Or, if you have objections to registering with the New York Times, this one: Pressure on North Korea Won’t Work, Says South
The problem with bargaining with NK is the US wouldn’t get anything out of them and the concessions it sends NK might somehow find its way secretly helping a nuclear program or an army they might eventually have to fight. Yes NK might say it is discontinuing its nuclear program but they have already shown that doesn’t mean much. So the question I have is whats better, to fight them while they are developing nukes or to wait untill they have a stockpile of nukes and the missile technology to hit the continental US? And yes I am assuming when they get them they will be making even more demands.
Hey, isn’t this like, a UN problem? Didn’t the U.S. say it would look to the U.N. for a solution? So how about we just wait and see what their bold vision is for solving this crisis?
You guys do trust the U.N. to be able to disarm North Korea, don’t you?
That is a surprising reaction from you, who at least claims to be skeptical of the establishment.
No, I was just trying to point out the blinding hypocrisy of Americans toward North Korea. We are all given our orders to focus on the evil of these madmen of the minute who supposedly pose a dire threat to our security. But this all just serves to divert our attention away from the much worse threat that exists in Washington. In fact, the two are not even comparable in scale: the U.S. national security state has the power to wipe out life on Earth, and has shown a reckless abandon and willingness to kill large numbers of people for the profit of those it represents.
Your problem is that you only look at North Korea, while ignoring the much worse crimes of your own state. But, if you look at both of them, you will see that the threat posed by the U.S. national security state is far greater than that posed by the North Korean regime.
Can you explain why disarming North Korea is the only acceptable option ? I should think that full integration of the economies of North and South Korea would substantially decrease KIM Chong-il’s mad desire to use his nukes on Seoul or Tokyo, much less his desire to build still more bombs. If that’s the path we take, there’s little need for U.N. intervention, and all the U.S. need do is to stop sabotaging the process. We’ll lose out because we won’t have an inside track on development deals, but our “moral compass” will be left shiny and bright. 
Squink: Let me get this straight: You are arguing FOR nuclear proliferation? I thought that ending nuclear proliferation was one of the pet causes of the left? Or does that only apply when Republicans aren’t in power?
Anyone who doesn’t see the danger of Stalinist North Korea having nuclear weapons is blind. It is a brutal dictatorship, and currently has missiles that can go 1200 miles and hit any city in Japan, South Korea, and a number of other countries. And it will have an ICBM in a few years capable of hitting the west coast of the United States.
It looks to me like the left’s answer to U.S. security is to A) cancel all funding for missile defense, and B) allow insane dictators to have nuclear missiles capable of hitting the U.S.
And you wonder why the people have voted Republicans into power.
Chumpsky- according to scholar RJ Rummel, North Korea has killed at least 1.6 million of its own people. Some scholars put the number as high as 2 million. Furthermore, an estimated 2 million may have died from famine, a result of inept government policies. This could mean that 4 million people have been murdered in a nation of less than 26 million.
According to Rummel, the US has murdered about 583,000 people, with a maximum of 1.6 million in its history (roughly North Korea’s minimum).
Draw your own conclusions.
Stop right there! Whenever you use the word “scholar” and the name “RJ Rummel” in the same sentence, you should always include quotes around the word “scholar.” A more appropriate description would be “propagandist,” or perhaps “liar.” Rummel’s use of statistics is highly deceptive, and intended to reach a certain conclusion. What does he mean, for example, when he says that NK has killed 1.6 million of its own people? And, then the figure of only 583,000 killed by the U.S. gets into truly Orwellian territory. In fact, the number is greater by at least a factor of 100.
Not only are you doubting a world renown historian, but you’re also doubting Cecil Adams, who puts his faith in Rummel. Look, I haven’t spent years studying statistics, nor published two books on it like Rummel has, but I will link you to that section of his website.
Maybe Rummel has an agenda. What is that agenda? To expose how many people have been killed by government actions. What’s his conclusion? That democracy is the least deadly form of government, whilst communism is the most deadly. Perhaps this doesn’t fall within your accepted range of propaganda, but Rummel is trusted by numerous institutions- Holocaust scholars, museums, writers, universities, etc. You can take up any discrepencies you may have with the man yourself, via his website, where his e-mail is presumably located.
Allow me to translate:
Rummel has a conclusion: Capitalism is better than communism. This conclusion comes first, then the statistics are manipulated to support this conclusion.
And don’t give me that crap about Rummel being a world renowned historian. Maybe by the folks at Fox News, but not in the actual world.
So basically South Korea should pay for NKs nuclear arsenal, because thats where a lot of the money would go. Thats a mistake the US has made many times. Hey while your at it remove the troops from the border as a gesture of trust.
Well I think you are getting Bush and Americans a little confused. There is a difference between the two.
He was a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize. He received the Susan Strange Award. He has been given grants by the US Peace Research Institute.
Although maybe those are synonymous for Fox News in your little world.
This is true.
I see you have no cites for showing that communism is better?
Nope, I’d just as soon no one had nukes, but that desire is no reason blind oneself to the likelihood that North Korea has been a nuclear power since the late 80’s. That Rubicon has been crossed, and it’s foolish to pretend that it hasn’t, or that we can somehow stuff the nuclear genie back into the bottle with more Cubanesque style sanctions.
Short of invasion, there’s little we can do to get the PRNK to relinquish whatever nukes it has. We can’t even force them to admit that they have them. We may be able to discourage them from producing more bombs, but we also need to be concerned with decreasing the chances that they will use the ones they already possess. Before anyone comes back with a request for proof that the North has nukes, ask yourself if, not knowing, is it safe to base our aggressive containment policy towards the peoples republic on the presumption that they are still non-nuclear ?
In the interests of equal unfairness, can I take this statement to mean that all you right-wingers have a special fondness for nuclear proliferation ? -Nah, that’d be cheap shot too.
Nah, we were against it too. It’s just that we kept being accused of wanting nuclear bombs because we wouldn’t support a unilateral nuclear freeze. Instead, we bargained from a position of strength, much as we’re trying to do now, and managed greater nuclear weapons reductions than any of the Democrats could manage.
Ahh, but now you’re giving the terrorists a better chance of picking up some of those old russian nukes by prematurely cutting the funding for and privatizing USEC. How much good will that do for national security ?
Contrary to much of the rhetoric in this thread, KIM Chong-il is not a North Korean version of Stalin. The situation is fundamentally different. We can’t use the same methods to solve this problem. If we did, we’d have to swallow our pride and form an alliance with Kim in order to squash the Hitler that is Saddam Hussein. :eek: There must be something wrong with our analogies because that makes no sense whatsoever !
Kim is an undercover capitalist. So are the rest of the so called communist regimes. The only difference is when you are a communist the world will excuse whatever you do because they expect it from you. Its because of this situation that people such as Chumpsky blame everything on the US when only half of it is the US’s fault.
The reason capitalism is better then communism is because capitalism is a part of communism. Its not supposed to be but it is and no government would survive without it. Communism would more correctly be compared to democracy and it sucks compared to democracy also.
I didn’t say that Kim Jong-il was Stalin. I said that he presides over a ‘Stalinist’ regime. That’s not my phrase for it - that’s a common description of the North Korean government, and it’s pretty accurate. It’s a Communist state that rules through fear and oppression.
I’ve noticed that some people seem to be unaware of just what kind of country North Korea is. They think it’s just some socialist worker’s paradise like the old Soviet Union - one with rational leaders that we can work with.
North Korea is a hellhole. It is the worst human rights abuser on the planet today. The government currently categorizes over a third of the population as ‘hostile’ and witholds food and support from them. As a result, over a million people have died from starvation in the last five years. And yet, North Korea spends a whopping 30% of its GDP on its military (the U.S. spends about 3%).
Another ‘Stalinist’ feature of North Korea is the widespread use of forced labor camps to detain political undesirable and use them for slave labor. The Gulag Archipelago may be gone, but the Pyongyang Peninsula is going strong. There are over 200,000 people now in these forced labor camps, including children. Needless to say, torture, rape, and execution are the norm, if starvation and disease doesn’t get the slaves first.
There are also thousands of South Koreans, Russians, Japanese, and other foreign citizens being held in slavery inside North Korea.
Now, as for whether we can deal rationally with North Korea, you might want to read up a little on the lunatic running that country. Under his ‘leadership’, North Korea has become to look more like a cult than a government. He claims that the skies shook with thunder and lightning when he was born. He claims that at age four he caused a storm in Japan by smudging a picture of it with ink. He claims he can create a paradise by touching the picture of a ruined place. He has commissioned more than 20,000 plaster busts of himself, and the people wear badges of 20 different ranks, each showing a picture of Kim, to show their social status. He owned 2.5 billion dollars worth of palaces, including an underwater palace. He keeps changing his official title to more and more outlandish ones, much like Michael Jackson changes his face. The country spends 4% of its GDP ‘praising’ Kim Jong-il through parades, statures, and new palaces. The man is a total nutjob.
Here’s a decent overview site with lots of links describing North Korea. I suggest you go read some of those links, and then come back and tell me that you think this is a country the U.S. can deal with safely as it builds up a nuclear stockpile and ICBMs.
North Korea is far more dangerous than Iraq. Until recently, I thought it was containable. Now I’m not sure. If that reactor goes online, he can apparently build 50 nukes a year. You want to leave that problem to your children?
That problem is likely to be left to our children, regardless. NK is the present case, there is no reason to believe it is the last, far from it.
And as to the mental stability of its leader, well, that’s as may be. Perhaps adopting a threatening stance towards a heavily armed paranoid is your idea of an excellent policy. I have my doubts. Grave doubts. And being quoted on 60 Minutes as to his visceral hatred of Kim Jong-Il is the kind of delicate diplomacy that has made Texans so widely beloved.
That said, I think the Powell approach is correct. Sometimes I think he’s the only sane officer on the bridge of the USS Foreign Policy.
Amusing how someone can talk about “red herrings,” yet their response to nuclear proliferation, violation of multiple treaties and protocols, not to mention the most reprehensible human rights violations one will find anywhere on the planet, is to talk ad nauseum about what a bad job the U.S. president is doing.