Perle Calls For Pre-emtive Strike Against N. Korea Nuclear Reactor - WTF?

Great Debates
41

Perle is exactly right that a pre-emptive strike should remain an option. You know, Clinton came VERY close to ordering one in 1994.

Sure, it would be a bad thing. But the alternatives are nothing to write home about, either. And it’s not a given that North Korea WILL respond with an attack against South Korea. Not being privy to all the intelligence, I don’t know what the probability is.

Of course, Kim is going to say that he WILL attack South Korea if the nuclear sites are hit. On the other hand, he also said that sanctions are an act of war, and Japan is stopping North Korean ships as we speak as a form of ‘soft sanction’. It’s hard to tell what is a real threat when a leader is so outrageously over-the-top in his threats as a matter of course.

But what would happen if the reactors are hit - do you really think Kim would self-destruct his country in an attack on South Korea? Or would he gulp and back down? I have no idea.

However, I do know this: The current situation is untenable. Within six months, North Korea will be pumping out weapon’s grade fissionables in enough quantity to make half a dozen bombs a year. Once he has that capability, he may well be truly unstoppable. Hell, he could obliterate Tokyo, and then threaten to do the same to five other major cities unless we capitulate to what are sure to be a series of increasingly expensive and dangerous demands.

This is why the Clinton administration had a red line drawn around those facilities, and Clinton WOULD have bombed them, with the same potential result as a bombing would have today, if NK hadn’t signed that treaty.

But I can see this discussion is going to go down the same road as the Iraq discussion: complain about everything the U.S. does, Bush is evil, blah blah blah. Never any positive suggestions or alternatives offered. Just stony silence until Bush does something, anything, then “HOW DARE HE???”

So, let’s hear it. You anti-Bush geniuses feel free to speak up: What is the proper course of action with North Korea? If you were president, what would YOU do, and what do you think would be the result?

42

We were right about Iraq, though weren’t we? Bush was lying, just like we said he was. Innocent people died for nothing just like we said they would.

You’re awfully cavalier about the lives of South Korean civilians for someone who’s going to safely be watching it on television, thousands of miles away.

I already posted my alternatives…diplomacy, de-escalation of tensions, economic incentives, etc. A bunch of dick-waving posturing solves nothing and kills people.

43

HBby is spot on about the South Korean military. The reason the US needs South Korea onboard for any military action is that should things tank and turn into a full blown war, it isn’t going to be the US Army and Marines driving to Pyongyang with a few token South Koreans along for the ride. The South Korean Army and Marines are going to be the ones providing the vast majority of the ground troops. US forces in South Korea amount to a single division, and the entire US Army currently has IIRC 10 active duty divisions. With commitments elsewhere and the unfeasibility of using the National Guard both for practical and political reasons, getting much more than say 6 or 7 US divisions into South Korea is not possible, and that’s including Marines.

South Korea has a standing force of 21 divisions in the Army and 2 1/2 in the Marines. On mobilization, that will be augmented by 17 reserve divisions and 14 home defense divisions. Total strength on mobilization is well over 1,000,000.

44

I rather liked the Clinton/Carter approach. How is this new sabre rattling moving us in any direction but towards confrontation ? The situation has been deteriorating for two years now, and despite occasional calls by the US for a multi-party solution, no one seems terribly interested in signing up to do it Bush’s way. Perhaps it’s time for the hawks to reconsider whether it would be such a disgrace to offer the people’s republic some slight assurance that we don’t intend to roll over them as we did Iraq.

45

You were RIGHT??? The only thing you MAY have been right about is that the imminent threat from Saddam’s WMDs was exaggerated. But on every other issue, you were dead wrong. There weren’t tens of thousands of casualties. There was no Stalingrad in Baghdad. There is no quagmire. The middle east didn’t erupt in flames. The war didn’t spark a round of terrorism in the U.S. The Iraqi people are ecstatic. A mere 2 months after the war, there is a civilian administrator, solid people in the government, reconstruction is beginning, and the Iraqi people can look forward to a better life than they’ve known since Saddam came to power.

And as for the innocent people dying for NOTHING… That’s obscene. How about those 200 children who came squinting into the daylight after being in a dark prison for years? Was that nothing? How about all those people cheering in the streets? Do you want to tell them that their case was irrelevant? How about all the lives that have been saved? More people would have died under Saddam in the last four months than were killed in the war.

This war was a HUGE net positive for the Iraqi people, and everyone knows it except for the Bush-hating fanatics.

46

Straw men on parade. I never predicted any of that. No one who opposed the war seriously thought there would be a quagmire or “tens of thousands” of casualties. I said that Bush was lying about WMDs and that people would die needlessly on both sides. They did. Bush sent people to die under false pretenses, just as I suspected.

Irrelevant. None of that is a legal causus belli. Furthermore it’s hypocritical. There are plenty of other countries living under despots and we don’t give a shit about them.

Shrubya’s stated justification for the invasion was that Iraq posed an imminent threat via weapons of mass destruction. He was lying. People died. I was right.

47

As long as he stays out of Alsaka. And a few years from now, the western US. SK is in the most immediate danger, but this concerns all of us. While the fact that they have so much to lose means that they have a right to be heard, it also means that what they are saying is more likely to lack the cold rationality that must be a part of this decision making process. If Bush did live in SK, I would question his ability to make the hard decisions that have to be made.

And just what is this line which their lives are literally on?

HBby

No, it just implies that NK has the power to kill them, which is the case. Were the characters in Speed not hostages because the antagonist had no power over them other than to kill them?

So these nuclear bombs that NK is developing: are they special Korean bombs? Do they only successfully detonate if located within the confines of the Korean peninsula? When France surrendered to Germany, should Britain have said “Oh, well, it’s really the French that are the most threatened by the Germans. We should defer to their judgement”?

DtC

You claimed that Iraqis died for nothing. You were challenged on that point (as well as many others). Instead of either defending your statement or acknowledging your error of like a decent person, you simply start throwing up a bunch of other issues to divert attention from the fact that you don’t have a response. As for whether we “give shit” about other countries, you may not, but I do, and I resent you implication that I don’t. And as for you’re statement “I was right”, that’s simply bizarre. The two sentences that precede that are, respectively, a completely unsupported assertion and a blindingly obvious statement that even Sylvia Browne could have predicted.

If the issue of whether Iraqis died for nothing is irrelevant, then why did you bring it up?

48

Warm thanks for your considered reply, HBby. It is always nice to find someone in this forum who doesn’t talk down to others, who answers the question directly without propagating one’s own agenda. That sort of thing. :slight_smile: Thanks again.

NK is a thorny issue, and while I am one who believes War Is Bad, sometimes it’s the best alternative. It would be preferable to solve this problem without any violence, of course, but that’s not terribly likely. At the same time, I don’t think a full hands-off approach would have any kind of beneficial effect. Therefore some kind of compromise between a full attack and a full “reasoning” must occur in order for this to end well.

A further question. I saw a news conference in which George Tenet, after conferring with an aide, confirmed that NK’s missles could reach the West Coast of the U.S.

Is this true? How many missles does he have that could do this? What kind are they - i.e., what kind of damage would they cause? Is this to be considered as a viable threat, in other words?

49

The intelligence on North Korea’s missile programs is at least as good as our intelligence on Saddam’s WMD and WMD programs. From this article:

For more on the missiles, see these threads:
Silly anti-ballistic missile defenses…
Can North Korea launch a nuclear attack on the US
For more reasoned discussion on our policy towards North Korea, see this thread:
North Korea, how do we avoid a war?

50

Still looking for a source, dantheman, but IIRC, they unsuccessfully tested a missile capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaii. And that’s about it.

51

Here’s some data on the test:

http://www.inesap.org/bulletin16/bul16art10.htm

52

What a preposterous set of lies you tell.

No, you didn’t.
“I fear that Hussein, feeling he has nothing to lose, will throw anything and everything he’s got in the way of chemical and bilogical weapons at American soldiers, at Israel and at his own people.” - Posted by Diogenes the Cynic, on 12-26-2002 at 07:38 PM

And I am supposed to believe that it’s Bush who is lying.

There aren’t enough :rolleyes: on the Internet.

Regards,
Shodan

53

It’s their country and that’s the end of it. They have no obligation to surrender their own well-being to whims of some idiot cowboy.

The DMZ.

No I didn’t. I claimed that people died for nothing. That icludes Americans and Brits who who told they were fighting a threat that didn’t exist. They were lied to. They died needlessly.

**
My “challenge” consisted of the puling company line that “Saddam was a really bad guy.” Ok, now give me a legal reason to kill people. So far, that’s none.

Spare me the wounded act. I said “we,” as a country, don’t give a shit, and we don’t. There may be individuals who do but the majority doesn’t and the government sure as hell doesn’t.

BTW, since you care so much, would you be willing to give your life to liberate, say, Liberia? Would you be willing to give your son or your daughter’s life? Would you be willing to risk having your daughter go through what Jessica Lynch (allegedly) went through? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you have no right to support the invasion of Iraq.

Shrub lied about WMDs. There is ample support for that statement. He said he knew, not believed that Iraq had “thousands” of WMDs ready to go. When he said he knew, he lied. I said before the invasion that he was lying about such knowledge. I was right.

I said that people would die under false pretenses. I was right. I don’t care if you think getting rid of Saddam was a good enough reason to send US troops to die. That isn’t why they were told they were dying. They were lied to. If getting rid of Saddam was a good enough reason, then why didn’t they just say that from the beginning? I’ll tell you why, because it wasn’t a good enough reason. It wasn’t even a legal reason.

I said it was irrelevant that some Iraqis were happy about the ousting of Hussein. Pointing at dancing Iraqis or the US orchestrated toppling of the statue for television cameras does not justify the invasion, either legally or morally.

54

Now that you mention the testing of the missles, I seem to remember hearing that they hadn’t been flight tested. So it was mere theoretical conjecture I witnessed in the press conference.

Thanks for the info.

55

You took one of my posts out the context of a much longer discussion made over the course of several threads. I said a few times that I didn’t think Hussein had much in the way of WMDs but that whatever he did have, he would use in the case of an invasion. It turned out that Bush was an even bigger liar than I suspected and Iraq had no WMDs at all.

Also (just to head this off) I also said that even if Iraq did possess WMDs, it was not a causus belli for the US, but merely an issue for the UN.

56

Sam, Dio, Ryan? There are plenty of live Iraq threads around here. Mind moving to one of them, rather than hijacking a thread about North Korea into yet one more Iraq post-mortem?

Link to wherever you decide to go, and I’ll be happy to join that discussion, yet one more time. :smiley:
Now, NK: lordy, what a mess.

Should the USAF have a detailed plan in place for a pre-emptive strike on the Yongbyon reactor? Darn tootin’ it should. (It should probably include missile strikes on as many NK missile launchers and air bases as we can locate, too, so as to minimize their ability to counterstrike against SK and Japan by air.)

*Should the US be prepared to act on the basis of such a plan? * Quite possibly. Whatever damage Kim Jong Il can do to Seoul with conventionally-armed missiles would be trivial to what he could do with nukes. IMHO, there’s a pretty good argument for blowing his nuke program sky-high now if we think we can pull it off.

Should South Korea have veto power over such an attack? Would they be the only ones endangered by North Korean nuclear weapons?

*Do you trust Kim Jong Il, once he has nukes, to only use them if attacked? * No. That boy makes the Unabomber look sane.
During the run-up to Iraq, I kept on asking why we were bothering with Iraq, when there were a number of more serious threats in the world. North Korea topped the list. It still does.

57

If it depends on a conditional (your second sentence), then it’s not “clear” at all. I assume you mean “SK civilians”, but in any case they are already in jeopardy, because once Il has a regular supply of nuclear weapons (and he already has at least a few, no thanks to the “economic incentives” you claim to support), all bets are off. The best case in that scenario would be that South Koreans would be living constantly under threat of being nuked, and we’d be paying ransom money out of our nose; not to get the hostage back, just in the hope that the kidnapper won’t kill them.

Interesting. Have you never played poker? If you carry through enough times you can get away with a big bluff every once in a while. Unless you happen to think the US carried through on every threat it made during the Cold War.

And in any case you’re the one who says they can’t be backed up. Perle’s point in making this speech, in addition to getting the message to NK, is that we’re not taking that option off the table. Conceivably there are scenarios where a strike on Yongbyon would be superior to all other alternatives.

Well I’m glad it has such a worthy endorsement. However, several statements in it contradict statements you’ve made throughout this thread, so it’s not exactly clear what your position is.

58

I understand what you mean. There is a definite and immediate threat to the Republic of Korea. But the way you put it, the U.S. is holding NK hostage also, since we also have the power to kill them.

And you’re also saying that NK poses a threat to the surrounding countries. I think I recall hearing in the news that even China wanted to mediate and host talks between Bush and Kim Jong Il for some resolution. Keep in mind, though, North Korea has not expressed desire over these other lands, but they badly want South Korea under their control. Historically, the Korean culture have not played the role of expanding imperialists.

There is one point that I’ve not heard made: NK and SK have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins on the other side of the border, which makes the whole mess even messier. NK and SK have always wanted one thing and that is to be unified. To them, Koreans are Koreans.

[hijack]
I’ve noticed that people have been calling Kim Jong Il by just “Il” and that’s like calling him by his middle name. In the Korean culture, people go by: Surname-First Name-Middle Name. In the U.S., the name would be “Jong Il Kim.” Or “Mr. Kim.” American friends would call him “Jong.” Most older Koreans have called other Koreans with the formal Mr. or Ms. Surname, even if they’ve known each other for decades. The younger generation and people talking to a subordinate in the family are much less formal. Just an FYI.
[/hijack]

59

Thanks dantheman and SimonX. :slight_smile:

60

My my, how quickly the standards change when you get caught.

I leave it to the rest of the SDMB to determine how plausible it is to claim “I am afraid Saddam will use WMD on our troops and Israel” really means “I am absolutely sure Saddam has no WMD at all”.

Did you have a comment on how nobody really thought there might be tens of thousands of casualties, or is that going down the memory hole too?

As I said, you expect me to believe that Bush is lying, but that you are telling the truth.

[Dr.Evil voice]Riiiiight.[/Dr.Evil voice]

Regards,
Shodan