WAR WITH NORTH KOREA….AND THE SOONER THE BETTER….Rod Dreher at The Corner is unsure if he approves of the Bush administration’s latest appeasement of North Korea:
CNN is now reporting that the United States has “temporarily” halted recon flights over international waters off North Korea, following Sunday’s intercept by Dear Leader’s MiGs….Now, if we’re taking the temporary break to steel ourselves for the possibility of imminent war with North Korea, fine….
Huh? This is OK, but only if it means we’re about to go to war with North Korea?
Have these people gone completely insane? So far the administration has not even been willing to talk to North Korea ? George Bush was “off-the-wall angry” when his own deputy secretary of state suggested it ? let alone do anything else to try and defuse the crisis. But Dreher thinks it’s already past time to go to war?
I’m under no illusions about either Kim Jong-il’s intentions or the odiousness of his regime, but the fact is that he’s been remarkably consistent in his demands: he wants bilateral talks with the U.S., and he wants them because he wants to negotiate a nonagression treaty with us. So let’s give him one. It’s just a piece of paper, after all, and it certainly wouldn’t prevent us from defending South Korea or anyone else if North Korea launched an attack.
Does it not also strike Dreher that perhaps our allies in the region, who would surely suffer the brunt of any North Korean aggression, should have some say in the matter? Are Japan and South Korea now to be placed in the same bucket as France and Germany, just another pair of weakling appeasers to be mocked liked a bookworm schoolkid and ignored whenever they disagree with us? Is there any check at all on American force that they believe in any longer?
UPDATE: Jeez, I hope Dreher doesn’t see this Political Strikes cartoon. It might just send him completely around the bend.
