North Korea's War

Astonishingly, North Korea actually repudiated the 1953 armistice before they started sinking warships and bombarding islands.  They have since been operating under a state of war and their actions can be seen in that light.

It is war in slow motion in which precise targets are picked and destroyed.  These are acts of war that advance the North Korean agenda but do not trigger a total response.

It appears that another evil and petty dictatorship is preparing to expire in a paroxysm of blood that can slaughter millions of South Koreans.  At least that is their calculation.  It is the same calculation that got this sorry business underway in 1950.

Again a military utterly brainwashed and trained forever sees this as a fantastic career opportunity.  They may even be pressing for it.

Against them we have the South Korean Army who will be hard pressed to stop this assault cold or even by giving up ground.  The North has its armies deeply dug in along the DMZ and can pick their pressure points for the first few days.

As this makes clear, the UN is unable to act directly as its leading committee would never give them such authority.  It is a forum for organizing united action over some time.

In the US we have Barack Obama who is simply not convincing as a war leader and much less so that any of his predecessors since Jimmy Carter who can be fully blamed for setting up the conditions for radical Islam’s successes.  This is the calculation that North Korea’s war leaders will and can make.

They will likely never see a better opportunity to restart the Korean War in their lifetime.  They may even have conned China into at least playing doggo for such an enterprise or at least hope to present a fait accompli.  After all what can China do to stop them?

The possibility of a North Korean surprise attack on the South is no longer remote at all.

The appropriate US response will need to be a massive air bombardment that is underway in hours of an attack been launched.  Can Obama make such a decision?

Getting North Korea’s Attention

Posted by Alan W. Dowd on Nov 29th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage

Alan W. Dowd writes on defense and security issues.

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/11/29/getting-north-korea’s-attention/

What’s most striking about North Korea’s latest act of war—and ongoing low-grade war against South Korea—is what it says about the United Nations in specific and multilateralism in general.

It pays to recall that North Korea is lashing out at its democratic neighbor not in response to a go-it-alone, cowboy foreign policy in Washington, but in the context of a wholly multilateral approach on the part of two consecutive administrations—an approach that has utterly failed.

Before getting into the myth of multilateralism—and how to respond to Pyongyang—it’s instructive to recap the litany of North Korean misconduct.

Since January 2009, North Korea has detonated a nuclear weapon; test-fired long-range missiles; declared that it no longer is bound by the armistice that brought a cessation to hostilities in 1953; torpedoed and sunk a South Korean ship, the Chenoan, in international waters, killing 46 sailors; fired artillery shells into South Korean waters; and coyly revealed the existence of yet another nuclear facility.

The latest act of war, the 90-minute artillery and rocket attack on the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killed two South Korean marines, injured 14 and destroyed 60 buildings. Calling the North’s assault “a premeditated, intentional illegal attack,” South Korea responded with an artillery barrage of its own.

In the face of these continual affronts, the UN has done virtually nothing. The most embarrassing example of UN fecklessness and worthlessness vis-à-vis North Korea came this past summer, after the unprovoked attack on theChenoan. The best UN diplomats could muster was a pathetic report condemning the attack on the ROK ship without condemning the attacker.

Of course, the problems at the UN began long before this latest spasm of North Korean mischief.

The UN Security Council’s responsibility, according to the UN Charter, is “the maintenance of international peace and security.” After more than a half-century of failure, it’s safe to say that it’s not working. Of the dozens of wars and threats that emerged since its founding, the UNSC was able to mobilize for concerted action on arguably just two occasions: Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990. Ofcourse, the first was a fluke, thanks to Moscow’s shortsighted decision to boycott a UNSC session; and the second proved to be a post-Cold War aberration. The UN failed in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq—and that was just in the 1990s. It took eight weeks in 2002 for the Security Council just to agree on a resolution requiring Iraq to comply with existing resolutions. Once it passed, half the Security Council refused to enforce it.

“It gets even better,” as French president Nicolas Sarkozy sarcastically observed last year, during a blistering critique of the UN’s record in North Korea and Iran. The North Koreans “have violated all Security Council deliberations since 1993, and they disregard everything that the international community says, everything. What’s more, they are continuing their ballistic tests,” he intoned.

“Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council resolutions,” he explained. “An offer of dialogue was made in 2005, an offer of dialogue was made in 2006, an offer of dialogue was made in 2007, an offer of dialogue was made in 2008, and another one was made in 2009…What did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing. More enriched uranium, more centrifuges.”