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UPDATE 2: U.S. Chooses Sides

South Korea has halted all trade with North Korea and announced it will seek U.N. sanctions (which N. Korea has previously threatened to interpret as an act of war). The White House responded decisively, promising "unequivocal" support to S. Korea. The U.S. has vowed to back all measures requested of the U.N., bolster S. Korean defenses and initiate joint military exercises.

This is undoubtedly the most resolved and militant posture yet adopted by President Obama. The White House has thrown its weight behind a S. Korean decision which N. Korea promised would lead to war.

The U.S. has thus called N. Korea's bluff. The next play goes to China, which must consider how to vote on a potential Security Council resolution to punish N. Korea. Thus far, every player at the table has upped the ante during his respective turn - and no one has flinched yet.

UPDATE: North Korea has threatened military action in response to the alleged trespasses of South Korean ships into Northern waters during the past week. N. Korea's military is now "on combat alert."

Seems the North doesn't want to wait its turn. I assume calmer minds will simply ignore this fist-pounding, but such likely-baseless claims and temper-tantrum posturing is revealing of the school-yard-bully-mentality governing North Korea.

UPDATE 2: North Korea has severed all ties with South Korea, closing off the country's air and water ways, expelling South Koreans from "a joint industrial complex just inside the North where about 120 South Korean companies employ about 40,000 North Koreans," and "totally abrogat[ing] the agreement on nonaggression between the north and the south and completely halt[ing] the inter-Korean cooperation."

Abrogating the agreement on nonaggression. I believe that makes the third time this week North Korea has declared war on South Korea. 

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Discussions - 15 Comments

"school-yard-bully-mentality" - Hey, that's good! Did you borrow that from Sarah Palin?

Right on though; I bet for the next thing N. Korea will make a "pre-emptive strike" against the alleged threat that S. Korea poses. Maybe they'll make some sexed-up charges about WMDs or something to justify it....

So far, it's only brave words. Let's see how Obama does when the nutjob of the North starts slinging artillery shells.

Let us hope that our leaders adjudicate this with wisdom

Do you have anything to say about the situation at hand?

Well, a Korean conflict would be bad. For one thing, it could be the eventual end of our Navy as an independent service of any great significance. I don't expect that to make sense, but it does.

The left will soon be running out of despotic regimes with which to compare the United States. What then?

quick, everyone buy brown borthers, root and Harriman stock now.

Brown Brothers Harriman is not a publicly traded firm. Why would we buy stock in it even if it was?

I'll tell you what Craig thinks we should do. Surrender. That's always his answer because he is an enemy of America just like Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

You have confounded Craig with Julius Rosenberg, who had a passably formulated set of ends and means.

Someone devoted to observing and understanding aspects of his social world does not respond to a report indicating a war may be imminent by tossing off an irrelevant insult about Sarah Palin. The class cut-up does not do that either, because he has a sense of the apposite.

I was being sarcastic. suggesting that the military industrial/banking complex was licking their lips at the prospects of world war 3. Brown Brothers Root and Harriman are not a publicly traded company, but they popped into my head due to their dubious history of landering Nazi Money.
I have a friend teaching in South Korea so I am hoping its all posturing. I don't understand what either side has to gain, and that leads me back to the banks who always seem to make out well when war comes. What is the old saying: buy at the sound of gunfire, sell at the sound of trumpets?

Brown Brothers Harriman had some business dealings between 1931 and 1942 with a German industrial concern called Thyssen. How this gets transmogrified in your head to 'laundering Nazi money' only you know.

As for the rest, why don't you read Birch Society literature? It's more coherent.

Belmont Club posts what Richard Fernandez claims to be the plan for an invasion of North Korea. I would say, of there is a plan, but he begins the piece saying that prior to 9/11 we had no such plan for Afghanistan. Why would we? North Korea is something else, in so many ways.

https://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/05/25/the-ghost-of-donald-rumsfeld/

Many years ago, John Roche wrote a column give (by the Gannett papers) "Having Plans is Nothing New". The burden of it was that a general staff is employed to...produce contingency plans. He recalled that in 1940 there was one on file for responses to a hypothesized joint invasion by Britain and Japan. We have been in a state of belligerency with North Korea since 1950. I would hope we had a plan.

I think I may have read that article. I remember a few years back newspapers going a little crazy because we had military contingency plans to invade -- I don't remember what country, China, Russia, Cuba, someplace. Why wouldn't we?

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