You all have heard about Otto dying, who knows what they did to him to render him a vegetable, but this kind of thing often happens there.
Labor camps, torture, murder, hostages. How many DECADES of that is tolerable to allow continue in the world?
It’s literally like seeing The South be successful seceding from the union, and persisted for another century or more with a slave state.
Would it not be just and right to just go in guns blazing and remove the regime? Too many deaths? There would likely be hundreds of thousands of lives lost, if not millions. Seoul would be targeted and many would die there. Is that a reason to let a slave state persist for decades on your doorstep?
The bloodiest American war, by FAR, was the civil war, we did not lose ~5k soldiers like Iraq, or tens of thousands like Vietnam or the Korean War, we lost over HALF a MILLION Americans in that war. Was that worth it? Knowing the loss of life? If you had a magic wand that would have spared us the war, at the low price of another century of slavery and misery in a separate southern nation, would you do it?
At what point do we just say fuck it, no more? You vile men, evil men, who would sit atop an enslaved nation for your own benefit, now it’s time to be removed, or Die.
What happened in Japan? Did the Japanese fight to the last man? No, the emperor, unlike many in the middle east, was not a DEATH cultist and wanted his people to survive and thrive. He called for his countrymen to stand down, over the objections of some in his government. There did not exist different ethnic religious factions of the same type that Iraq had, kurds, arabs, sunni, shia, yazidis, minority christians. Centuries old blood feuds.
Would Removing the North Korean regime REALLY produce that kind of conflict? Are the North Koreans like the Iraqi population?
This is one of those blind spots of the anti war always and forever crowd. Vietnam was a mistake, Iraq was a mistake, lesson = do not intervene in other countries, do not engage in optional wars. What about the Korean war? What was the result of that? We have an EXAMPLE of what a unified Korea could have looked like in the North, that was a semi successful intervention, South Korea is a prosperous and thriving nation. Is it SO terrible to try to get to that state via war? What if war is the price to get on the path to that place for N Korea? Don’t bother because “WAR = BAD?”
On that I agree, but if they did decide they had enough, I would be fully behind having the US military assist them to full effect. I sometimes wonder if the people who are intrinsically against optional wars would want to wash their hands of that as well.
If the International Community* were to intervene in one place in the world today, it should be Syria. As bad as NK is, Syria is worse. Not that I recommend intervention, but if that could work, I’d vote for Syria. If only that Humpty Dumpty could be put back together again, even under Assad, it would be a miracle.
*Not the US. We’ve done enough stupid things by ourselves
It is absolutely impossible that Syria could have a stable government under Assad, as long as Assad’s regime continues the war will continue. It is also impossible that Syria could have a stable government under ISIS, because obviously. It is also impossible for the so-called “moderate rebels” to defeat Assad or ISIS. It is also extremely unlikely that ISIS could defeat Assad, due to the support of his patrons, Russia and Iran. Assad isn’t going to be dislodged any time soon, but meanwhile he is so weak that half his country is under rebel control.
So there is absolutely no hope of the Syrian civil war ending any time soon.
Are you high? You are seriously comparing the Imperial Japanese Army favorably to “many in the middle east” when it comes to a cult of death? You are aware of how miniscule the numbers of Japanese prisoners were taken, right? And that the masses of soldiers of the Iraqi Army couldn’t surrender fast enough? I won’t even try to educate you on the atrocities committed by the IJA in wars that Hirohito was perfectly fine with Japan starting, or your lack of understanding of the role of the emperor in the Japanese government.
So regime change in North Korea would be like how easy regime change in Japan was (which for some inexplicable reason you think was easy) because - why exactly? They’re both Asian countries so they must be the same? Gotcha.
Tell you what, I think the North Korean government must go too, so I’d like to volunteer you to go over there and die so I won’t have to hear about North Korea anymore. You’re okay with that, right?
North Korea would probably be more difficult than South Korea because of the brain washing, but I still suspect it would be an easier unification compared to trying to get sunni/shia/religious minorities in Iraq to get along, on top of the ethnic arabs and kurdish population. The asians are not the same, but it’s not as fractured as Iraq was. And look, North and South Korea were basically the same people not too long ago, this separation does not go back for literally centuries.
So many non-sequiturs, so little time. And not by someone who just registered!
To paraphrase someone else: you don’t just walk in and change the regime in North Korea. They have huge batteries of conventional artillery trained on Seoul (the South Korean capital, population 10 million, located a few miles from the border) and a huge army poised to rush as far as they can get into South Korea, and no-one knows how small a provocation it would take to set all that going. No-one knows how the population would react to an attempted decapitation of the regime, due not only to propaganda but to the fact that conditions there have actually improved recently. Perhaps their nukes are far enough along that they could drop a couple on Japan.
A few stupid foreigners (stupid because they went there in he first place) run afoul of the NK government, and you think (using the word advisedly) that that is enough to justify a military effort that is likely to cost millions of lives. Have I got that right? Just so you don’t have to “hear about” North Korea any more?
I suggest earplugs. I also suggest you are either trolling us or you are a moron.
I’m not an expert in North Korea, but I did go through a North Korea phase a few years ago and read every book I could find on their history, culture, and current regime. My take on why nobody nukes them from space is that nobody wants to deal with the aftermath.
Let’s say we snap our fingers and the entire NK government is gone. Now South Korea and whoever they can convince to help are left with ~25M North Koreans. These folkds don’t know how to function in the modern world or in a democracy; the little education they may have had is filled with lies; they and their parents and their grandparents grew up in a world filled with propaganda and miscommunication. Most can’t hold jobs. Most are largely broken. We have enough refugees from North Korea who have made their way to South Korea/China/etc to teach us the realities of that situation.
So what does the world do with these people? Certainly the right thing to do would be to save them, but it’s a big, expensive, complex, and difficult problem. I don’t think any country wants to take that on right now, and won’t unless the threat from Pyongyang gets much worse. Taking the government out is a simple problem compared with dealing with what comes next.
I have heard (not sure how factual this is) that years of famine in North Korea has led to a population that is significantly damaged both intellectually and physically.
As a compassionate human being, I would also like to see North Korea emerge from autocracy and privation. However, our recent performance in this area has left a bit to be desired. Last week the Trump admin announced we’re sending 4000 more troops to Afghanistan. We’ve been liberating them for going on 16 years now. Iraq hasn’t exactly been an unqualified success either. Plus, North Korea has nukes, and no one in their right mind would invade a country known to have and be ready to use WMDs.
I’m not opposed to all wars forever. I might support regime change in the DPRK. Show me a plan that doesn’t start with the ever-popular “bomb them to the stone age” and I guess I’ll see what I think of it.
I don’t know…lets ask our ally Qatar who gave Hilary 1 million, who Trump is going to sell arms, who will host a fucking World Cup in winter and has ‘legal slavery.’
Advocates of war with North Korea should be aware we already did “bomb them [in]to the stone age” once before. Americans choose to gloss over this, but a reliable source, statistician Matthew White, believes America killed about TWO MILLION PEOPLE in our bombing campaign in the Korean War, most of them “civilians,” if that term has meaning. That’s exclusive of combat casualties on the front line.
Do you [the generic you, not the person I quoted] think it helped?
If there was a time for the United States to make the reckless decision to obliterate North Korea in a preventative war, it probably would have been sometime in the 1990s when communism was collapsing and China was still not really powerful enough to matter much. But let me be clear – there’s never been a convenient time to deal with North Korea. They’ve always had the capacity to make a war messy, and they’re going to try to make it messier.
It’s pretty telling how Trump came charging out of the gate to say that the era of strategic patience is over. Well I don’t hear a lot about that now. If anything the last few months have shown a pretty profound level of fecklessness in Asia that probably emboldens Kim Jung Un even more.