Archive for ‘North Korea’

May 29, 2009

Is Dick Morris the new Neville Chamberlain?

by Smitty (h/t The Dead Hand)

  J. over at The Dead Hand is unimpressed with Dick Morris’s latest on the subject of the (NSFW, double non-nucular f-bombs) Ronery One: “military action is off the table since [North Korea] already has the bomb.”

So odds are the North Koreans aren’t ready for nuclear war now, and if they are, it’s by the slimmest of margins. But the one thing we now know is that they will be ready… and soon!
And we know that, just as soon as the North Koreans are ready for nuclear war, so will be Al Qaeda and all the rest of them.

  I’m not so sure. It looks like the American public voted to ignore the problem. Or, if NK gets too uppity, we send Rahm Emmanuel galloping in on the unicorn to bury them with far more f-bombs than the Ronery One used at the beginning of the clip above.
  Less flippantly, His Oneness isn’t likely to get too adventurous. O’s superficial need not to appear like His predecessor (while substantially duplicating W’s foreign policy) makes the dovish path tactically cheaper. Also, let’s face it: while it’s fun and games to liquidate a bunch of matériel on the chess board, no one in the sane category, least of all BHO, actively seeks the butcher’s bill that military action will entail. You just about have to give NK the first strike, as unfortunately, W. used up the American taste for adventurism for a generation or two. The logic that the butcher’s bill would be lower to take NK out earlier is obvious. We also know that eliminating bugs earlier in a software project lowers the overall cost. That happens how often, exactly?
  Now, in terms of having the government seize totalitarian control of he economy to support a war effort, the idea of fisticuffs with NK has merit. Not that we’d, you know, declare war, or anything. We haven’t done that since WWII. Smacks too much of following the Constitution. It’s an interesting question, though: does BHO give sufficiently good speech to support a war? As a thought experiment, the idea of watching His mewling sycophants’ heads ‘splode as they try to reconcile their pacifism to their adoration of a newly minted war president is amusing…