How can the US stand idly by when this kind of thing goes down in the backyards of their biggest debt holder and one of its strongest idealogical allies, yet preach from the pulpit when it comes to the Middle-East?
Surely it cannot all be about resources / oil, otherwise Siberia would be the new frontier. No? So what is it then? Are the US indeed fretful of confronting the Korea issue? Are they so in debt to China now that they’re effectively Sino lapdogs? I mean, from the information proffered in the link, the NK army are hardly spoiling for a fight!
So given the storms in tea cups that almost brought the world to a nuclear head during the Cold War, how can the incongruity of Communist NK, in all its archaic and inhuman intricacies, being permitted to exist be reconciled today? :dubious:
N. Korea has had the ability to level Seoul, a major city of something like 11 million people, with artillary (and now maybe nukes) before we could do much about it. Plus any subsequent invasion would probably kill another couple millions of the N. Koreans we’re supposedly trying to help. You don’t really need silly theories about China and debt to explain the US and S. Korea’s entirely rational reluctance to provoke a military conflict with N. Korea.
Plus, as Mace said, its not like we’ve ever claimed to be committed to intervening in every place that has large starving populations, so I’m not really sure how we’re hypocrites, regardless of what we do. We haven’t rolled tanks into Bangladesh or Chad either, despite the fact that they have large malnourishment problems and unlike N. Korea, a pretty limited ability to retaliate.
So letting millions per annum ‘attrite’ to death is a more humane solution? …Or more strategic? What do you think will happen anyway if starvation does indeed infiltrate the NK military; they’ll just keep quietly genuflecting to the ‘dear hand’ that doesn’t even feed them anymore?
This is how wars start.
Nothing “silly” about US$900,000,000,000, by my estimates… especially in the US’ current economic shituation.
Indeed… or Burma or Tibet or sailed into the Sengkaku Islands (despite China’s obvious ‘soft push’ into the Asia-Pacific with their brand-spanking-new ex Soviet carrier and, admittedly rudimentary, stealth fighter… *ehem *).
The US has sent huge amounts of food aid to North Korea in the past. Right now there is an impasse because the North Koreans won’t allow any international monitoring of where more food aid would go.
On a side note, I find more and more often that when person A accuses person B of being a hypocrite, person A often doesn’t understand either person B or the issue very well.
Would you sacrifice New York or LA to stop starvation in N. Korea? Those cities are far less central to the US then Seoul is to S. Korea. So yes, I think its better to let N. Koreans starve then to have Seoul be obliterated.
There’s something silly about proposing it as a mechanism for preventing the US from intervening in N. Korea when its not at all clear how such a mechanism would work, while at the same time there’s a clear reason we haven’t invaded N. Korea. Plus, our debt to China has only grown in the last decade or two, while N. Koreans have been starving and we’ve been not invading them for considerably longer, and N. Korean artillary has been aimed at Seoul for the entire time period in question.
Non of those military interventions were undertaken to alieviate starvation of the populace, and only one was even done for a primarily humanitarian purpose.
Or is the OP suggesting that the United States invade every place in the world where something bad is happening? Because I can foresee problems with that policy.
Old quote, one is tragedy and millions are a statistic.
Its gotten to the point that invading would kill about as many as if we left the joint alone. At least this way, all the dying are North Koreans. I dont see a purpose in commiting western forces beyond treaty requirements.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing… blah blah.
Hey. It’s kinda worked so far, no?
Says who? Is there a military assessment you could link that analyses what cost, human and material, a possible ‘NK liberation’ would entail…?
I mean, if the US are so dead against twirling their ‘world police’ truncheon in NK’s recalcitrant face, surely their must be some statistical foundation for this apprehension…
Here is a non-partisan estimate of what war with North Korea would likely mean. Scroll about 2/3rds of the way down, an you will see estimates of one million deaths, not to mention huge damage to Seoul and North Korean cities. I’ve seen other estimates that war could mean 100,000 casualties in the first day, due to the Norks having 13,000 artillery pieces within range of Seoul.
So…you think we DO have an obligation to invade each and every substandard country? And you think the military actions we’ve participated in recently–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya–have worked out fairly well?
In actual fact, they haven’t gone that well.
You’re the one pissing your pants with fear over China’s second-hand carrier that they literally bought as scrap from the Russians, and you think this non-functional carrier is a deadly threat to the United States. And so your advice on how to deal with this threat is to invade North Korea? Is this correct? And you somehow believe that the only reason we won’t invade North Korea is because we owe the Chinese a lot of money?
Ever hear the expression, “If you owe the bank a thousand dollars and can’t pay, you have a serious problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars and can’t pay, the bank has a serious problem.” If we owed China a gazillion dollars, wouldn’t a war against China be a good way of cancelling that debt?
a) This is an 8+ years old precis based on the ruminations of some ‘secret source’, not some definitive, up-to-date study, taking into considerations such elements as drone technology.
b) You cannot hope Communists will just ‘give up’ their power and turn democratic on accounts of a rice shortage sometime in the future – they’ll starve every living North Korean to death before that happens. Then you will have a ‘zero-sum game’ on your hands. Communism is a disease that must be excised if reform there is to ever be achieved. Russia would still be Soviet if they didn’t collapse under the weight of their own military spending and the democratization of its neighbouring Pinkos; a role I don’t see a prosperous China taking the lead on in the foreseeable future.
c) 2,000,000 innocents from famine every couple of years and who knows how many in the interim, plus the Gulags and executions Vs tucking the South’s denizens in bomb shelters, expunging the military root of the problem and subsequently profiting from the post-war reconstruction contracts the US will certainly get first dibs on. (Sound familiar?)
d) How long do you let China prop up the Jong Ills? They’ll be pan-handling for handouts in a matter of months again, if this new information is credible, and what then – just keep turning a blind eye and continue blissfully importing cheap shit from our soon-to-be Sino overlords; who themselves are effectively as guilty as the Dear Leader himself is? Charming.
e) How soon is now? If the hermits do in fact have the capabilities to rain wormwood upon Seoul, by 2003 estimates, what would they have today? I mean, Iran are known ordnance suppliers to 'em and the longer you leave it, logically, the more they’ll amass – the article cited confirms as much. Moreover, the more economic sanctions back them into the corner, the more pressure there is for them to lash out unpredictably. And what of China and its not-so-surreptitious ambitions in the region, with their burgeoning carrier and stealth armadas? Wouldn’t it be better to do this on ‘our’ terms while we still have the relative wherewithal to do so?
Didn’t you always say it was better to draw first blood, John. :dubious:
I think it’s been touched on in these forums, by myself and others, that it’s not the direct threat of China that’s the issue to the US; it’s the indirect one from the elbow room they’re making in the Asia-Pacific.
I mean, do you really think the US can cross its arms, circa 1939 style, and pull a “I know nusing… nusing!”? Do they even teach history at Kipp Academy?! :dubious:
I know they say ‘Yanks cannot see past their noses’, but come on… :smack:
With great power comes the responsibility. You wanna fly the star-spangle and preach sermons of democracy and freedom? Then walk the walk… and not only when there are oil wells to be syphoned. Burma would be a nice warm up, conveniently enough… if you’re feeling a little antsy about rushing in and taking on the Jong Ill heavyweights!
So the answer to your question is, yes – the US do have a tacit obligation to ensure the world stays stable and we don’t go down the path of the first half of the twentieth century. As much critique as I have of the US, I still share its fundamental ideology and would much rather see ‘them’ as the hegemonists of the future than the Communists; some of which who are clearly deranged, others, irredentists with scores to settle.
It is far, far more humane than precipitating a war that will result in the deaths of many more millions, which will certainly happen once North Korea starts its bombardment/invasion of South Korea. It sucks that there are do many people dying, it really does, but doubling or tripling the eventual death toll isn’t the right or humane thing to do under any circumstances.
I thought this would be another thread about how we’re obligated to give the NK regime food that it will then use to feed only its troops and it’s elite political supporters, which would have been silly. Instead it’s evidently even sillier.
