I've got family in Korea, some of them in South Korean military units likely to be among the first to take the brunt of an assault, and one of my relatives had been in a South Korean special forces unit whose mission, in the event of the invasion for which they regularly trained, included things which he knew full well would not be survivable. His mission basically was to make sure Korea still existed for his family, because everybody knew he'd never be coming back.
So yes, maybe my judgment is problematic. Many of yours would be too if we were talking about the ramp-up to World War II and you had relatives in Poland, Belgium or France (I don't add the Netherlands because the Dutch wrongly thought their neutrality would protect them, as it had in World War I, until Hitler actually invaded).
We can't be Neville Chamberlains, burying our heads in the sand about the North Korean threat, but we also can't act as if it would be a cakewalk. Please listen to Mariner. He's right... the North Korean military when his father was fighting in 1950 was far worse than its current condition, and they fought bitterly then with much less than they have today, and didn't have the “benefit” of six decades of Communist indoctrination to brainwash soldiers into obeying orders.
As Mariner said, “them little buggars can fight.” That's especially true if the North Korean sergeants and platoon leaders know that they'll suffer a far more painful death than an American bullet if they don't follow their orders to attack. We had lots of POWs and defectors from North Korea during the Korean War, caused largely by people who had lived under communism for only a few years — North Korean soldiers today have gone through three generations of communism and know nothing else.
Yes, I understand that a brutalized soldier does not mean a well-disciplined soldier, but what it does mean is that a soldier who is trained brutally will fight brutally — and the North Koreans have numbers of personnel and equipment unlike anything we've faced since Vietnam, and probably since the Korean War. Having American high tech weapons and a radio and GPS to call in American air strikes is great, but if you have a hundred half-crazed Norks running at you who (unlike most Iraqis) have been trained to aim their rifles well, what may count more than anything else is raw numbers.
I understand that the North Korean dictatorship is not Nazi Germany. I also understand, after listening to many things my father-in-law told me about fighting as a South Korean soldier in the Korean War, just how vicious the North Korean Communists were. The civilians in my family have told me what it was like to have Communists enter their village and do the things Communists do.
But let's drop all that. Let's say the North Koreans attack, we don't send one single American soldier over there, and the South Koreans handle it all themselves after President Obama turns tail and orders all our military out as fast as they can flee.
Imagine the economic crisis. Korea is not what it was in 1950. South Korea is one of the world's larger economies, and it's a huge supplier of electronics not just to the United States but to the rest of the world.
The nation is quite affluent by world standards, even those of Europe. According to the CIA World Factbook, South Korea ranked just behind Japan in per-capita GDP, not far behind Canada, France, the UK, Germany and most of the Scandinavian countries. It is somewhat ahead of Israel, Spain, and Italy, and considerably ahead of a number of Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic countries. In raw economic size, South Korea is the world's 12th largest economy, behind the United States, China, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, the UK, France, India, and Mexico, but ahead of Spain, Canada, Indonesia, and all the rest of Europe.
So even in the best of situations with an entirely South Korean response that quickly knocks out North Korea in a few weeks or months, we're going to have one of the world's major industrialized economies basically eliminated as a consumer of American goods and as a producer of civilian goods for the rest of the world. North Korea will be far more difficult to reintegrate into a capitalist system than East Germany ever was, and there will be massive destruction of factories and cities on both sides of the border, with hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and utter chaos for years.
Yes, the North Koreans are literally starving. Their equipment is falling apart. It's no match for top-scale American technology or South Korean technology, and many more of their soldiers will die.
But the battle will still be devastating to the civilian economy. Look what knocking out only two buildings of the World Trade Center and adjacent structures did to New York City's economy, and then imagine the consequences of hundreds of 1960s-era artillery shells landing on Seoul.
Economically, it doesn't make much difference if the North Korean military is wiped off the map if Seoul and Inchon are in flames from a major artillery barrage, with missiles hitting points farther south such as Taegu and maybe the industrial heartland of Pusan, with ten million people or more internally displaced. And that's all assuming none of the North Korean longer-range missiles manage to hit Tokyo or somewhere else in Japan.
Mutually assured destruction presumes that both parties are sane and rational, and don't want to see themselves destroyed. I'm not convinced we're dealing with rational people in North Korea, and they are militarily capable of doing tremendous damage.
I have no doubt that we will win a second Korean War if the Chinese don't intervene — although we would have won the first Korean War without the Chinese, too. More important, I have very little doubt that the South Koreans can take care of themselves if the United States government won't act.
But what will that do to the world economy? We have not had a full-scale war in an industrialized nation since the end of World War II, and having exported much of our manufacturing capacity to China, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia, I'm not naive about the damage that the loss of even South Korea manufacturing capacity and markets will do to our economy — and that's assuming China doesn't decide to do something to shut down our manufacturing plants in China or wreck the American economy through some other tactic.
Bottom line: North Korea is a serious threat. Yes, we'll win, but at what cost?
Has anyone ever told you that you ramble too much?
Your position is that of the typical liberal coward.
North Korea has to be spanked.