Could george bush have been this patient with north korea in the face of all these rascally rants? Is Obama doing the right ignoring the hitler type leader and not striking firt?

redsun: Could george bush have been this patient with north korea in the face of all these rascally rants? Is Obama doing the right ignoring the hitler type leader and not striking firt?

...but why should America "strike first"? America will strike if there is a real, present threat - not just the blabbings of a boy on a power rush.

He needs to be disarmed. He is a certified lunatic with weapons of mass destruction. If left unchecked, he w ill definitely harm him self and millions of other innocent people.

Every time I see him only tv, he reminds me of hitler, a psychopath with the destinies of millions in his sick hands

The nuclear confrontation began two decades ago.

In 1994, it brought the small, crowded, heavily urbanised Korean peninsula close to a potentially cataclysmic war.

In the Spring of that year, the Clinton administration seriously considered air strikes on North Korea's small nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.

US military chiefs planned a massive reinforcement of American military forces in South Korea - a process that risked provoking the pre-emptive North Korean strike that it was designed to forestall.

After months of crisis, Washington finally agreed to direct talks with Pyongyang - a long term North Korean goal - and an agreement was reached that traded a nuclear freeze for economic aid diplomatic concessions.

It is debatable who blinked first. But two decades later, North Korea has a small and possibly growing stockpile of nuclear weapons - and the United States no longer contemplates going to war to stop it.

Kim Jong-il was celebrated in North Korea as a military genius who had humbled a superpower.

He also claimed a famous victory during another major confrontation with the US in 2002.

President George W Bush accused him publicly of cheating on the nuclear freeze - by developing a separate uranium enrichment programme - and spoke of North Korea as part of an "axis of Evil" at a time when talk of regime change was much in the air in Washington.

North Korea scrapped the nuclear deal and threatened retribution and war.

But once again, the crisis ended in talks - this time with North Korea's neighbours at the table as well - including Russia and its principal backer, China.

While the talks dragged on inconclusively, North Korea built up its nuclear arsenal and missile technology.

The North Korean leadership appears to have drawn an important lesson from these experiences.

It concluded that threats of chaos and war - in the midst of one of the world's must dynamic industrial regions - would always force adversaries to back down and grant concessions.

The bluff requires two ingredients: North Korea's threats must be credible. The leadership in Pyongyang must appear wild and irrational enough to risk a suicidal war.

And, North Korea's adversaries - in effect the United States - must have ruled out the threat of war as an ingredient in coercive diplomacy.

That effectively happened in 1994, when the Pentagon looked at a potential war on the Korean peninsula and concluded that it would lead to hundreds of thousands of casualties in a few days, and the destruction of one of the world's largest cities.

The new leadership
Kim Jong-un appears in a hurry to establish his credentials as a military leader - and poker player - in the mould of his father and grandfather.


Unlike his father, Kim Jong-un has been keen to appear in public
He was unknown to the North Korean public just two years before he was appointed supreme ruler of the country and its million man army.

He now styles himself a great general, appearing in the front line and making very specific military threats - a dramatic contrast with his enigmatic father, who never made a public speech during his 17 years in power.

In the past, North Korea has relied on other regional players to lose their nerve and intervene with the United States, persuading it that war is too big a risk to take and that North Korea will respond well to incentives.

That may yet happen again. South Korea stands to lose the most from a conflict, Japan is within range of North Korean missiles and China wants to avoid chaos and the possible destruction of a buffer state on a key frontier.

But Kim Jong-un will first have to convince them that there is some substance to his threats.

His bellicose style and almost daily threats of war have gone well beyond the rhetoric employed by Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung.

Any military action would be sure to meet a determined response from South Korea and the United States.

China could yet intervene by cutting a crucial oil pipeline and other economic aid and trade if it concluded the new leader was out of control and bent on self destruction.

Kim Jong-un and his advisers are relying on an old script to bolster their position at home and abroad. It is far from clear that this time they will succeed.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22032246

Man is going to use his hands to destroy himself,fighting for what he doesn't own,forgetting that nature owns it all,including the infinitesimal man himself.

Why can't all man live together in peace?

redsun: Man is going to use his hands to destroy himself,fighting for what he doesn't own,forgetting that nature owns it all,including the infinitesimal man himself.

Why can't all man live together in peace?

This world lives on hypocrisy.
Your Oga at the top is the most hypocritical one in this world

Nice and informative post bookface, I am kind of hoping other countries would call N.Korea's bluff instead of asking the US for an amicable settlement.

Fatass kim jun-un with his fat jowls thinking he can bully everybody by threating war.