American foreign policy analysts are understandably worried that North Korea now has intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. Given that their president is given to bellicose rhetoric and has prioritized his nation’s military program over domestic needs, they wonder if an attack is inevitable, in which case the United States would be well-advised to strike first. The problem is, everything we worry about is something the North Koreans could just as easily say about us.
Worried About North Korea? Think How They Feel
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Neither Bush or Trump understand the law of cause & effect, but Heinlein got it right, “Never threaten a small man, he’ll kill you”
Why did that remind me of this old joke?
The school runt declared to the school bully, “You just remember that dynamite comes in small packages!”
The bully punched him in the face and said, “Now let me see you explode!”
(????)
It works just as long as the other 299 kids on the playground don’t gang up on the bully – or until the runt brings a gun to school.
Kim wants the DPRK to survive. He knows if he tries a pre-emptive strike, the DPRK is toast, nothing would be left.
Kim saw what happened to Libya. Obama promised to drop sanctions if Libya ended it’s nuke program, it did, and Obama kept his promise. Bombs, sanctions, what’s the difference???? The one thing going through Kim’s mind is, ‘We came, we saw, he died.’
Kim keeps shouting that he now has MAD. He does NOT have an ICBM that could target a US city. He does have subs that could deliver nukes to most coastal cities, and would be very hard to stop if the US forces regime change. Kim wants it clear that regime change in the DPRK will cost more than the US can afford.
> Kim wants it clear that regime change in the DPRK will cost more than the US can afford.
Just like in Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq – the question is not whether we can afford it, but whether those in charge realize it.
And in the unlikely event they do? They’re not the ones paying the costs. So what if they blow the world to Hell, they can’t conceive of an outcome where they don’t win
“‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
– James Tiberius Kirk. Also, Satan.
Thanks, Ted. One thing you forgot to mention – but one can’t put everything in a single frame cartoon – is that the last time the US tried «regime change» in the DPRK (on the way to the main objective, «regime change» in China), they killed some 20 % of the pre-war civilian population (according to Curtis Emerson Lemay, who as head of the SAC, might have been prone to exaggeration : «Right at the start of the war, unofficially I slipped a message in “under the carpet” in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC loose with incendiaries on some North Korean towns. The answer came back, under the carpet again, that there would be too many civilian casualties; we couldn’t do anything like that. So we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan-an accident, but we burned it down anyway. The Marines started a battle down there with no enemy in sight. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off-what-twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure? Over a period of three years, this seemed to be acceptable to everybody, but to kill a few people at the start right away, no, we can’t seem to stomach that. » (note that Mr Lemay was here talking about nuclear weapons ; Mark 4 atom bombs and the B-29s to carry them had been shipped to Guam in July – August 1950, but their plutonium cores remained in the US.)) No wonder the DPRK leadership wants a deterrent….
Henri
Most of urban Korea was utterly mangled by the war, which erased how Japanese the cities looked. Pyongyang was an utter ruin after being shelled every day by a US Navy cruiser, and we were sending comparatively high tech Navy fighter bombers to hit bridges and positions that were right out of World War One….in fact the ground war had become static just as the fighting in the first World War had, because the territory allowed for it. Meanwhile US Air Force Sabre jets dueled it out with MiG-15s flown by Soviet, North Korean, and Chinese pilots in a jet version of the 1915-1918 “Dawn Patrol”…..it was a war so strange to Americans that they forgot about it until Vietnam.
Another Korean War would be absolute madness, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the first couple of days and inevitably dragging in China to defend its border with the DPRK, if the North doesn’t use nuclear weapons first as a response to a US-ROK attack. There is also the chance that the paranoids are right and North Korea has sleeper agents living in the South, which means sabotage and guerilla warfare for the first weeks of the war if it remains conventional…..and when I talk about nuclear weapons I’m speaking of tactical nuclear bombs exploded on the battlefield, not an ICBM wiping out Tokyo or Portland, Oregon. Beyond another Asian nuclear bombing, the chances are high this could drag America, Russia, and China into a repeat of the 1950s war and then some sort of nuclear war, either deliberately or by accident.
«Another Korean War would be absolute madness, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the first couple of days …» Indeed. But alas, as many historical examples demonstrate, a war being «madness» doesn’t mean it won’t be launched….
Henri
So now Komrade Trumpinov has threatened to rain fire and brimstone down upon NK. Let us not forget that they ramped up their nuke program after Baby Bush named them part of The Axis Of Evil [tm]. Maybe Kim Young’un is not as mentally il as his departed father, but it *still* doesn’t pay to threaten a little man. (‘il’ tee hee)
And the basest of his base are lovin’ it.
“The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness.” – George Washington
The great experiment as failed, perhaps it will, indeed, be the last.