How will war look like with North Korea? Will it be like the invasion of Iraq where only 10% of the Iraqi army fought? I've seen articles about the antiquated weapons of N. Korea and how those cold-war era weapons will easily be destroyed. Doing something like shock and awe and cruise missile attacks on nuke silos and airfields and AA defenses... then sending in the marines and tanks... with apache helicopters after the bombing.

An easy victory? Or is this wrong like what this article says:
http://www.rense.com/general37/nkorr.htm

Some interesting things from the article:

During the Iraq War just ended, the main cause of Iraq's defeat was the low moral of its soldiers. Iraqi soldiers had no will to stand and fight, and they ran away or surrendered without fight. Iraqi soldiers believed in Allah protecting them and became easy preys to the US military. North Korean soldiers are taught to fight to the bitter end. In September 1996, a North Korean submarine got stranded at Kangrung, South Korea, and its crew abandoned the ship. Eleven of the crew committed suicide and the rest fought to the last man except one who was captured. In June 1998, another submarine got caught in fishing nets at Sokcho and its crew killed themselves. Such is the fighting spirit of North Korean soldiers.

US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that North Korea uses underground optical fibers for military communication and that it is nearly impossible to plant human agents in North Korea.

prolly won't be one. we only go after crippled nations with vast oil reserves or nations messing with our oil investments.

Kyupol quotes an article that says...

>

Oh that's just silly. Why do we always have to paint the people we fight as superstitious savages? The Iraqi soldiers knew they were outgunned buy the US and they acted very rationally. The bigotry of the writer comes through here and it's rather embarrassing to read. In the case of describing the Iraqi and North Korean soldiers, the writer goes out of his way to make them seem irrational, savage, and inhuman.

In fact, note how the author makes the Iraqis seem easy to defeat because they were irrationally sure of victory, but the North Koreans will be tough because they are irrationally sure of victory? The author is not smart enough to walk and talk at the same time.

But of course this is exactly how you talk about someone before you attack them - you make them seem very different, very savage, even inhuman. It's just easier to fight people if you dehumanize them first.

Personally, I think it is better to evaluate your enemies honestly, if you are going to go to war with them. That way, you don't make so many stupid mistakes.

The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves to make hard things easier. I say, if you are going to do hard things, be honest about them. It's called "courage."

We don't attack anyone nuclear.

Which is why now that the USA is acting like an asshole, everyone wants a nuke.

It'll be just like M.A.S.H., won't it?

Laugh a minute. Lots of casualties, I know, but hey - Alan Alda always looked like he was having fun.

hah ! there will never be war with N. Korea, for the same reasons the US is ignoring Myanmar and Darfur (among other places) US "democracy" only acts in the interests of US business . if there is no money to be made, any country could start up another holocaust and the Americans would do nothing about it !

The US military has several bases in South Korea, with several thousands soldiers in those bases.

North Korea has something like 19,000 large artilley and rocket postions aimed at those bases and they are manned around the clock.

If they opened fire US soldiers would be dead before they got out of their beds and jets would be destroyed before they got off the ground.

Granted what would happen after that is up in the air, I do know this:

Our airfore and South Korea's out class the North Korean's, same with our armor and ground troops.

One thing is for sure, I would hope that would happen after i've gotten out of the army!

Didn't I just read about North Korea dismantling their nuclear reactors? Why should we invade them?

lothar
hah ! there will never be war with N. Korea, for the same reasons the US is ignoring Myanmar and Darfur (among other places) US "democracy" only acts in the interests of US business . if there is no money to be made, any country could start up another holocaust and the Americans would do nothing about it !

^^This is the truth!!

When Clinton went into Bosnia, all the republicans screamed like stuck pigs. "Nation building", they charged, "a waste of forces, why do we need to get involved in an internal struggle with a sovereign nation??" And when our troops were there, they criticized the president every day(It was not until the Iraq war that it somehow became treason to criticize a wartime president) and even when we acheived our objective and brought a genocidal tyrant to justice, it was deemed no more than a wagging the dog move. Why??

Because there's no oil in Bosnia.

Let's not make this a partisan debate mmkay?

We would win. It would be ugly, lots of men and women would have to die on both sides.
In the end we would win. Namely because enough people hate North Korea now. And both Russia and China (the countries who bailed out North Korea first time around) would either claim neutrality or even help invade. Additionally despite its current apparent indecision the U.N. if war came in all likelihood it would be a true international effort. Let's not forget that it was UN not a US war originally.

with that all said, even though North Korea would fall it won't happen.
Unless a drastic change occurs on the world political stage N. Korea is likely to stay an annoyance and nothing more.

As many of you know I live in Japan... My wife and I see (almost daily) on the news, shows how disconnected the N.Korean people are.
Many N.Korean's do NOT have any idea what is going on out-side their borders, or what their "government" is doing. They are not allowed to use the net, cell phones, short wave radios, or ANY satelite viewing technology; if they do they are put in jail, or worse.
In the past months, China has been talking with N.korea, telling them that China will not help N.Korea, if they start a war! With the build up of troops in (south) Korea, and the amount of bases in Japan, Guam, Alaska, Thai, and other asian places, the US has no trouble getting here! And comming next month, is the big aircraft carrier (sorry I don't know the name) to Yokohama.
If any thing, I feel there will be a very cold war, with a few fly over missles... No "WAR" any time soon.

I also have to side in the "no war" people.

N. Korea is a poor country, and has no value to the US at this point. The threat it has towards it's neighbors is small, and ultimately it would be smacked like a bug if it tried anything.

Now, what the heck is going in in Pakistan?

North Korea is South Korea's problem.

Ronson
Now, what the heck is going in in Pakistan?

That's a very tricky situation... I suppose it all ultimately stems from an extremely broken and corrupt political system that's controlled by cronies, and "ruling families"... The pseudo royalty who are 100 times worse than royalty ever was because their version of democracy is forcing their way into power, ruling like a king when they are, trying to stay there as long as possible and exploiting everyone until someone manages to force them out with yet another coup.

In Pakistan the courts are all part of the situation too.

The current guy is a military dictator, and he's actually been a lot better than the people before because he wasn't part of any of the corrupt "born to rule" political dynasties. The problem with him currently is a mix of things:

The ruling families and their supporters have gotten too strong and are stirring up a great deal of civil unrest, they want their old power back and they're using their support base to try and get it -helped in part a by naive international community and media who don't really understand that not all "democracy" is actually free and good... The other massive problem is nationalist and fundamentalist Muslim anger over Sharif letting the Americans have free reign in their territory as well as his support for them generally -with the actions against Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and of course support for Israel... And his restrictions over some of the crazy STUPID things these extremist Muslim groups have been getting up to within the country. Plus there's a civil war raging in some of the tribal regions... stirred up because of US actions and encouragement (forcing Sharif to hunt down groups in those regions that have always been unstable)
And lastly, Sharif has a taste for power now himself, besides; he hasn't done with fixing the corrupt system. The trouble is that the courts wont let him stay leader of the military and STILL be president when he goes for election, and he NEEDS that military backing to stay in power. The courts know this, which is why they've made that decision. :)

What doesn't help is naive people dressing it up as some kind of simple problem of not having a "free democracy" at the moment... Every country is unique, and there is no one size fits all. Pakistan is in a bit of a messy situation.

But at least they don't want nuclear war with India right now like they might have done in the late 90's-early 2000's.

That's what I have been given to understand as well, ozone. And his detractors claim the current martial law situation is a result of Musharreff trying to avoid the court verdict.

Of course, kyupol was just musing upon what a war with N. Korea would look like, he wasn't wondering how likely it was.

I think it would be very messy, and it would cost a lot more than people think. Not unlike other wars going on at the moment.

The martial law would be partly to do with the court verdict... As well as all the other chaos, and it's embarrassing the Bush administration who have always been the worst sort of supporters for him: privately helping him out and "encouraging" him to hunt down extremists in politically volatile lands, while publicly criticising his government and making him look quite bad on the world stage. The poor fellow's in an invidious position.

But once you have power like that I suppose it's hard to let go? Either that or perhaps he just wants to help his country that badly?
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Costs of a war with North Korea would be really quite a bit. Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam have proved that air power isn't the dominating factor it was once thought to be. You have to get in there on the ground. The US would win, but taking it on the ground would make Iraq look like kindergarten.

The cruise missile/Apache helicopter type attacks are only super effective in fantasy and simulation. The Serbs lost a hell of a lot of decoy tanks, trucks, bridges etc to US weaponry, as was discovered later... But at the time I had Serb friends laughing about US reports of tank kills (Serb tanks) and so on. And as for precision state of the art missile and bomb strikes, they were always very sad and worried because those bombs and missiles were hitting people's houses. -all throughout they kept in constant contact with friends and family over there so they knew exactly what was going on, unlike us poor slobs stuck with the filtered content on CNN and the BBC.

So anyway, yes, North Korea would be a real war again, not an easy invasion or token campaign. The "fighting spirit" stuff isn't quite true though... The reason they killed themselves would be because of the mad cult of personality that the regime inspires. Many of the so-called "communist" countries had something similar, with people willing to die for the great leader... Be it Stalin, Tito, Ceausescu , Mao... You'd probably neutralise that similarly to the Japanese in WW2- put overwhelming pressure on the leadership, or more likely, just kill it off. Because that sort of fanaticism tends to originate from those above, not from within.

I've been following NK news and I noticed they got less bashing of USA lately. They're more focused on bashing japan and certain south-korean political parties...


http://kcna.co.jp/index-e.htm [kcna.co.jp]

KCNA Urges Japan to Swim with Trend of Times
Pyongyang, November 6 (KCNA) -- Shortly ago, Kyoko Nakayama, special assistant to the present Japanese chief executive, categorically stood against delisting the DPRK as a "sponsor of terrorism", labeling it a "terrorist state" over the "abduction issue."
She talked nonsense that if the U.S. takes no account of the "abduction issue" while handling the issue of delisting the DPRK as a "sponsor of terrorism" it would adversely affect the Japan-U.S. relations.
In another development, the Japanese government went the lengths of complaining about Washington's DPRK policy. It asked the U.S. ambassador to Japan to send to U.S. President Bush a message to the effect that the on-going DPRK-U.S. negotiations over the nuclear issue might adversely affect the U.S.-Japan relations.
This is a reckless move to prevent the six-party talks from making any progress, much upset by it.
It is a rash act of going against the trend of the times for Japan to throw a stumbling block in the way of the six-party talks whose main purpose is to solve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula and pending issues between the DPRK and the U.S. related to it.
This is as foolish an act as pricking its own eyes.
The world public is jeering at Japan, saying that it has been thrown into a tight corner by the progress made in the efforts to settle the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula though it has made so much fuss over the "abduction issue." Japan, in fact, has lost every sense of decency to talk about the "abduction issue" as it has not yet redeemed the hideous human rights abuses it committed in the past.
This has brought into bolder relief Japan's political and moral vulgarity on the international arena as it is no more than a trouble maker and bete noire.
Japan, however, is behaving like a cowboy, not knowing where it stands now.
If Japan goes on like this, it will not only be rebuffed at the six-party talks but be marginalized in the international community in the end.

Truth of Police Mass Killings of Civilians Disclosed in S. Korea

Pyongyang, November 6 (KCNA) -- The south Korean Committee for Settling the Past History for Truth and Reconciliation on October 29 disclosed the truth about the mass killings of civilians committed by the police before and after the Korean war, according to a press report.
The committee recalled that "Raju Unit" belonging to the police massacred innocent civilians in Haenam, Wando and various other areas in July 1950.
The committee claimed it probed the fact that policemen attacked a village in September 1948 to massacre guiltless peasants when they were engaged in farm work after branding them as "communist bandits."
The committee urged the "government" to make an official apology for the police mass killings and take immediate steps to prevent the occurrence of similar cases.

Notice how the south-korean govt is ALWAYS in quotation marks. Its their way of sarcasm against the south.

Our troops would face a massive challenge in any ground invasion there--IMHO, the US would be unable to prevail, without the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

According to the US Department of State, North Korea has the fourth largest military in the world. If you think we'd have a chance of taking them on successfully, you've been playing one too many real-time strategy computer games.

I think I'm gonna come to the forums for my news instead of Drudge...nice in-depth exploration of topics (way better than anything on tv).

TitanOne
Our troops would face a massive challenge in any ground invasion there--IMHO, the US would be unable to prevail, without the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

According to the US Department of State, North Korea has the fourth largest military in the world. If you think we'd have a chance of taking them on successfully, you've been playing one too many real-time strategy computer games.

I'm pretty curious as to how well we'd do. Its been so long since we've had a traditional, line vs line, war.

They disabled their nuke reactor. Though there are rumors that that nuke reactor was planned to be disabled anyway. Because the nukes have already been distributed to the army. And that NK has at least 100 nukes and not less than 10 as western media claims.

War always has been and always will be about profit.

WWI... a war between competing colonial powers who had run out of new countries to subdue,
WWII... a war begun to promote German expansion not only of its military economy but to control the newly booming pharmaceutical industry on a global scale.
etc...etc...etc

If NK had oil or mineral reserves there might be a chance for invasion, especially as the US economy does a nosedive.

Iraq happened because of Saddam's threat to trade 'his' oil in euros instead of dollars. It is the fact that the world trades oil in US$ that keeps the US economy 'propped' up and holds off the ineviteable collapse.

If the world switched to the euro the whole pack of cards would instantly come tumbling down.

Many economists argue that this would have happened if the US did not invade Iraq in '03.

It will still happen of course... it is ineviteable... maybe another invasion (this time of Iran) may forestall it a bit longer...

Yeah, I think you're wrong on just about every point you made.

TnTComic
Yeah, I think you're wrong on just about every point you made.

Please explain...

I. Think. Everything. You. Said. Was. Wrong.

Profit isn't a direct motivation for war, although that's part of it.. It tends to be primarily about strategic control of resources- that could be water, energy reserves, farmland, land to expand you population onto, etc. Then there's nationalism and ideology. War isn't usually initiated with cynical motives though, even if that's why its being pushed for, sane people never want war, diplomats and politicians usually try to prevent it up to the last minute. So wars generally begin with a catastrophic failure of diplomacy... War represents failure and stupidity..

The drive for the US to have a war with North Korea would be ideology... But the cold war is over and that sort of mad anticommunist ideology was always more about being anti-soviet anyway, all about opposing their rival control over half the world and all that went with it. North Korea was just a small part of that. They don't matter any longer really.
North Korea matters most to South Korea, and South Korea is on better terms with them now.

Sorry but wars are started for profit... some simple research will soon tell you this.
"strategic control of resources" = profit, ozone.
"nationalism and ideology" are simply the methods for gaining public acceptance for the wars.
There have been plenty of generals who have fought for their coorporate masters who have come to this understanding and some have spoken out against it.
If a company or group of capitalists want something another country has got, one way to get it is to convince their country's government to wage war, then the fear campaigning and lies begin to convince the populace to send their children to die for those profits.
Give me a war, any war, and you can trace its cause to profiteering.
The 'great' president Roosevelt himself fought as a 'Rough Rider' in Cuba on the orders of coorporations before becoming president.

A Good article on the history of coorporations is here

cartoonprofessor
Sorry but wars are started for profit... some simple research will soon tell you this.

Where was the profit in the Japanese attack on America in World War II? Where was the profit in Mogadishu? Where was the profit in Bosnia? Where was the profit in the American role in World War I? In the Civil War? In the Revolutionary War?

Do your own simple research. Sometimes wars are fought for a motivation other than profit.

There is always a profit margin in a war. But that is not always the reason for them. Japan attacked many countries on the Day of Infamy. It did so for their resources, to continue its overall quest to control the Pacific. A leading reason for the Revolution was to escape excessive taxation. The Mogadishu and Bosnia were largely United Nations efforts and munitions companies made a tidy profit on those conflicts.

Yet profiteering and expansionism were not the reasons we flushed lives away on those conflicts. In every war I can find a merchant or industrialist who seized the opportunity to make a dollar off the suffering of others. The reason for any war is the one used by the soldiers that fight them. I doubt soldiers fight to make somebody or something more wealthy.

TnTComic
Where was the profit in the Japanese attack on America in World War II?

The US was blocking Japanese access to oil and other vital resources they didn't have on their island. Or do you think Japan hated the US for it's freedom?

TnTComic
Where was the profit in Mogadishu? Where was the profit in Bosnia?

True, those on the surface were horrible examples of ethnic cleansing. However at the heart of ethnic cleansing is "my neighbor has neat stuff" the fact that the neighbor has the wrong gods, skin tone or language is just an excuse to take his stuff.

TnTComic
Where was the profit in the American role in World War I?

Now that's a good point. Woody Wilson was such a huge anglophile that he just wanted to go and help out the British because he worshiped them so much and the idea of them losing to the Huns was just unbearable. The war itself of course was over land and alliances. But true, the US part in it was just plain stupid.

TnTComic
In the Civil War?

The north, which had majorities in the House, was placing high tariffs on imports to make the south purchase more expensive manufactured goods from them instead of cheaper ones from England and France. Slavery was brought up later on when Abe needed a moral quality to his war for capitalist oppression.

TnTComic
In the Revolutionary War?

Revolutions are fought over the formation of new countries. Huge amounts of land, industry and valuable resources are at stake. Sure it's wrapped up in imagery of liberty and fraternity and such but at it's heart is the desire of a few to rule over the people like the old rulers have been doing.

Mister Mxyzptlk

TnTComic
In the Revolutionary War?

Revolutions are fought over the formation of new countries. Huge amounts of land, industry and valuable resources are at stake. Sure it's wrapped up in imagery of liberty and fraternity and such but at it's heart is the desire of a few to rule over the people like the old rulers have been doing.

That's pretty cynical.

And I'm a cynic.