{"id":3290,"date":"2010-11-25T17:31:16","date_gmt":"2010-11-25T22:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3290"},"modified":"2010-11-29T10:39:48","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T15:39:48","slug":"are-we-ready-for-another-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/11\/25\/are-we-ready-for-another-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we ready for another war?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons the Iraq War is such a dismaying conflict is that it has left us unprepared — emotionally and culturally, if not in practical terms — for a war of actual necessity.<\/p>\n

Last week, North Korea shelled an island owned by one of our allies, South Korea, killing civilians without provocation.\u00a0 In the same week, a scientist was given a surprise tour of an elaborate new North Korean nuclear facility.<\/p>\n

No one — not the most dovish American — has any doubts that Kim Jong-Il, the dictator of North Korea, is a megalomaniacal sociopath.<\/p>\n

His treatment of his own people makes the Sudan and Iraq look like amateur-hour.\u00a0 Imagine if Cambodia’s Pol Pot had managed to secure permanent power and you have some idea of just how wretched this man is.<\/p>\n

And he’s developing a sizable nuclear arsenal.\u00a0 Super.<\/p>\n

If you’re like me, the prospect of taking on another power-mad lunatic, putting our young men and women in harm’s way, is about as appetizing as chewing glass.<\/p>\n

And most non-partisan experts on the conflict say military brinksmanship here is not a viable option.\u00a0 This from the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone would conclude that the peaceful approach is best to reverse the situation,\u201d said Moon Jung-in, a politics professor at Yonsei University in Seoul and a former adviser in the Roh administration. \u201cA hard-line approach is not a real option.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But while South Koreans and the vast majority of Americans (myself included) prefer to back away from the nightmare of another full-scale war on the peninsula, North Korea may have a very different agenda.<\/p>\n

Last March, North Korea sank a South Korean warship.\u00a0 As Kim Jong-Il’s Mad-Hatter Stalinist society slouches into another brutal, starvation-wracked winter, the potential for irrational behavior will only grow.<\/p>\n

We’ve learned how horrific a single suicide bomber can be.<\/p>\n

What if that suicide bomber were governing an entire country, with a sizable, nuclear-armed military?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the reasons the Iraq War is such a dismaying conflict is that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[882],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}