REGIME-CHANGE NOT REALLY PEACEFUL? Max Boot, a regular hawk contributor to USATODAY, offers a plausible proposal (23OCT) for dealing with North Korea: neither attacking it, nor allowing its nuclear program. We should, says Boot, try to encourage 'peaceful' regime change,by further undermining N.K's faltering economy. However:
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Some parts of Boot's proposal are absurd; no neighbors will increase the numbers of N.K. refugees that they will accept. Nor will China back a proposal to cut off all food aid (thus worsening the starvation that Boot and Bush pretend to find so shocking). That would increase the unwelcome flow of refugees into China. Bankrupting N.K. further, by harassing N.K.'s shipping (pretending to seek illegal exports) may not get the backing of China or Russia, both of whom have overland export-routes to offer N.K.
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Why would we want to increase misery in N.K., on the wan hope we can get the people to throw out their admittedly unsavory rulers? If the policy did work, the desperately threatened rulers might conceivably launch a (suicidal) first-strike attack [for which they are awesomely prepared] on always-hated Japan (our subservient ally) and on our 40 thousand vulnerable troops in South Korea. That might please the Bush-team, which seems to try to provoke N.K. into a first-strike (e.g., by personal insults hurled repeatedly at their leader by our President, for God's sake!)--a first-strike which would justify our nuclear strike at N.K.
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It's not clear that even such a nuke retaliation would eliminate the N.K. threat. Their n-plants are probably buried deep under mountains (the North Koreans may be the world's champion tunnelers!) so their survivors could retaliate against us 'from their grave'--by offering plutonium to terrorists to use in 'dirty bombs' here, or by offering them designer war-germs--or both.
And of course the 40 thousand Americans might well perish in the first day of conflict. That risk seems not to concern the Bush-team.
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It seems hard, but our only sensible alternative now is to let the N.K. regime go ahead and build a few nukes, even to sell them to other naughty nations. (After all, Russia and China have hundreds or thousands of nukes available for possible sale. The dream of 'non-proliferation' is quite dead.) These nukes would never be used by any nation as first-strike weapons against America, for fear of our dreadful retaliation.
N.K. already have a few nukes, anyway, if they want to donate them to terrorists--and by the time the regime changed, they'd have more..What's more, the NEXT regime might want nukes! (That's why Bushie-Sharonista Woolsey screams, in WallStreetJournal, that we must invade N.K. right away!)
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The Bush-team may worry that other nations could have a second-strike deterrent against our imperial threats; they don't want any more nations to be able to say [as China and France can say now] , "You can destroy us in a day; but 'from our grave' we could MAIM your vulnerable homeland--so IF you're sane, you won't want to attack us--so we don't have to yield to your imperial decrees."
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That's the most likely explanation for the Bushies' incredibly ferocious attitude to North Korea--when we are already rather entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq.