North Koreans are indeed more aware of what is going on in the outside world than the outside world gives them credit for. Indeed, it is apparently common knowledge in the North that the South is far more affluent, etc.
Many North Koreans don’t genuinely hate the USA.
Nevertheless, if push came to shove, North Koreans would fight, and fight hard. They would be no pushovers, no slouches. Sure, technology-wise they’d be slaughtered en masse, but psychologically they’d be tough to the bone.
The three things may seem mutually contradictory, but people are contradictory beings.
I think you vastly overestimate our ability to destroy embedded artillery where they’ve had 40 years to harden the area. The simple truth is that no matter how much we throw at them, millions of South Koreans are going to die. Yes, we’d wipe out the NK regime but it wouldn’t be instantaneous and lots of people would be killed before the danger was neutralized.
They grow up learning that no one is to be trusted, and the only way to get ahead is to look out for themselves. Now, between the fake news told about us by their own government and the real news about us they get smatterings of, why the hell would anyone assume they would believe anything we say, let alone embrace us?
A comparatively easy task when dealing with a military much weaker than our own.
[QUOTE=Stringbean]
and installing a democracy
[/quote]
Oh right, that part. The notoriously-difficult-to-the-point-of-repeated-catastrophic-failure part.
[QUOTE=Stringbean]
doesn’t do us harm.
[/quote]
Well, it might not do us harm image-wise or interests-wise if we could ever, you know, get it to actually work. There is no reason to suppose we’d be any more successful at such a quixotic program in North Korea than we’ve been in Iraq or Afghanistan (or Vietnam before them).
And if we’re talking moral standing, I think the salient question is not how much harm such an attempt would do to us, but how much it would do to the people of North Korea. Taking out a tyrannical leader and leaving a nation (and many of their neighbors) in a state of chaotic endemic bloodshed is not much of a moral accomplishment (which you think we’d have figured out the first few times we tried it).
[QUOTE=Stringbean]
Call me naive I suppose
[/QUOTE]
You suppose correctly, for a change. You are indeed appallingly naive about realistic prospects for the outcome of attempting to reshape another country’s entire system of government via military aggression.
While Otto Warmbier’s harsh treatment and untimely death are a tragedy, and the North Korean regime is unspeakably and barbarically despotic, none of that is a legitimate casus belli for violently overthrowing another nation’s government.
Probably true, but one of the lessons from WW2 which came out of how we treated POWs (compared to how the Russians or Axis did) was,
If you treat them humanely they will be forced to question all the propaganda they were told about US being the monsters. In fact after WW2 many German POWs chose to stay here and became citizens.
Not just prisoners, either. You could add the entire population of occupied West Germany, especially West Berlin during and after the Airlift, to that assessment.
I was unaware the Saddam had nuclear weapons. Perhaps you should take this information to Fox News I am sure that after all these years they would be interested to know that he did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.
Would they? The Iraqi army didn’t fight to the death, either under Saddam Hussein or under the provincial government. They gave up en masse against the US and against ISIS.
I don’t understand the psychology of soldiers, but I don’t think NK has very good military training. They don’t have western levels at least, and I don’t know how the soldiers would react to a true war. Would a bunch of starving soldiers who know they are fighting a losing war to defend an evil government really fight to the death? Who knows. But just because the government is brutal doesn’t mean soldiers will obey it in an all out war. That didn’t work in Iraq.
Then again, Iraq had issues with religious and ethnic sectarianism, that wouldn’t be an issue in North Korea.
Also just because the official Iraqi military lost pretty quick, a lot of veterans ended up joining the insurgency. I don’t know how much that’d be a problem in NK.
Yes, the North Korean soldiers would fight. While they are not as well-trained or even as well-fed as their counterparts in the South, the NK army has one thing going for them: the soldiers are not really aware that their government is evil. Another thing going for them is that, for most of those in the military, their understanding of the US and ROK is what propaganda the NK regime has taught them their entire lives. Consider the civilian casualties during the Battle of Okinawa. While the indigenous population of Okinawa had no love for the IJA, they only knew what they were taught.
Another thing to consider about regime change in NK: What do you think is going to happen to all the prisoners in the life-time concentration camps? My South Korean friends agree with me; the guards will flat-out murder the entire prison population and then either kill themselves or try to “blend in” with the civilian population to avoid the trials the government of re-unified Korea will certainly hold.
Maybe 20 or 30 years ago. But a lot has happened since then.
The great famine of the 1990s made a lot of people lose faith in the state. Plus when China industrialized, a lot of their old technology ended up in North Korea so now the nation is full of DVD players, VHS players, etc. that the Chinese didn’t want. Supposedly a lot of North Koreans have access to western media now, and (as I once read) if they send the military or secret police to confiscate the media, then they just watch it instead.
If half of North Koreans (at least the ones who escaped) were watching foreign DVDs in 2010, the number is likely higher for the general population too as of 2017.
