Conflict flares up in KoreaFollow

Seriously, read up on your history. North Korea as been pulling things like this since the cease-fire was called back in 1953. The Korean War has never ended. The North believes it is in their right to perform such actions because of this. They won't vocally say that, but it is what they believe.

Read up on the following if you want to really get your blood going:

Operation Paul Bunyan
or
Major Henderson Incident

or hell, just read about the Korean DMZ to give you an idea what stupidity the North has pulled in the last 57 years.

Lol.

Clinton? Yup. Sure did...

And you accuse me of being ridiculous

And yet, oddly enough, the Soviets never lobbed shells over the borders after we held Reforger, Nato-TAC Evals, or any other countless readiness inspections. I've spent many years in both Europe and Korea. I paid attention to both the local and "Pro-west" news. Ironicly, both sourses were pretty much spot on with each other.

Unless it was some poor German farmer complaining about a destroyed fence, which was promtly paid for.

When North Korea decides to do something stupid in the area, they aren't doing because of some "button-pushing". They do it because they feel it's their right to do whatever the **** they want. You need to realize North Korea does not recognize South Korea as a separate country. They think of them as "lost" country men under foreign control.

This is their way of saying "Hey, we are a world power too! Pay attention to us." However, the rest of the planet doesn't see it that way.

So... does this mean we get a M.A.S.H. sequel?

Of all the amusing anecdotes about NK, my favorite is the lie the leaders perpetuate that everyone in the West is worse off than they are. When a US citizen who taught English in South Korea visited and was shown Kim Jong Il's treasure vault, he was delighted to see the same Hyundai he had parked in his garage back in Seoul right there in the museum. The tour guides didn't believe him - that car had been a gift from the South to the Dear Leader! Surely it was not something un-special enough for a random white foreigner.

In that same museum, they had a basketball that had been sent from the US that was signed by Michael Jordon. They thought he was some famous diplomat... not just an actual basketball player. The concept of sports celebrities exists in China and the rest of asia, but apparently not in N.Korea.

Also, they use US released versions of Microsoft Windows XP, because they refuse to believe that Microsoft would program the OS into Korean just for the south.

Edited, Nov 26th 2010 7:06pm by catwho

This is getting interesting now. China is really showing it's true colors towards the rest of the world. South Korea seems fairly prepared to take things to a higher level if the North and China don't back down.

NK issues more warnings

Actually, China has been rather reasonable about the whole situation recently. They didn't really raise much of a fuss at all when we parked a nimitz class carrier battlegroup off their shore, a move that would normally cause them to raise hell just for appearances if nothing else, and they just sent a group of high ranking envoys to north korea to tell Kim Jungle to back down.

Though the fact that the north koreans have just moved some of their SA-2 anti aircraft missiles to the boarder near the wargames is worrying. If they shoot one of those at a US aircraft, things get very interesting, regardless of any actual damage at that point.

I see china sitting on them fairly hard here in the next few days if North Korea doesn't back down. China doesn't want military trouble right now while they are busy with their economic devaluation shenanigans (which we are about to incidentally copy with that $600bn bond buyup, buy your Ram and LCD tv's now folks...) so I suspect they will actually be leading the way in calming things down in north Korea soon.

I think that really depends on how China swings. If NK turns SK into a smoking crater, the US turns NK into a smoking crater. What happens after that? Either WW3, or nothing.

I learned recently that the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere don't really mix that much. I'm really grateful for that.

China does pose a threat as WWCD, "What Will China Do?", as they don't like the US to be even near their borders. To be honest, it all depends on how political we approach this. The more we try to be "humane" and "talk things through", the more likely something disastrous will occur.

The US can just go straight in for the kill, giving NK less reaction time, and "call it a day", but doing so will make the US look "bad" in the media and in society. So, as opposed to being proactive, we have to wait till NK attacks Seoul, Incheon and or Pusan, creating total chaos and THEN react so we can have "justification" for retaliation. Then we would have to do it quickly before society changes feelings on the war and we lose support of it.

It's really a "Lose-Lose" situation. We can only hope that NK's first disastrous attack that justifies retaliation isn't that bad.