Michael Totten ponders:
Kim almost certainly isn’t serious, but what if he is? How would we know? His attention-seeking theatrics are identical to the behavior of a lunatic hell-bent on blowing the region apart. If war breaks out next month, everyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the Korean Peninsula will slap their forehead and see, with the clarity of hindsight, that every warning we could possibly need, want, and expect was right there in front of us.
The North Korean military is nothing like Saddam Hussein’s or Moammar Qaddafi’s. Pyongyang has such an enormous array of artillery batteries targeting South Korea (the capital, Seoul, is only 30 or so miles away from the border) that hundreds of thousands of people could be killed over the weekend. North Korea would eventually lose at the hands of South Korea and the United States. It would be finished forever as a state. But the cost in lives would be unspeakable.
He has more to say right here, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but I will say this: we probably have a very good idea whether he’s serious, because we are almost certainly listening in on almost all the regime’s communications. It is plausible I suppose that the Obama administration is receiving warnings from people at the listening posts and is just not listening, but unlike those with Presidential Deranagement Syndrome (my new term for people with an unhinged hatred for whoever happens to be President at the moment, as there appears to always be a subset of such people in American politics no matter what) I am not inclined to think that even the slightly dovish Obama is likely to just ignore warnings that a lunatic is about to launch an all-out attack.
Of course I’ve made plain for some time now what I think the solution is to this; it is pretty much a given in my estimation that our intelligence services know with pinpoint precision where most of the North Korean artillery and missile launchers are and we probably have the ability to take most of it out very very quickly, and furthermore, we will probably be able to hear any communications they have making any such plans. I suppose we could get caught with our pants down but probably not, and frankly, as bloody-minded as it may make me sound, I honestly hope Kim III really is that insane and really does try it; something and someone needs to destroy that regime, and I’d like an excuse to see it done in my lifetime. Mass jamming their communications and taking out most of their weaponry capable of hitting Seoul, then just sitting on the border and waiting and inviting them to come over peacefully any time they want seems like the best option to me. But I remain cynical that anything like it will really happen.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.