Korea, Again

The news coming out of the Korean peninsula these last few days is not good . . . but it's not new. I, for example, would note that this humble blog alerted its six seven readers back in April 2013 that some news reports based on info coming out of the DIA indicated that Little Kim seemed to have achieved the miniaturization of a nuclear warhead suitable for a missile. That info seems to have been recycled.

A bit earlier that same month in 2013, I posted a piece about Korea and the cost of unfinished business. I noted that a

[T]ruly stunning example of half-measures and unfinished business coming back to bite us is the Korean War. We, once again, see the consequences as Kim Jong-Un, a gangnam-style Pillsbury doughboy with a bad haircut, threatens to rain nuclear weapons on our Pacific bases and even our cities. Little Kim is the dictator of a decrepit country of zero importance to the world. This repellent little communist monarchy stands across the DMZ from the Republic of Korea, one of the truly great political, economic, and social success stories of the past seventy years. North Korea's leaders, however mad and absurd they might appear, know how to play with Western reluctance to apply total solutions. They look at the current leadership in Washington, and what do they see? The most anti-military President, Secretary of State AND Secretary of Defense in our history, i.e., the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse. They see us babbling about nonsense, and openly vowing to destroy our own military in order to provide free stuff to people who vote for Obama. We have a pompous, lying, rich boy, blowhard as Secretary of State who vows to do "whatever is necessary"( Note: In a style reminiscent of "Genghis Khan," eh?) but who has a record of opposing whatever is necessary, and has committed public acts of treason. We have the irony of having the very liberal Democrats who so opposed anti-missile defenses now being forced to move into place those very systems they sought to abort. The same bunker buster bombs which the Democrats opposed developing are being loaded into B-2s and would play a critical role in case of war against North Korea. The military which the Democrats have for years sought to cut and make into a playground for their social experiments now stands as the defense for Los Angeles, and other Democratic-governed urban centers. The ironies go on and on. 

This is what happens when you go hunting to wound the bear.

In those two cited pieces I naively wondered how Obama would handle a nuclear threat to the United States--remember this was a couple of years before he funded the Iranian nuclear program. He "handled" it by ignoring it, acting as though it were not there.

Obama left the Nork Nuke mess for his successor. That successor is handling it as well as can be expected. What remains shocking--perhaps it shouldn't--is that the progressive mau-mau machine seeks to make Trump's, properly, stern rhetoric is response to Kim a greater threat than Kim's popping off missiles and bragging about incinerating the USA. This is not unlike blaming Churchill's anti-Hitler rhetoric for Hitler's actions in Europe.

I am no expert on Korea, and don't play one on the internet. It, however, seems to me that dismissing Kim as insane does not get us very far. He might be a psychopath, but he ain't stupid or suicidal. He knows that a war with the United States would end very badly for him and his regime. He is clearly testing the new administration and probably looking for deal like the one his granddad and dad got from Clinton and, even better, the deal the Iranians got from Obama.

The solution? Not an easy one, but sooner or later it will end in war unless there is a dramatic change inside North Korea, perhaps fostered by China working with some element or another of the Nork military.

Frankly, if we're going to have a war, and this is a brutal thing to say, sooner is better than  later. Just as it would have been much better to confront Hitler in 1935 than in 1939, so it is now. It would have to be an overwhelming, quick, and brutal attack. I am glad I don't have to make that decision.