Which has a lot to do with what I said. I don’t think Kim would be rushing to get nukes and aim them at California if somebody hadn’t decided to call him part of an ‘axis of evil’ with two countries he wasn’t involved with and implied he was next on the hit list.
To quote Ravenman from earlier:
Um, metaphorically speaking. I could find a cite, but GWB said some mean things about KJI.
Personally, I very often agree with Bush’s fundamental approach to foreign policy. OTOH, the way he carries it out sometimes makes you wonder what that approach is.
Obviously, North Korea should have been included in the list of State Department terror-sponsoring nations. Oh, they were? So, it was totally unnecessary to cook up the whole “Axis of Evil”? – TM Marvel Comics
Beagle, I believe you’ll find Bush called him a “pygmy,” among other things.
I read Ravenman’s post. The “Axis of Evil” crap did nothing to help matters, nor did the rhetoric that followed. Kim Jong Il is a horrible dictator. It’s still stupid to deliberately antagonize him.
Exactly, “among other things”.
One way to look at it is that basically the North Korean news agency always says things like that about George Bush. The other, more logical way, is to think that no matter what Bush’s policy on North Korea was going to be, personally insulting the unstable Stalinist military meglomaniac with death camps might – or might not – work.
I’m thinking “might not” is the way it’s going so far. Of course, all that means is renewed military blackmail. The North Koreans are like the barbarians on the fringes of the Roman Empire. “Give us tribute, or we attack!”
Obviously, the problems in North Korea have been passed down through the generations. GWB is just the latest guy to get thrown into the blender.
I think it was 1976 when there was the “tree” incident. The US then went into the DMZ with an armored division, and air cover, or something – to cut down a tree.
Seriously. This shit is very serious.
If it wasn’t for my typos and faulty sentence construction…
Punch line 1: “No, silly, that’s the CIA”
2: “State Deparment terror” – lots of water, no bathroom breaks
3: Um, Switzerland?
Anyway, North Korea is just about the last nation on the planet I’d want to see have a nuclear arsenal. If a leader is willing to kill millions of his own people, that does not suggest he cares a great deal about his neighbors.
… anyway, the hope obviously is that negotiations can result in him destroying the weapons and taking apart his capacity to produce them. Inspections, of course would have to be a part of it.
Later someone else said…
If a leader is willing to kill millions of his own people, that does not suggest he cares a great deal about his neighbors.
And then a apologist chimed in…
The “Axis of Evil” crap did nothing to help matters, nor did the rhetoric that followed. Saddam Hussein is a horrible dictator. It’s still stupid to deliberately antagonize him.
Today in Baghdad 50 Iraqis were murdered by cowardly terrorists, today in Baghdad 10,000,000 Baghdadians no longer live in fear.
The time is now to give Sun Jong II a call.
Is this a joke? You utter in one breath about the threat posed to Iraqis, and in the very next claim that Iraqis are no longer threatened?
Seriously, am I being whooshed?
Damit** Ravenman** you put me in a hard place. because you didn’t get the point of my post everyone here is going to think that I did a poor job presenting it.
Ok** Ravenman** here it is again, I hope you are happy. You know darn good and well that the sting is always lost in the retelling.
The comments that were so cleverly lifted from various posters to this thread were altered only so slightly so as to suggest the similarities of the two situations, i.e. the prison country of Saddam Hussein, the prison country of Sun jong II.
Today the Iraqi people are free but as free people they too now face the greatest threat to all free societies - terrorism.
Sooner or later the madmen who enslave whole countries in this world must be stopped. South Korea knows this, Japan knows this, even Communist China knows this. Now is the time to strike while the irons of war are hot.
God forbid that we elect that screwball Kerry. He and Jane Fonda would likely don hippie garb and skip up and down the 38th parallel holding hands and throwing flowers while singing “Lets give Peace a Chance”. ()
Ah, I follow… I guess. As a point of curiousity, since you seem receptive to taking out North Korea by military force, does the likelihood that South Korea could suffer tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties in the first day of a war play into your views? North Korea has something like 10,000 pieces of artillery, and Seoul is is only like 30 miles away from the DMZ.
At least in Iraq, Saddam essentially had zero capability of doing significant damage to his neighbors at the time of the invasion.
I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to do that around here, Milum. And if I’m wrong, please don’t do it anyway. I don’t enjoy being deliberately misquoted. By the way, I’m two of the three people you misrepresented in that manner. I’m the first quote AND the apologist. Which makes no goddamn sense. I’ve made no apologies for Kim.
Since the field we’re debating is sometimes called DIPLOMACY, I think it might be occasionally good to be diplomatic. Once in a while. Personal insults from leader to leader do not help matters in any way that I’m aware of.
The only minor difference I can think of is that it’s plain as day Kim has everybody’s favorite three-letter devices, where Saddam allegedly did and turned out not to. Also, Kim has among the world’s largest militaries and could probably level much of South Korea, while everybody knew Iraq’s was a fucking joke.
That would be funny as a display of your total lack of judgment… if I didn’t think you actually believed it.
Really ravenman? 10,000 pieces of artillery are 10,000 slingshots when contrasted with the supertech weapons of tomorrow that we fight with today.
Being a good American I will let our Generals sophisticate the details but if it was me I’d suprise them by attacting at night. You see… they have no lights. 
宇宙から見た夜の地球：DMSP衛星による地球の夜景データ - 9k -
Maybe not Marley but maye you should have apologized to the North Korean people for not speaking out in their behalf.
In this case Marley, you give insult to the English language. Kim Jong II is not a leader, he is a murderer. He is a slaveowner of thirty million people. His DIPLOMACY is hanging between his legs. His hope is that no man will step forward and call his bluff.
Uh…everyone didn’t think that Saddam was a …joke. Some people said that he commanded the fourth most powerful army in the world (in 1990). Then some people said that our casualities in Iraq would reach more than twenty thousand (in 2005).
They didn’t.
Don’t be silly. I think Jane Fonda has matured as she has aged.
But I think that Kerry is still just a phoney and a jerk.
I’m no military planner, but I know that it takes time to kill thousands of pieces of artillery – especially seeing as how we only killed something like 10 tanks during Kosovo.
This site here says that all of North Korea’s artillery along the DMZ could fire up to half a million rounds per hour. That adds up to a hell of a lot of dead civilians – and I have no doubt that downtown Seoul will be target number one if war breaks out.
http://www.janes.com/defence/land_forces/news/idr/idr031111_1_n.shtml
I said it then, and I still think, that Bush’s speechwriters are making too much money. “Axis of Evil” was stupid. That even pissed off the Iranians that are growing to hate the Mullahs, most of them.
Whether we like it or not, the military option is not really a good one in Korea. It’s not that we won’t “win”. We will possess the smoldering, toxic, quite possibly radioactive wasteland that was the Korean Peninsula.
Even if the Chinese intervene, and we spark a global thermonuclear war, we’ll win. OK, let’s go git [sub]em[/sub]?
Why not pray that somehow North Korea goes away? Tap our shoes together?
What?
Obviously he’s a murderer. He’s also a head of state. I don’t know why you’re wasting my time by playing with semantics.
Call him whatever you want. He’s the guy running the country and its military.
I’m talking about the war in 2003. I don’t recall anyone making any such estimations then.
How many deaths are you willing to accept in Korea? The military is huge, and I think that’s where most of the country’s resources go. I’d like to see the intelligence you’re basing the “slingshot” comment on. And then keep in mind that while it may or may not do much to the US military, what it could do to South Korea may be a different matter.
Good for you. John Kerry has next to nothing to do with this debate, and Jane Fonda has less.
North Korea’s military, among other things, is the fourth largest in the world
WMDs
Killing people, preparing to invade South Korea, and selling arms, are the only things they do. Yes, italics for scary emphasis. North Korea, I believe, spends a far greater percentage of their meager GDP on arms than any nation in the world.
Obviously, North Korea needs one of the largest standing armies forward deployed near the DMZ to protect themselves from the hostile South Koreans and Japanese, but especially the United States. We really want the place for its warm summers and cold winters, plus starving population.
That’s the real problem, it’s not our problem. I’d suggest the cunning plan of running away, but for the fact that there are smart South Koreans that understand where the real threat is coming from. Hint: not Washington DC.
You might notice that the prevailing opinion in favor of the right of states to own any weapons they so desire comes somewhat from a libertarian viewpoint, not a liberal one. If you didn’t notice, I referred to the North Korean regime as evil, maniacal, and a dictatorship.
I fail to see the relevance of my age, but I’m 31 if it matters. If this is the closest to “when did you stop beating your wife” in a debate that you can manage, so be it. Seeing as you are in favor of striking while the irons of war are hot, you might notice that North Korea has a very large army, forward deployed, with over 10,000 artillery pieces equipped with plentiful chemical weapons, even if they don’t have nuclear arms. To throw your own question back upon you, without trying to so cleverly lift quotes after deliberately altering them:
It would seem not, as a war with North Korea would most certainly entail at the least mass conventional if not chemical or nuclear shelling of their civilian areas. It might have additional problems as well, as the US military is a bit involved at the moment in Iraq.
Personally, I consider myself a realist first and a liberal second. I’d like to see the current North Korean dictatorship gone, but your apparent solution is a certain recipe for disaster.
So, Milum, are you genuinely advocating an invasion of North Korea? Or are you just winding us up?
At the end of the day - he might well have them. Or will eventually get them. Is aggressive posturing still a good idea? Or should we be engaging genuinely in some sort of diplomatic solution? I would have thought that North Korea needs ‘opening up’ and that threats aren’t the best way to get this done…
Cheers.
No. The world is too dangerous to find bravado in warmongering. I too would like to live in a pretend world while thinking only pleasant thoughts as was offered up as humor and bait by Beagle when he said…
The problem, of course, is that despots don’t go gladly into that good night. Do the math…
Casto X 10,000,000 Cubans X 40 years of slavery = A world without balls.
But yo! Kim Jong II won’t give us the luxury of waiting for events to change inside Korea. While thousands of the poor men and women and children of North Korea die each month of starvation, he coldly diverts their pitiful, hard-earned resources towards the building of more nuclear bombs in order to intimidate the free world against effecting his removal. He is even upsetting the heartless Chineese Communists. Now is the time to act.
Marley, this debate is not abstract. This debate has everything to do with John Kerry (although I’ll admit it has little to do with Jane Fonda). North Korea is real and won’t go away by wishing. But as for me I wish for the sake of our children’s future that John Kerry would.
Actually, not “bait”. I wrote a letter to the editor in the mid-1990s (“Everything is coming up roses!”) mentioning that there were long term foreign policy issues that hadn’t gone away simply because Clinton chose to ignore them. The list was available then: Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Sudan, Chechnya, Syria, Iran, Iraq…
People thought the “New Economy” could “reform” nations – or some BullSheite.
As much as I don’t trust the CIA, and I don’t, that’s why they are so important to the POTUS. If they do their job properly, there might be conflicting reports from human sources. Maybe one is a double agent.
To simply ignore the importance of the CIA (yes, it’s dirty) is idiocy. Clinton NEVER met with his CIA Director.
So, in a nutshell, if we were going to go to war with North Korea – I, personally, wish it was already over. I, personally, could not order that many people to be killed to “save” a nation from itself.
If the North Koreans were to attack, and I were POTUS, I would use all the “Usable Nukes” we had. Then we could tell the Russians, “OK, back to building the big gigantic ones we never would have used.” (;
That is why we want “usable” weapons, BTW, is to bust all these North Korean underground facilites. Not to attack them, but to wreck them quickly when they attack. War is ugly business. Starting one in haste over nothing (please, no comments about Iraq from socialist surrnederniks) with North Korea would be stupid.