Conflict flares up in KoreaFollow

I was just reading about this, I can't say that I know enough of the whole situation to really comment aside from hoping that it won't end in a full scale war.

Especially with the recent "baton-passing" from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un, there may be instability within the North Korean leadership. Some high ranking officers may take advantage of the changeover.

Kim Jong-un reportedly cares more about the common korean than his father, so if he does gain the respect of his peers, the possibility is there for a peaceful reunification.

It would be a great tragedy if Seoul was decimated by the North.

We were once having a conversation about Hamas, and how they would lob rocks and home-made grenades and small launchers over the border to Israel. I said it seemed so futile, because Israel completely outclasses it militarily. A friend said: It's like boxing. Say a boxer, with no hope of winning, challenges the world title holder. They hold the match, and the boxer duly loses to the world title holder. But that boxer is now the second ranked boxer in the world, because he lost out to the first ranked.

Hamas continuing to lob puny little mostly ineffective but sometimes tragically effective missiles at Israel while no-one else is lobbing anything else at Israel, means that Israel, and the rest of the world, have to pay attention to them and deal with them. And what that means is that Hamas isn't going to do anything much to Israel, but within Palastine, Hamas accumulates more power.

Edited, Nov 23rd 2010 9:12am by Aripyanfar

And that, my dear, is why restraint in war is asinine. You wipe your enemy from the face of the earth and you move on. I hope it does go full blown. It would be a good excuse to insert the necessary assets to remove the nuclear threat in the north.

I'm an American. We learned condescension from the British just like the rest of the former empire.

This. If it does flare up, and the western powers get completely involved again, it has to be all or nothing. With the possibility that China could get involved again, we can't afford to do anything less.

I just hope it blows over. Who would want to re-fight that war?

No, idiot, because that would mean it goes nuclear.

This is a fight that will be decided by diplomats. Although a war of assasins would be much more effective tbh.

1. If North Korea does have even one nuclear weapon, the risk exists regardless.

2. I have my doubts that any of the major powers, China included, would use their nukes. While Korea is within China's sphere of influence, considering that US participation does not by any means equal a US takeover of Korea, China would likely keep any involvement down to traditional warfare. Even if there was any consideration of using the bomb, the US would not strike as such first, and China would likely not do any such thing for fear of MAD. Not to mention it would not be economically viable to start throwing Nuclear weapons at the US, or most of the countries of Europe, or Japan for that matter, and hence, as SK has the support of those countries, South Korea.

You're making the assumption that the Chinese and US leadership are both completely brainless. Corrupt, greedy, and diplomatically inept respectively, but not brainless.

While assassination was always part of history, there was an opposite pull towards preserving the lives of enemy leaders. A mutual survival game between leaders, that at last resort ransom or imprisonment was better to offer in exchange for receiving it in turn. It tied in with old traditions of Betters, being well, betters, and thus to be treated more well than the cannon fodder peasantry.

Morally, I'm not particularly fond of that old trend. Would you shoot someone, if you were absolutely certain that by doing so, you would immediately save the lives of 9 other people? I would rather that leaders and officers were targeted, than the people with no power and no say. If a fight means much to a populous, then new leaders will take over the fight from the old leaders gone. But if surrender or treaty is better overall for a populous, they get to choose surrender when they lose their present leadership.

Basically, I would have preferred GW Bush and Saddam Hussein to duke it out with assassins against each other, than dragging whole armies into it.

Maybe that's shortsighted. Maybe we can't have effective government if leaders are utterly cocooned in protective security, and focussing on staying alive rather than government. But it makes me sad that wars still happen, and that the individuals in armies and citizens still die to failures of politics, diplomacy, communication, tolerance, a will to live and let live, and a willingness to give up retribution and revenge for past injustices.

I hope they aren't going for exploding cigars.

Well, **** just got interesting:


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101124/ts_nm/us_korea_north1

U.S. aircraft carrier heads for Korean waters


INCHEON, South Korea (Reuters) – A U.S. aircraft carrier group set off for Korean waters on Wednesday, a day after North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island, in a move likely to enrage Pyongyang and unsettle its ally, China.

The nuclear-powered USS George Washington, which carries 75 warplanes and has a crew of over 6,000, left a naval base south of Tokyo and would join exercises with South Korea from Sunday to the following Wednesday, U.S. officials in Seoul said.

"This exercise is defensive in nature," U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement. "While planned well before yesterday's unprovoked artillery attack, it demonstrates the strength of the ROK (South Korea)-U.S. alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence."

North Korea said the South was driving the peninsula to the "brink of war" with "reckless military provocation" and by postponing humanitarian aid, the North's official KCNA news agency said. The dispatch did not refer to the planned military drills.

The government in Seoul came under pressure for the military's slow response to the provocation, echoing similar complaints made when a warship was sunk in March in the same area, killing 46 sailors.

Defense Minister Kim Tae-young was grilled by lawmakers who said the government should have taken quicker and stronger retaliatory measures against the North's provocation.

"I am sorry that the government has not carried out ruthless bombing through jet fighters during the North's second round of shelling," said Kim Jang-soo, a lawmaker of ruling Grand National Party and a former defense minister.

Tuesday's attack was the heaviest in the region since the Korean War ended in 1953, and marked the first civilian deaths in an assault since the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987.

The United States and Japan urged China to do more to rein in North Korea after the reclusive nation fired scores of artillery shells on Tuesday at a South Korean island near the maritime boundary between the two sides.

Beijing will not be pleased by the deployment of the aircraft carrier and will not respond to such pressure, said Xu Guangyu, a retired major-general in the People's Liberation Army who now works for a government-run arms control organization.

"China will not welcome the U.S. aircraft carrier joining the exercises, because that kind of move can escalate tensions and not relieve them," he said.

"Our biggest objective is stability on the Korean peninsula. That interest is not served by abandoning North Korea, and so there's no need to rethink the basics of the relationship."

Beijing has previously said that an earlier plan to send the USS George Washington to U.S.-South Korea joint exercises threatened long-term damage to Sino-U.S. relations.

Tuesday's bombardment nagged at global markets, already unsettled by worries over Ireland's debt problem and looking to invest in less risky assets. But South Korea's markets, after sharp falls, recovered lost ground.

"If you look back at the last five years when we've had scares, they were all seen as buying opportunities. The rule among hedge funds and long-only funds is that you let the market sell off and watch for your entry point to get involved," said Todd Martin, Asia equity strategist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong.

SEOUL CALM

Pyongyang said the firing was in reaction to military drills conducted by South Korea in the area at the time but Seoul said it had not been firing at the North.

Seoul, a city of over 10 million, was bustling as normal on Wednesday, a sunny autumn day, although developments were being closely watched by office workers on TV and in newspapers. Editorials stepped up pressure on President Lee Myung-bak to respond more toughly than he has to past provocations by the North and two small groups held anti-North Korea protests.

President Barack Obama, woken up in the early hours to be told of the artillery strike, said he was outraged and pressed the North to stop its provocative actions.

Although U.S. officials said the joint exercise was scheduled before the attack by North Korea, it was reminiscent of a crisis in 1996 when then President Bill Clinton sent an aircraft carrier group through the Taiwan Strait after Beijing test-fired missiles into the channel between the mainland and Taiwan.

"My house was burned to the ground," said Cho Soon-ae, 47, who was among 170 or so evacuated from Yeonpyeong on Wednesday.

"We've lost everything. I don't even have extra underwear," she said weeping, holding on to her sixth-grade daughter, as she landed at Incheon.

CALM THINGS DOWN

Despite the rhetoric, regional powers made clear they were looking for a diplomatic way to calm things down.

South Korea, its armed forces technically superior though about half the size of the North's one-million-plus army, warned of "massive retaliation" if its neighbor attacked again.

But it was careful to avoid any immediate threat of retaliation which might spark an escalation of fighting across the Cold War's last frontier.

China has long propped up the Pyongyang leadership, worried that a collapse of the North could bring instability to its own borders and also wary of a unified Korea that would be dominated by the United States, the key ally of the South.

Beijing said it had agreed with the United States to try to restart talks among regional powers over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

A number of analysts suspect that Tuesday's attack may have been an attempt by North Korean leader Kim jong-il to raise his bargaining position ahead of disarmament talks which he has used in the past to win concessions and aid from the outside world, in particular the United States.

(Reporting by Seoul bureau, Michael Martina, Aileen Wang and Benjamin Kang Lim in Beijing, Kaori Kaneko and Yoko Kubota in Tokyo, Alister Bull, Paul Eckert, Phil Stewart and Arshad Mohammed in Washington and Ralph Jennings in Taipei; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Jeremy Laurence and Sanjeev Miglani)

Yeah, that's about the worst "square peg/round hole" interpretation of foreign affairs politics I've seen in a long time. The attention-getting aspect of this is more or less correct, but the timing choice has nothing to do with a perceived military weakness in the US or NATO. You kinda have to be an idiot not to see that North Korea's entire foreign policy strategy basically rests on acting like a mad dog barely held by a thin leash, threatening some horrific action, but then being willing to negotiate a peaceful resolution which inevitably results in them getting something for nothing. They've only been doing that for 50 years or so...

The "weakness" they see isn't military. They see an opportunity to exploit Obama's "give peace a chance" approach to foreign policy in order to play the same game for another round and get some free door prizes. Whether that pays off in this case remains to be seen, but if history is any indicator, it will.

Edited, Nov 24th 2010 3:03pm by gbaji