Would the US invade?
Nope. Too close to China.
Didn’t we sort of already?
So lets assume that the Korean peninsula is an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
The President would be itchin’ to, at the very least.
If they had oil, they’d have an export and probably wouldn’t need to do all the nuclear posturing.
It does. Not a huge amount, but a bit.
Nope, not if they have nukes. Same reason Iran wants them.
One of the reasons why NK is messing with Nuclear is because the USA used to sell it cheap oil, then they stopped it.
The similarities to Japan are alarming
Personally I would just leave them alone
- at present, my guess is that they feel cornered …
Mexico has oil. Canada has oil. Why haven’t we invaded them?
Heck, back in 1991, we COULD have taken Iraq, and didn’t. If oil is the only driving force behind U.S. policy, why didn’t we conquer Iraq and take its oil then?
Because we lack the non-oil incentives to invade them, such as a strategic location and domination by non-white non-Christians. As well, both have much more powerful US lobbies than Iraq. That puts them far down the list, although I’m sure we would invade them for oil if we needed to.
Because for all his other faults, Bush I was not a gibbering idiot like his son. Like anyone with two brain cells to rub together, he forsaw something like the present disaster would occur, and refrained from sticking America’s collective hand in the meat grinder.
Are you talking about the fuel oil that the US taxpayers paid for that was shipped to North Korea for a total of about 5 years in the late 1990s? You are aware of exactly why those shipments stopped, aren’t you?
That sounds like it.
The version I heard was that the Nuclear fuss was in reaction to the oil being stopped - I would be interested to hear other variations.
You’ve got it exactly backward.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/14/nkorea.fuel.oil/index.html
Dateline, November 14, 2002:
The North Koreans boasted in talks with the US in early October 2002 that they had restarted their uranium enrichment program in direct violation of the 1994 agreement: free energy for no nukes. Five weeks later, the US delivered its last shipment of free oil for North Korea. The clean nuclear power plants being paid for by South Korea and Japan were also put on indefinate hold.
Didn’t you get the memo? According to the ignorant bigoted hordes who worship Bush and Jaysus, Mexican Catholics are close enough on both counts. :rolleyes:
As I said, they have a powerful lobby. Otherwise, I expect we’d “discover” that they were a hotbed of terrorism and invade. Plus, of course, we are fortunately bogged down in Iraq.
Do you know what a “just so” story is? If not, that’s one.
Do you know what it means ? A “Just so” story is an attempt to explain something that has occured/exists with an unfalsifiable story, like, oh, God and Creation. It’s not a speculation about hypothetical alternate realities, especially not one as straighforward as "they would do in Mexico exactly what they did in Iraq.
Explain please?
IIRC we cut off Japan from it’s oil supply, and that lead Japan into deciding that they needed to use force to get us out of their way, leading to Pearl Harbor, etc.