The greater danger Iraq or North Korea?

And Jerry Falwell set at a table on Donahue in all his Jabba the Hut glory, and in all audacity and arrogrance proclaimed he was going out to buy a Hummer! At least, I think they make them now with lifts...

Blatham,

I don't know how the duplicate post occurred (did I strike a key twice?)and I'm not sure how to delete it. The help section indicated only a moderator can do that. If that is correct would you do so?



I'm not particularly familiar with Oliphant or his reputation. However I did read the piece carefully and my reaction to it is unchanged. The bit about the United States being "isolated from North Korea" was superficial and, in view of the facts of the matter, absurd.

I read a great deal but generally don't give the opinion press more that a very quick scan. It is difficult enough trying to filter out the point of view in the supposedly "factual" reporting of current events. The predigested opinions of pundits facing a thrice weekly three thousand word quota are not often worth the trouble in my view. There are no such pundits of either conservative or liberal stripe whom I would recommend to you.

Perhaps my use of the term " concrete actions" does appear odd to you. I do accept your analogy though.

Moderator is the correct answer, George. You can only delete a post before it is followed by another. If you would like, though, you can edit it to read something like "Deleted by author". Or not; your preference.

I love it New Haven.

New Haven, That's a very interesting scenario, but our hopes of that ever happening is minus 1000 to zero. ;( c.i.

Craven, if North Korea does not want to attack South Korea, why does it attack South Korea? North Korea is constantly sending infiltrators to South Korea. Some of them come by land. Many of them come by sea. Certainly, you read of the North Korean midget sub that washed up on the South Korean coast after disgorging three dozen North Korean commandoes? More commonly, North Korea launches commandoes from mother ships on semi-submerged rafts to infiltrate the South Korean defenses. When I was deployed to Kunsan AB, the ROK troops went down to the beach every morning to check for infiltrators footprints. They would rearrange the pebbles on the beach every morning and check them to see if they were disturbed. If so, they would hunt down the infiltrator who disturbed them and kill him before he could kill any good guys. That is the reality of Korea, Craven.

If North Korea does not want to attack South Korea, why have they dug tunnels under the DMZ wide enough to drive a jeep through? Why do they have their troops configured for attack near the border? Why do they have a full invasion plan, revealed to us by high level defectors?

Asserting that North Korea does not want to attack South Korea is the worst kind of wishful thinking.



Kim Il Sung wants whatever he can get from the outside. He has not established a reputation for being particularly brilliant. They are not interested in making friends outside. Such friends bring nothing but danger for Kim Il Sung's regime. He and his father have fed their people a diet of lies for fifty years about the outside. People from the outside would only bring shocking realization of the magnitude of Kim's lies. That's why he doesn't want any aid workers in North Korea who can speak Korean. Every moderate action that North Korea has done, and there aren't many, has been forced by circumstances.

Kim Il Sung is not tired of the hostilities. He stokes the fire of hostilities to keep control on the inside and to extort concessions from the outside. He wil never stop. As soon as the North Korean people see the success of the outside, particularly of South Korea, his regime will collapse.

Tantor

So? We consume a large portion of the world's bananas, too. We pay for them just like we pay for the oil. If the rest of the world organized themselves to be productive like the US, they would buying oil too. Bananas too.

Tantor

Lightwizard, Iraq attacks the US several times every week in the No Fly Zone. How do you reconcile your "honest feeling" that Iraq would never attack the US with those missiles Iraq fires at our aircraft every week? They have attacked our aircraft about 500 times in the last two years.

The FBI has concluded that Iraq was behind the first attack on the WTC in 1993. One of the participants in the 1993 attack also participated in the Sep 11 attack. Iraq may well have been the sponsor of that attack.

Tantor

Tantor,

I should have written invade. The hostilities you mention are minor and a poor argument.

Let me illustrate why:

If America didn't want to attack China why do we try to infiltrate? (bugged plane etc). Why do we have nuclear plans for them? Blah blah blah.

The above is as poimntless an argument as you made, DPRK's shennanigans do not necessarily equate to the desire to invade. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I do not share your opinion on this.

The endless commando raids are meant to train their special forces and probe for weaknesses in the South Korean defenses. These are preparations for war just as our special forces probing the beaches of Normandy before the invasion were preparations for war. And really, how do you explain away the invasion tunnels?



We don't run commando raids into Red China. We do fly reconnaissance missions, or at least we used to before our satellites improved. We have nuclear defense plans for China because China has nuclear tipped missiles aimed at the US. Their admirals and generals make a point of threatening us with them.

We certainly have no invasion plans for China as North Korea has for South Korea. I have heard of no invasion plan nor have I ever rehearsed such a plan.

Tantor

Tantor,

If I felt threatened (as DPRK has said they feel) I'd keep my military options open. If I were contained so well by a towering power I'd probably want to be pesky and poke at them every now and then. It doesn't mean I'm ready to invade.

We threaten China with our nukes albeit more tactfully. Sure Chinese military men say things like we care more about LA than Taiwan but then we do things like leak nuke plans. It's part of a day's work.

Craven,

May I suggest you reread some of the history of the Korean War with particular emphasis on the behavior and actions of the North Korean government during the almost three years of negotiations that yielded the armistice (as opposed to peace treaty) under which we are still (after almost 50 years) cohabiting.

North Korea invaded the South without either provocation or warning. Their armies were successful until they were outflanked at Inchon after which they crumbled rapidly. As the US led UN forces approached the border with China that country invaded with well over 500,000 men. From that moment on our fight was with the Chinese Army augmented (as we now know) by the Soviet Air Force.

Almost three years of exceedingly frustrating negotiations followed, during which an utterly intransigent North Korean government finally exhausted the patience of even its Soviet and Chinese benefactors. A very clear threat to use nuclear weapons by a then newly elected President Eisenhower in 1953 finally forced the Soviets to rein in their unruly stooges. After the armistice, the Soviet Union rearmed their client state in the North as a key element of the Cold War, however the many contradictions and inhumanities of their totalitarian systems and command economies precluded meaningful economic (and political) development in either state. Indeed North Korea remained the worst political and economic case in a truly awful political and economic empire.

During the ensuing 50 years there has been a near continuous stream of incursions, assaults, kidnappings, assassinations, murders directed against both South Korea and U.S. forces as well. (Tantor has given a good description of some of this.) The stories of many outrages done against Japan are now emerging. To paraphrase a now obsolete Supreme Court formula concerning pornography, North Korea is perhaps the one state in the world that is 'utterly without redeeming social value'.

The key point however is the very clear pattern they have established of truly dangerous bullying behavior towards other nations in pursuit of economic and military advantages which by their own achievements they could never earn. This is the clearly dominant pattern of behavior of this ghastly regime which has so ill-served its unfortunate people. The U.S. attempt to negotiate good behavior on the part of North Korea in 1993 was extraordinarily shortsighted and foolish. There was then and there is now, no basis whatever on wish to expect they will respond to any "reasonable" offer of negotiations with anything but contempt and a renewed determination to raise the ante at the next propitious moment.

We will have either to destroy this regime or isolate it sufficiently so that its inevitable collapse will do as little harm as possible. Efforts to accommodate it in anything are a fool's errand.

doesn'tThe Unspeakable Truth: What Bush Dares Not Say About North Korea

Oh, but we can engage DPRK on the battlefield and win with relatively modest casualties. If you want to avoid war and the inevitable blood cost, then you must make our willingness and capability inescapable to Kim. Norh Korea will only respond to a credible threat of actual force, this has been demonstrated repeatedly over the last fifty years. The best chance of avoiding war is to put UN/US forces on heightened alert, increase force size on the penninsula, get the Marine Division on Okinawa on board ship, stage a joint exercise with the ROK, and deliver an ultimatum to Kim requiring him to shut down his nuclear program and readmit UN inspectors to certify his compliance. Even that might not work, but it is the best option if you want to avoid war. Kim is again testing our Will, and he will not chance open hostilities if he believes we will fight.

I've been unable to find any conclusive and cooberated information that Iraq was behind the 1993 on any FBI or news site. It's natural to suspect them but without proof, there's no case. Obviously, I was talking about the United States on its soil. If Iraq were to develop Nukes, at least small enough devices for a suitcase bomb, it would be possible for Saddam to get it into the hands of terrorists with little or no link to him. Is it difficult to prove? Yes, including any previous connections. However, it's all we've got to go on and not enough reason for a war to tobble a nation. Unless the U.S. has given the information they have about WMD's and where they might be located, we're presently stuck on no evidence there, either. I don't see we have the trigger for the war and the Brits are slowly showing their reticence for a battle. So, those wanting to attack now, put on your armor as you have have to do it alone. BTW, what's happened to Powell not traveling around to the countries we need to form a solid coalition? We need Turkey especially and that's not looking good.

Georgeob is right that the North Koreans have seen our perserverance before in protecting South Korea. I don't believe they've forgotton and now that it could threaten the entire area, it's even more crucial that those countries be involved in convincing the NKR to cease this idiocy.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - An Asian diplomat emerged from one of the many meetings on defusing the North Korean nuclear crisis saying that no one could know what Kim Jong Il wants: a nuclear arsenal or new relationship with the West.

But the real mystery, he said, is here in Washington. "I'd just like to get a handle on what President Bush has in mind," he said. This administration, he said, "sends as many conflicting signals as the North Koreans."
Even many of Mr. Bush's staunchest loyalists concede that the administration's approach to North Korea has been a confusing case study in atomic diplomacy. The White House took 18 months to settle on a strategy that promised real engagement, including eventual security guarantees and normalization of relations that North Korea has craved for years. In the end, the offer was never made because of revelations about North Korea's secret nuclear program.

Then, perhaps hoping that it could avoid a confrontation that would distract from its campaign against Iraq, Mr. Bush never described to North Korea what might happen if it crosses the nuclear "red lines." Though he has often said he will never allow "the world's worst dictators to obtain the world's worst weapons," Mr. Bush has never specifically warned North Korea about how - if at all - he would respond if the country began producing bomb-grade plutonium that could produce half a dozen weapons by summer.

"We ended up with a policy that could best be described as `hostile neglect,' " said one senior administration official who sat, often fuming, as State Department, Pentagon and White House officials replayed old arguments.

This point has a lot of merit, though I think it assumes we have equal reason for doing both. I think Iraq is a far more imminent danger to the US than North Korea. But that's just my opinion.

Read Laurie Mylroie's book, "The War Against America: Saddam Hussein And The World Trade Center Attacks: A Study In Revenge". The FBI concluded internally that Iraq was behind the attacks, largely because the mastermind of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, had a false identity provided by Iraqi intelligence. The FBI agents were frustrated with the Clinton White House, which stopped them from pursuing it any further. Clinton did not want to know anything that might force him into a war. In doing so, he stored up trouble for the future.

Tantor

george,

I have no idea why you feel I should have that information repeated to me. If you'd like to dispute my conclusions feel free to do so but I admit to not having read your post carefully (because I'm tired of people seeing an opinion they don't agree with and suggesting that the one who holds the opinion is ignorant of well known facts).

I know the history, what I don't share with you is your opinion that they need to be destroyed. I find it ludicrous, we'll simply have to agree to disagree on this.