This reminds me of an incident in the middle 90's. The Commander in Chief of all Pacific Military forces, a Navy 4 Star Admiral, made a comment about North Korea that went something like this,

"They can't be starving because there are still stray dogs on the street."

Not P.C. but it is an accurate observation. Needless to say he was fired by Clintoon.

Anytime I see a post about Communist regimes and famine, I reflexively think of the most horrifying book I've ever read: "Hungry Ghosts" by Jasper Becker. It's about the starvation under Mao. A hard book to read.

My brother the stonecarver had houseguests in Chicago who came from the Italian village where he had apprenticed. They were fascinated to see squirrels in the city, as bushytails became extinct in parts of Italy in the aftermath of WWII.

Not a whole lot of meat on squirrel, but what there is makes good eating, and they can be harvested with snares or slingshots.

There is no double standard. Deterrance works against Western-style democracies. We did not want to wait until we could be similarly deterred by Iraq and we will not wait until we can be deterred by Iran's nukes.

The North Koreans have had us deterred for quite some time even without nuclear weapons. Their current nuclear weapons cannot reach us in the U.S., and neither can their artillery, but either would be quite effective against Seoul in the opening rounds of any military conflict. Fortunately for the residents of Seoul, our free press and voting rights ensure that our leaders will take this into account when dealing with the tyrant in the North.

For years the DPRK have had China as their guardian and sponsor. DPRK is the buffer that keeps the U.S. and South Korea away from China's border. When DPRK becomes a big enough problem for China the situation will be resolved.

It is evil, there is not another word to describe it.
The nuclear weapons pointed at the heads of tens of millions of innocents I do believe is being watched by our elite in the most secretive ways none of us would ever read about.
You had a post about the space craft that china sent up and somewhere in a hyperlink, we found out one of our finest a darn precise pilot, brought down a russian satelliate. Pretty awesome, since it was done out in space and the media knew nothing about it.
My ex-husbaand was a green beret, and went into another federal job,when he got out of the army. He went to the top in that field. We have some smart intelligence. Pay no attention to the stupid media. Keep on blogging Mr. Esmay.

I fail to see why the threat of nuclear weapons is, in any way, a deterrent. Please correct me if I'm wrong but were we not the country that quaked in it's boots at the thought of anthrax being spread through the mail? By chemical weapons being crop dusted over our cities? By biological contagion being spread amongst our suburbs? I remember not long ago that the great media fear was that of "dirty-bomb" nukes being detonated in our major cities.

These types of attacks seem no more or less likely then a nuclear strike. They certainly have neither stopped nor slowed our current military initiative.

We will go to extraordinay lengths to justify pre-emptive strikes against our current Evil of choice. I find it ludicrus to believe that with demonstrated atrocities like these we feel it neccessary to continue "talks" with N. Korea. They have demonstrated time and again that they are perfectly willing to spite our diplomatic efforts. If we were commited to going after "The Evil-Doers" in any real fashion then I must ask why N. Korea has been getting away with atrocities like this for far longer then some newer regimes?

"What's that? No US commercial interests in your neck of the woods? All our forces are tied up at the moment and we do liberate on a first come, first serve basis. Can we put you down for sometime in 2005?"

I find the hypocrisy appaling.

Kyle:

For years, if we had invaded North Korea, it would have touched off a war with China. It still might.

The fact that they can nuke Seoul and kill tens of millions is now yet another deterrant. Oh yes, they also now have missiles that can go as far as Japan--they shot one over Japan a couple of years ago. Which means they can take out Tokyo as well.

Knowing this, what exactly would you have us do about North Korea? Invade anyway? How many would perish if we did so? Are you ready to do that? I'm not.

Commercial interests have nothing to do with this one way or the other so far as I can see.

I once again need to point to our recent military action in Iraq. Unless I've been terribly misinformed our justification at the time was that the (then) current regime posed an immennent threat to us with their Weapons of Mass Destruction. With egg still on our face over that one (this may or may not change in the future) we've altered our justifaction to include liberating the people from a represive dictator so the egg goes down smoother.

No one is going to argue that liberating innocents isn't a noble and admirable, if not one of the best, goals one can aspire to. However I still call in to question our motivations.

We suspected Saddam of being able to pose a large enough threat to the saftey of our country that we were willing to endager not only our troops but our citizens as well. In doing so, did we then blindly ignore the well being of our allies geographically closer to Iraq? Did we arrogantly assume that only we could be the target of any wide spread domestic carnage? How does Seoul factor in comparisson to said allies? Either we knew the risks and accepted them or disregarded them because the risk wasn't as high as we were told.

If The Threat we were sold was so terrible that it required military action to prevent it from being carried out then why are we so loathe to deal with that same threat-level (Weapons of Mass Destruction), coming from N. Korea in any other way? Did Weapons of Mass Destruction mean something different when it was sold to us last time? Was the threat somehow less immenent?

I don't especcialy wish to recreate a debate that is still being argued everytime I tune in to one of our 24/7 news stations but I do want a decent justification for our sudden withdrawl from this "War on Terror" we've managed to commit ourselves to. I'd like to be able to claim morale superiority some time in the future when I'm talking to my kids. I want to be able to tell them we truly were fighting Evil in a meaningful way.

I suppose my real question is how morally outraged do we have to be before "plight of the people + WMD" = "plight of the people + WMD"?

Groggy makes me spel bad.

Kyle, you listen to too much Bill Maher. ;-)

We had well over a dozen reasons for invading Iraq. These reasons were given by the administration and by other officials for an entire year. They were also debated on the floor of the congress.

They included:

Violation of surrender terms of the Gulf War
Violation of UN resolutions
Refusing to account for Weapons of Mass Destruction that everyone believed he had--that he himself claimed he had.
Firing on coalition forces in the No Fly Zones.
Attempting to assassinate a former President of the United States.
Ties to known terrorist groups.
Horrible human rights abuses.
Misuse of money from the oil-for-food program.
A free and Democratic Iraq would not pose a long-term threat to us.

I can go on, but why bother? The lie--and it is a big, stinking lie, and nothing short of a lie--that we went in with WMDs as our sole justification just will not die. But it's a lie, a bald-faced, total lie.

It is also a lie when someone tells you that we were told that Iraq was an "imminent threat." That is the exact opposite of the truth. What the President very specifically said was, "We cannot afford to wait until Saddam becomes an imminent threat."

Now vicious partisans whose hatred for Bush has overcome their rational minds are claiming that "Bush lied." He couldn't have been WRONG, he couldn't have been MISTAKEN. You know, President Clinton thought the same thing, as did his whole foreign policy staff and most of the Congress, and the U.N., and the Europeans. But now, HE is the liar? Jesus. Nothing but partisan bullshit by people who just hate Bush and want to say anything to embarass or defeat him.

We went into this war for a whole lot of reasons. We also had a couple of unstated reasons:

1) To send a message to the other terror-sponsoring regimes in the region a message: fuck with us and this could happen to you.
2) Long term, over a period of years, a truly free and democratic Iraq will lead to positive changes in the other regimes in the area.

The list of good reasons for this war are manifold. The arguments against it are always the same retread bullshit:

1) "It's all about oil." That's a bunch of crap, since if we wanted the oil we'd buy it from Saddam and that would be the end of it. Saddam even offered this outright--end the sanctions, get rid of the no-fly zones, leave me alone again, and I'll give you exclusive rights to my oil. We turned him down.

"Blood for oil" is irrational, childish nonsense, and has been from day 1.

2) To finish daddy's job for him. Does this even require a response?

3) Imperialism. As if Americans by nature enjoy the thought of conquering others.

4) It'll be too dangerous and too expensive. Of all of the arguments, this is the only one with a shred of rationality to it. But guess what? TOO LATE! Monday Morning Quarterbacking is not appropriate at this point. What's appropriate is to be looking at what it takes to win the conflict and achieve our objectives.

And the only thing I'll say on point 4 is that casualties have been on a downward curve since May, are very light by historical standards for almost any war, and things are measurably better in Iraq and continuing to improve.

I'll be blunt with you: if I thought we could do the same thing in North Korea, I'd advocate doing so. Almost all the reasons for going after Iraq would still apply. But nuclear weapons and the Chinese threat make that untenable.

I sort of hope we go after Syria next, but I also think that right now our forces are stretched too far, and we need Iraq more stable before we can turn our attention to other threatening regimes.

Dean, I've one quibble with your post - North Korea's nuclear program is not deterrence, it is extortion. The thousand artillery pieces pointed at fixed targets in Seoul and the U.S. military presence are the deterrent. As long as North Korea can kill a few hundred thousand people in a matter of days, we won't invade. Nuclear weapons don't add to that threat. What they do is give them leverage to blackmail more "aid" for them - give us money, or we sell to Saudi Arabia (which they just might do anyway).

Kyle, if commercial interests were all that were at stake, we wouldn't even have an Army presence in Korea (or Europe, for that matter). Okinawa and Pearl harbour already provide sufficient naval support to clear the sea lanes - there's no reason to maintain a 50,000 man tripwire across the 38th parallel, other than to deter a couple thousand tanks from rolling down the country.

Kyle won. He changed the subject to Iraq, just like he wanted to.

North Korea has nothing whatever to do with Iraq. This is not hypocrisy; and proposing to use a "one size fits all" policy towards all foreign situations without regard to the individual character of the conflict is the sheerest fantasist nonsense.

Fred has it just right - until the Chinese decide it is a problem, there is nothing the US can do to mitigate the North Korean situation.

"I sort of hope we go after Syria next, but I also think that right now our forces are stretched too far, and we need Iraq more stable before we can turn our attention to other threatening regimes."

Lovely. Going to take our show on the road, are we? Obviously, there's no point in debating whether it's worth invading Iraq, but "Monday morning quarterbacking" seems to be a curious turn of phrase when people are talking about gearing up for a new game. When friends who aren't American complain to me that we see ourselves as world policemen, I've always felt confident in coming back with Dean's retort--it's not in our nature. In fact, living in post-San Francisco Treaty Japan makes it that much easier.

But talk like this makes me less certain. I'm not less certain that I love America and believe in its worldview and should support our duly elected President, understand. But if we start getting into the habit of taking out governments that (1) are hostile and violate human rights and have dealings with shady baddies and (2) just happen to be the ones that are too weak to fight back, we're not exactly setting a tone of high principle.

"But it's a lie, a bald-faced, total lie."

He did lie. Get over it.

"Long term, over a period of years, a truly free and democratic Iraq will lead to positive changes in the other regimes in the area."

You've studied the history and cultures of the region and have figured out how this will happen? Just how long is "long term"? decades? centuries?

Sean: Syria continues to support terrorism. We are engaged in a long-term war against such nations. We will use many means to do so: economic, military, diplomatic, whatever.

I would have no problem with taking out Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia's governments if I thought we could do it. I'd like to go after the Congo and Mugabe's regime while at it. I do not believe we can do all that. Morally, I would have no objection--all are vile, oppressive regimes, and the world would be a better place without them, a better place if we could install functional regimes that didn't oppress their own people and give support to vile terrorists around the world.

But there are limitations on resources and how much we can do.

Given the overwhelming gratitude of a majority of Iraqis, I'm not in the least bit ashamed of our actions there. It was right for our national security, it was right for our long-term strategic objections, and it was right from a human rights angle. Win/win/win. If we had the resources to take out Syria or North Korea with minimal loss of life, I'd say we should do it. I'm not sure we do.

I don't consider that being the "world police" by the way. We don't interfere with the Russians, the Brazilians, the French, the Germans, etc. These are not regimes that threaten freedom (well, we should talk about what the Russians are doing in Chechnya...).

Claude: Proof by repeated assertion is the position of a weak mind. No, he did not lie, or if he did, then so did the U.N., so did the UK, France, Germany, and dozens of other nations. Including most of the Democrats in Congress and the entire Clinton administration.

Get over your obsessions with Bush, pal.

Oh, by the way, Claude? I've linked to countless articles, almost all of them written by Iraqis, who talk about these issues. I also have contact with human rights and democratic reform groups run by Iraqis. I've been advocating democracy for Iraq, and linking to articles by Iraqis on this very subject, for about a year.

How many Iraqis have you talked to, son?

Transitioning Iraq to a stable democracy will take a few years. We always expected this. So far, the effort's going very well and, while there are of course complaints, most Iraqis are very positive on what's going on in their country. Why shouldn't they be? They are more free than they've ever been, and their lives are already materially better than they have ever been, with steady improvements all the time.

Why don't you try getting to know some Iraqis, and reading some of the literature I've linked to? Over on my right sidebar you'll see a graphic called "Support Democracy in Iraq." Click it. Start reading. Inform yourself, why don't you?