It must by nice to have your simplistic view of the world. As difficult as diplomacy is at times, it is preferable to bombing somebody. True, military action may end up being the only way left to go, but only after all diplomatiic options have been tried and have failed. You can't simply discard diplomacy because it is difficult. And yea, I can just see Russia and China not taking any kind of an action - either military, economic, diplomatic or political - against the United States simply because Bush calls them up and tells them not to. Boy! What a Peter Pan view of the world.
And what if North Korea then invaded, took Seoul and we lose South Korea? Nukes away? WWIII? There is no military solution that doesn't result in serious consequences or it would have been done decades ago. So far the consequences have made it not worth the trouble to slap down Kim. But he is trying very hard force the US to deal with him. He expects us to capitulate to all his demands in one-on-one talks. I think we will deal with him in quite another fashion, but we must be ready for a major war if we do, one that will require all of our resources. Right now we have wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and Kim knows we ain't ready to take him on. But this situation will change in time, so I think we must bide our time. Sooner or later Kim will go so far over the line that the Chinese and Russians cannot back him up without joining him in a war with us. So we will make concessions to them to sit it out, which is what they want anyway. China wants us to give up Taiwan and Russia wants us to get out of the former Soviet republics. So . . . is North Korea worth that? I don't know.
i agree, which is why i do not buy your argument that we are wasting troops in iraq that could be used elsewhere.
It's for military flexibility. Troops may be badly needed elsewhere. Kim could force our hand in Korea before we are ready to react because the bulk of our ground troops are tied down in Iraq. People keep saying that we must leave those troops there until we "win the war". I keep saying that we won the war in 21 days, sacked their capital, captured Saddam, and the WMD's don't exist. We have met all of the conditions that we went to war for supposedly. Now we are occupiers and there is no war left for the troops to win. Our stated policy at this point is to let the Iraqis take charge and then the occupation will end. But they are inept and non-cooperative. What if they never get their act together? At this sad point we have made our exit dependent on "the Iraqis" accomplishing something. The solution is thus out of the hands of our military, there is nothing left for them to win. They won every battle, they won the war, they have proved that we can take down a country and stay there as long as we want to. The costs keep rising and the returns are diminishing. We need to get prepared for the next war. There is always a next war.
I was not talking about an invasion of NK in the late ninties. Just a pre-emptive strike against his nuclear facilities.
We put troops where they are needed - not where they may be needed in some undetermined future should some undetermined events take place.
Well we are about to completely hand over the Al Muthanna province (which is approximately the size of the non-state West Virginia.) and are hoping to have 7 or 8 more provinces turned over by the end of the year. http://www.pentagonchannel.mil/
Then why, pray tell, have we kept troops in germany and japan for all of these years. It's called strategic pre-positioning. Or, in other words, "planning for some undetermined future should some undetermined events take place".
If I'm peter pan, then you're Tinkerbell. Have you not been paying attention for the last couple of decades? I would venture to say that diplomacy has just about been played out. It is time to take actions to ensure that when we do fight them, it's a winnable war. At the moment, it's very winnable. Whose to say what the situation will look like in another 5 or 10 years. They want a fight, by God let's give them one.
Speaking of diplomacy being played out I came across this article from The Times Online, i'm really not sure how credible the Times is but it's a very interesting article. Here are a couple excerpts: and It also talks about how China is the enemy not an ally, all-in-all an article Salty would be a fan of, even though it does say the military option isn't on the table. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2261782_1,00.html
