He did post any situations where the United States was in any danger fgrom Saddam. Granted American troops are, but that’s only because they were placed in harms way.
That he is evil, there is no doubt. A fringe benefit of taking out his regime will be to eliminate some evil, sure.
But oil is why we will take out the Baathists. It is as, if not more, important then clean water (we can make that) to a modern civilization, and our supply of it is of great national interest.
Nothing wrong with that.
Also, you are making the mistake of assuming ‘Danger to America means only danger to the contiguous 48 states and Alaska and Hawaii’. That is not so; Danger to America involves all sorts of stuff, oil being near the top of the list.
Why are you insisting on carrying on with this particular strawman? I honestly do not think you are this ignorant .So insisting that I provide obvious cites only pisses me off. And I will not continue this kind of adolescent discussion. Unless you have something legitimate to debate i’m done.
Curse you reeder, I was going to start a thread on this myself. 
2004 Scenario: Baghdad has fallen! Onward to Pyongyang!
The second Gulf War was remarkably successful. Baghdad fell with only 450 US troop casualties, far below the most optimistic estimates. Fears of a smallpox attack on US cities that could kill up to 500,000 civilians proved unfounded. The attack only killed 1600 Iraqi civilians and 8000 Iraqi conscripts and irregulars.
Entirely separately, 20,000 Iraqis were killed in the subsequent civil war, I mean isolated disturbances.
But that’s over now. General Mustachio has things under control and has even scheduled elections for 2007. So things are going very well.
Still, some strategic thinkers in Washington are worried. The so-called Dear Leader of North Korea has refused to allow international inspectors into his nuclear sites. Something about wanting security guarantees from the US, despite repeated informal chats proposed by the US, then later withdrawn.
Anyway, Dear Leader is a bad guy. He even gassed, I mean starved, his own people!
Question to hawks: What separates Saddam from other tyrants bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction?
One answer: nothing.
My answer:
(A) Nuclear proliferation should be curbed by clever diplomacy, which may involve monetary handouts and (gasp) diplomatic and ideological concessions on the part of the US.
(B) But when that doesn’t work, we should typically fall back on deterrence, which is the promise that if they nuke us, we nuke them.
When does deterrence work best?
Pollock, 2002, numbers added: "…deterrence works best when (1) decision makers are conservative in their goals, (2) avoid taking risky actions, (3) are content with the status quo, (4) have access to high-quality information about their adversary and (5) work within a decision making process that considers a range of possibilities and reaches a decision only after each possibility has been subjected to careful scrutiny.
Now, let’s play comparative tyrant.
Brezhnev
(1) Yes, conservative in his goals.
(2) Yes, (3) Yes, (4) Yes, (5) Yes
Kim Jong-Il
(1) Yes, mostly. Dear Leader wants energy and food for his country, though not enough to undertake peristroika. (2) Um, actually no. Kim takes risks. But his calculated risks so far have all paid off. (3) Yes. (4) Not clear, probably no. (5) Unclear. Perhaps yes. I’m not sure.
Saddam Hussein
(1) No, Saddam wants to be the next Saladin. (2) No, invading Kuwait and Iran were risky. Saddam is a serial miscalculator. (3) No, Saddam wants to be the leading regional leader. One way or the other. (4) No, In a 1990 interview with Diane Sawyer, he appeared incredulous that the US did not have laws forbidding criticism of its President and he insisted that American Indians were forced to live on reservations. (5) Not at all, given the reign of terror he has created.
So, I would say that Saddam is a greater threat because Kim Jong-Il is deterable, while Saddam is prone to miscalculation. (OTOH, I would push clever diplomacy with KJI very hard, to prevent him from selling ballistic nukes to the highest bidder).
Saen
I still need something that shows me Saddam is a threat to this land, a threat that says he can damage this me and you. We know Jung supplies terrorists. We have only heard anecdotes saying Saddam does.
Brutus…So oil makes it better to remove Saddam and not Jung?
Flowbark, I disagree about Jung. He wants nothing for his people. He wants it all for him and his cronies. How else can you explain him starving the populace? He enjoys everything he has denied his people, even the internet.
Great post by the way.
Why does everything have to fit one mold with you? You keep trying to align the reasons for dealing with Iraq and North Korea, and also keep trying to align the methods. Doesn’t make sense, but little you said so far has.
No, oil is not the reason we are going to have to deal with North Korea; The fact that South Korea and Japan, two of our larger trading partners, are threatened by this loopy fool is a good reason for dealing with N.Korea. Or how about that A)North Korea has nukes and B) Their Taep’o-dong-2 ICBM could hit Alaska or the western seaboard. And this is in the hands of a frigging freakshow lunatic.
No one said we wanted to go to war with NK over oil.
bolding mine.
Yet were are going after Saddam and negotiating with a regime that has lied more often than Saddam has.
Hey, I agree he’s a bad guy. But there are lots of bad guys. (Ok, he’s a bad guy who’s developing a nuke.)
I’m saying that he’s a bad guy that can be deterred. Like Stalin.
(Also, I’m saying that he has bargained rather hard for food (without a Made in US label) and oil. KJI is hardly an humanitarian though.)
Thanks. I really did design it earlier as an OP. 
Yes. I don’t want to turn this into a Pit thread, but one more time, calmly:Dealing with NK in a military way will be orders of magnitude more difficult then dealing with Iraq.
The probable cost* of taking Iraq within the next few weeks: Low.
The probable cost of taking NK within the next few weeks: High.
We are dealing** with what we believe to be the ‘quick and easy’ threat now. There are several reasons for this, but I doubt you would understand them.
We are not dealing with what we believe to be the ‘long and costly’ threat now. Again, several reasons, etc.
After we eliminate the Baathist regime in Iraq, we will have considerable forces freed to deal with N.Korea, should that become neccesary.
*Cost including real dollars, weapons expended, lives lost, disruption of economy, etc.
**Dealing, in a military sense, not a diplomatic sense.
The whole point of my OP is whether or not we should be readying our resources to combat a two bit wannabee like Saddam who may or may not have have the means to damage our “homeland” or should we confront Jung who definately does?
Both, one at a time.
One thing you must remember is there are around 10 million people in Seoul and another 8 million in the suburbs. All these people are in artillery range of N. Korea. N. Korea has a buttload of artillery. Are you willing to sacrifice large numbers of these people just to take out Kim? That’s not even counting missiles that can hit further south in S. Korea and Japan.
IMO, negotiation is the way to go in N. Korea. If negotiation fails and there is ever another war over there, it’s going to make Gulf War I & (possibly) II look like a cake walk.
But we aren’t doing that. We are preparing to obliterate the wannabee and bargaining with the worst government in the world outside of maybe Mugabe’s.
Fugazi, how many times does you negotiate with a liar before you realize he’s lying?
What aren’t we doing?
What we are doing:
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I think it’s safe to say that the Baathist regime’s days are numbered. We are poising for the ‘conquest’ of Iraq, not simply some half-baked punitive raid. The next war in Iraq will be the last war in Iraq for a good, long while.
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We are conducting low-level and back-channel talks with North Korea. Since they already have WMD, our negotiation options are limited. If only in '94…Ah, nevermind.
North Korea is a great example of realpolitik.
We want Kim so bad we can taste it, but we dare not attack because Seoul would cease to exist in about a day, and the entire Koren Peninsula wouldn’t be too much further behind.
Does anyone really believe that a Korean War wouldn’t go nuclear?
Saddam, well, there’s no convincing you guys of his guilt, so rather than waste time trying, I’ll just say that we’re going after him because we can. The damage that he can cause in retaliation is minimal in comparison.
In other words, we’re picking our fights. Fine with me. I think Hyundais are pretty nice cars and Samsung makes nice phones. They wouldn’t be so nice if they were glowing.
I agree Saddam is guilty and needs to be removed. My point is there are regimes in this world that are much worse than his. I do believe there are deeper reasons in the Bush administration for getting Saddam than they are telling us. It surely isn’t because of WMD. Jung has those. It isn’t because he supplies terrorists. We know Jung does that. It isn’t because he subjagates his people. Jung and Mugabe both do that. Perhaps it’s because he is the easy target. But don’t sit there and tell the world how evil Saddam is while there are Regimes much worse than his flourishing. Why is he doing it? Is it oil? Is it revenge? Only Bush knows I guess.
But lets hope things are better when we are done instead of worse.
What do I think?
I’ve been visioning pandora an awful lot lately.