I’m with spanna.
US: ‘You are an evil person, you and Iraq and Iran and we are going to whup your ass. After Iraq and Iran.’
NK: Oh yeah? Err… well we… (clinckety, clonck) have the… (hammer, bash-bash) means to fight back. So don’t you dare threaten us!
US: ‘See!!’ ‘They’re an agressive and dangerous lot.’
How about a group defined as anyone, or anyone in the family of, or anyone who is a descendant of someone that had a negative thought about the Worker’s Party, Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, or tuned in to a foreign broadcast, or was randomly accused of treason or espianoge becuase they didn’t bribe the local army chief with enough food?
If that’s not a group, I don’t know what is.
I also think a surgical strike would not precipitate an all-out war. NK isn’t dumb, and realizes it will not survive if it attacks another nation.
In theory, since we have the world’s biggest navy as well as its most sophisticated army, we could invade North Korea from three fronts at once: The west coast, the east coast, and the DMZ. With or without South Korean support, we could win. The butcher’s bill would be much higher than it was in Iraq, but we could win.
But how can we invade North Korea without provoking China? Does anybody have any ideas? How would China react?
Sorry for all the posts. I have read a lot about North Korea, and am very interested in the subject, thus the postings.
China is not interested in having a nuclear neighbor. They aren’t even interested in having a limited capitalist zone in North Korea. They arrested the appointed governor of the Sinuju zone before he ever made it to N. Korea.
One of the Chinese students at my school puts it best - China is an egg. The Chinese communist party is the shell, and the people are the unhatched chick. Whenever the government gets out of control, the chick will break through the shell.
That is not a distinct group, seth. That is the entire population. And no, they are not dumb. Kim is, however, spider-monkey howling in the brain gibbering third stage syphillitic in-god-be-cursed-sane.
This presents a certain problem with diplomatic efforts. Or military ones. Luckily, given time, this problem will solve itself, provided we keep funding away.
Unfortunately, many, many, many people are going to starve and die. This is not good. As far as China goes… China Guy? China’s been real quiet recently… they’ve got a lot of domestic issues, both political and medical… but I still doubt they’d be pleased in us turning NK into a little country for us to run. Which is, like Afghanistan and Iraq, what we’d have to do in order to rebuild it. Which means we really have to let China take the lead here.
Al Qaeda may be, but the “bomber squad” of 19 or so airline pilot/hijackers are very dead. Suicide even. And that’s my point – not even the sure-suicide prevented them from doing a drastic act.
The analogy with North K is, if they did an attack on the U.S., it might be country-suicide, but knowing that might not prevent them from attempting it.
To extend the analogy further: a strongly-held belief can be a powerful driving force behind irrational acts. In the Al Qaeda case, it was probably Islamic ideology; in the NK case, it would be a charismatic leader who is worshipped in a god-like sense.
What is needed is an assassination.
Many people will begin shrieking at me, but so what?
What is one man’s life, in the face of war, fammine, illness (remember SARS? AIDS? North Korea denies so much as one single case of either), & the suffering of millions?
What of the citizens of Japan? An unknown number have been kidnapped. Millions more are threatened by atomic attack.
How many more must die, before we do what should be done, what should have been done long ago?
It’s certainly a thought, Bosda. From a certain perspective, an attractive one, too. But… does anyone know who’ll follow Kim?
Hey, what happened to those S.K. Students who kept demonstrating to reunite with North Korea, anyhow?
Anyhow, it’s attractive, except for the problem where it’s just a tiny bit hard to pull off with a hundred percent certainty. And the “Okay, what next?” issue.
To be afraid of North Korea is like being afraid of acid rain, or the ozone hole, or a frankenstein movie. North Korea is a little bitty country that South Korea should have taken care of of years ago.
The only option that Crazy Kim has is to frighten the timid of the world into concessions, you know, like Saddam frightened the henny-penny doom criers until George W Bush came along.
Crazy Kim is a basket case. When his daddy was alive he kidnapped two expatriates who were living in Japan and brought them back to North Korea and put them in charge of his cultural program under threat of death. Kim loved the theater. But it takes pretty good theater to make people forget their hunger.
All of Noth Korea is a slave camp that in contrast makes Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a land of milk and honey. May God bess the wretched people of North Koera and may God forgive those who look the other way.
You’d be crazy not to fear NK. That situation is so much more dangerous than the one in Iraq was. NK is desperately poor, but has one the biggest armies, has tested nukes, and can manufacture or buy some impressive misslie delivery systems. The world, and especially that region, would be a far better, more stable place w/o NK.
However, believing that NK could invade SK and get away with it is ridiculous. It might be bloody, but the US would never let that stand.
I think Kim Jong-Il is at some pains to cultivate the world’s impression that he is nuts. Whether or not he really is is almost beside the point. He has made himself unpredictable in order to take the edge in brinksmanship, and now nobody can trust him to do the right thing even if he wants to.
I wonder most about his generals. Even if he is crazy enough to start a nuclear war, is he surrounded by enough other crazies to let him get close enough to really do it? I remember what happened to Khrushchev after the Cuban missile crisis. The Russkis were theoretically committed to world domination and the glorious victory of the proletariat and all that, but when we actually got close to missile launches, they got rid of the guy who created the danger. Rather quickly.
The worst NK can do at present is nuke South Korea. They are working on creating a missile that can hit the US, but given their level of technology, I wouldn’t bet on it any time soon. If they actually nuked anyone, or gave serious reason to believe they were about to, I suspect the world pressure to turn everything above the DMZ into radioactive glass would be overwhelming.
Religious nutcases are a different breed. They think God will reward them in the afterlife with seventy-two virgins or whatever it is, and so you can get the dumber ones to be suicide bombers, or even a bunch of them to crash planes into buildings, or even (God forbid) start a nuclear war in hopes of everyone waking up in heaven. But who the hell is going to die for the Glorious Leader of the People’s Revolution? What good does it do? So everyone can eat bark in a famine like the NK does?
He isn’t bluffing, exactly. I think he is experimenting to see how far he can go before the rest of the world reacts badly. The trouble would come if he was forced to go further than he would want to if he had a chance to think about it.
The only real military option Kim has is a bad one - nukes, which amount to almost instant suicide for him and his whole country. An conventional arms invasion of South Korea would not work. So he is trying to get as much as he can by threats.
It seemed that the quick victory in Iraq has toned down the rhetoric from Pyongyang a bit. And postponing disaster is always an advantage.
I agree with those who say this is the world’s problem, not just the US. The UN made so much noise before the Iraq invasion - let’s see what they think would work here.
In the long run, not the short term. This looks like another place where regime change would be appropriate. Then reunite them with South Korea, and the threat goes away, as it did when East and West Germany got back together.
Regards,
Shodan
There are three things that seriously worry me about North Korea. One is that it has a large, powerful army that could easily flatten Seoul with conventional artillery. The second is that the government is certifiably insane. The third is that North Korea has a history of outlandish actions. On top of the kidnapping of Japanese citizens has already been mentioned, there was the Pueblo incident, the axe murders of US soldiers in the DMZ, occasional shootouts with the South Korean Navy, infiltration of commandos into South Korea by midget submarine, and digging tunnels under the DMZ.
In the event of war, we would ‘win,’ but the cost in South Korean lives would be very steep.
I don’t see the US going after NK, because doing so would certainly cause massive destruction in SK, and, if nuclear weapons are involved, fallout in Japan (it’s downwind, most of the time).
I don’t think Kim will start anything, because Kim’s (and everyone around him’s) big motivation is the preservation of, well, Kim. He knows that any overt act of aggression on his part will end with him out of power, one way or another.
If Kim does nothing, I think there will eventually be a coup, sometime after he can no longer afford to feed his army.
His best way out is to engineer a reunification with the South that will include a viable communist party (with him in charge). In order to accomplish this, he needs to bring some things to the table, namely a non-starving populace, nuclear weapons, and a history of having dealt with the US as an equal. The first goes a long way toward cementing his power base within a unified Korea. The second holds the promise of a unified Korea taking its place as a superpower. The third establishes Kim as a legitimate potential leader of this superpower.
That is the game I think he (or whoever’s pulling strings up there) is playing, and I think that’s why the US is stalling and calling it a regional issue. Colin and Co. don’t want to give him #3, basically the only they can deny him unilaterally.
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2003/200306/news06/02.htm#4
Just to get an idea of the state we face today.
Thanks for the link, Spite.
I don’t see how calling North Korea an evil state has harmed our diplomacy any. It’s a long-overdue recognition of reality, in my book.
The hate filled rhetoric on the part of the North Koreans is much worse, as the link above indicates.
Why should we forgive this untrue, self serving tripe spewed by the propaganda organs of the DPRK? To say they’re entitled to say what they want, while we have to show restraint, is incredibly patronizing. It’s like forgiving a small child you don’t expect good behavior from anyway.
North Korea wants to be treated as an international equal - a member of the club. Fine. They can demonstrate their seriousness by not starving the politically problematic peasantry and refraining from selling drugs and weapons like a particularly well-stocked crackhouse. Until then, they are evil and should be called such.
Personally, I can’t imagine anything like this happening. The mainstream government of South Korea would never accept it, and KJI knows that they never would. Quite frankly, he doesn’t really have an out. Though given what we know about his behavior, it wouldn’t be surprising if he had some sort of elaborate escape plan for himself in place already to be used when war starts.
Oddly enough, the South Koreans themselves are not worried. I lived in Seoul and Taejon from 1993 to 1999, and from my conversations with the locals and reading the papers (English-the Korea Times, Korean-mostly the Chosun Ilbo and sometimes the Hangoreyeh Shinmun), the South Koreans overwhelmingly believe that their common heritage and racial ties will block the North from ever invading or nuking Seoul. Heck, President Roh (pronounced “no”) Moo-Hyun himself doubts that the North has a nuclear arsenal..
The South Koreans are much more afraid of the United States than of the North; you can always count on seeing anti-US demonstrations around Kwanghwamun or near Yonsei University.
The link spite provided us reads like a pure NK propaganda blast. This is why you supplied it, right?
What a wonderful, happy, angelic place! Well-fed, well-clothed, well-amused. Makes me proud to be part of the human race. And to think, they are just inches away from being annihilated by the big, bad Imperialists!
Shodan Said:
No, the worst North Korea can do at present is destroy South Korea’s production facilities, including things like the largest shipyards in the world, and drop a nuke or two on Tokyo and a couple of other major industrial cities.
What do you think the result of that would be on the world economy. Can you say depression? Kim Jong Il is sitting right in the middle of some of the biggest industrial/manufacturing areas in the world, and he can trash them all on a whim.
Not to mention the millions of people he could kill.
I don’t know what to do about North Korea. It looks like a stalemate to me. I think the Bush administration is handling it about as well as can be expected. Which isn’t very. But what are you going to do? The people who say the U.S. should cave in and hold bilateral talks are giving in to blackmail. That’s the best way to ensure there is even more of it in the future.
The only lesson I can take out of this so far is, don’t let any other countries become another North Korea.
Y’know, am I the only one unimpressed with the threats of North Korea? Honestly, they ranted for a while, then apparently started to realize it wasn’t working, and Bush basically ignored them. Their threats got them nowhere, and they aren’t really cooperating, but they certainly haven’t done anything actually rash. They talk a good game, but they are pretty weak, and they know it. Hell, even China dislikes them.