luttwak’s essay that the United States and NATO (but not the United Nations) finally did something to curb the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia.

But that’s probably little solace to the people of North Korea.

The West ultimately intervened in the Balkans for several reasons. The slaughter was in “Europe’s backyard,” and images of sunken eyes peering from emaciated souls kept in concentration camps on European soil couldn’t be ignored. The memory of World War II and the Holocaust crept into every debate. Moreover, the violence and cruelty emerged fairly suddenly, making it “news” instead of the status quo. No one could deceitfully claim — as President Clinton would in the case of the Rwandan genocide — that we didn’t know what was going on. And, perhaps most important, ending the aggression was relatively cheap and easy. The U.S. sent no ground troops and suffered “only” one American life lost in combat.

None of that applies to North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom’s regime has kept images of concentration camps and mass starvation limited. The gulag archipelago of political prisons doesn’t get much airtime, nor do the women forced into having abortions or, in some instances, compelled to deliver their babies only to watch them be suffocated because they contain “impure” Chinese blood. You see, the North Koreans contend they are the “master race” and have strict eugenic laws against what they see as race-mixing.

And yet, North Korea’s plight is not news. It’s been the status quo for two generations. Everyone knows that it is an anachronistic, totalitarian police state, but the spirit of “never again” finds little purchase in the Western conscience. Indeed, with the exception of some heroic human-rights organizations, such as the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the debate is defined almost entirely by what some call “realism.” If North Korea could be trusted to abandon its nuclear ambitions and mischief — an absolute impossibility — one gets the sense that vast swaths of the foreign-policy establishment would be happy to call it a day.

After all, America, we are told again and again, is overextended. And we all know that the concept of regime change — the only conceivable remedy for North Korea’s plight — is out of favor.

The simple truth: Deterrence works. The madmen running North Korea have made it clear that they will at least try to drown the peninsula in blood if their rule is threatened.

Stopping Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program is rightly a priority because of the threat it poses to the U.S. and our allies. But it should also be a priority because, if we don’t, the regime may stagger on for another half-century of barbarous cruelty.

Eventually this dynasty of misery will end and North Koreans, starved, stunted, and beaten, will crawl back into the light of civilization. My hunch is that it will not be easy to meet their gaze, nor history’s. No one will be able to claim they didn’t know what was happening, and very few of us will be able to say we did anything at all to help.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

But this sort of neo-con blather is simply another smoke screen designed to put a smiley face on the congenital imperialistic cravings of the greatest criminal nation of all time - the USA!

Un-indicted war criminal and U.S. Air Force commander in Korea, General Curtis LeMay concurred with this observation, boasting that U.S. warplanes "killed off 20 percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure."