Can we bomb them yet?

[Melchiah]

Beckwin, chill out man.

[hagun]

Never gonna happen. North Korea is going to start the next major war - bank on it.

Exactly. North Korea is the new 1940 Germany minus the Jewish scapegoat though you could say that western culture replaces Jewish bigotry to a certain extent.

At any rate, a good bombing should snap them back to reality. However, this will create a chain reaction that will escalate into WW3. As history repeats itself sickingly close every few decades and as most struggling, modernizing nations would rather spend all their resources on building guns and bombs instead of logically building socio-economic stability, the world is again ripe for global scaled loss of life and development.

Heh, forced artificial natural selection.

[Plow]

Where the oil ends up has nothing to do with who is profiting, the US invaded Iraq so they could control the oil, put in corporations and sell it to Iraq's customers.

Except, no.

U.S. companies profited from construction and repairs, not from "harvesting" oil.

[510Meeze]

As history repeats itself sickingly close every few decades and as most struggling, modernizing nations would rather spend all their resources on building guns and bombs instead of logically building socio-economic stability, the world is again ripe for global scaled loss of life and development.

And I think this problem falls onto the US' lap. The world faces a lot of problems in places like the middle east, asia and africa (but who cares about africa, there are no resources there). And the problem is that these places still have a very tribal way of thinking, strongly based on their religious beliefs. Even the more peaceful tribes have to gear up for war, because their enemies are, and creates a snowball effect. Then the tribes are part of a nation who has a problem with them, so both those nations are gearing up and so on.

Now I know the US isn't the world police, but someone has to be it. You can't let these problems go unchecked because they become, well, North Korea.

I had dinner with Brando Crespi the other day, and we were talking about stopping deforestation in Brazil (his organization started there), and he talked about how you can't just put a fence up and expect the farmers to not cut down for their farms, you need to educate and give them another alternative. The problem, the farmer needs to be ready for this alternative, if he has his mind set that chopping down more forest is what he needs to do to survive, he's going to do it.

It's the same with third world countries arming themselves first. You can't tell any of them no, because they come from violent societies, whether it be country v country, or tribe v tribe (civil war). Something needs to click with the leaders in these places in order for change to happen. It has happened for the most part in western society, and hopefully we can figure out how to get into these countries' heads that they don't need to buy up all of these arms.

[510Meeze]

Except, no.

U.S. companies profited from construction and repairs, not from "harvesting" oil.

The way I understand, the oil is sold by an Iraqi organization with US administrators. They give out contracts (to US companies) for extracting and protecting the oil fields. Haven't seen evidence yet, but they're probably overspending leaving the actual Iraqi's with little profit. Everything is done by the US, and they cut the Iraqi people a check when the oil is sold.

[hagun]

It's the same with third world countries arming themselves first. You can't tell any of them no, because they come from violent societies, whether it be country v country, or tribe v tribe (civil war). Something needs to click with the leaders in these places in order for change to happen. It has happened for the most part in western society, and hopefully we can figure out how to get into these countries' heads that they don't need to buy up all of these arms.

Pretty good insight. It always fascinated me by how fascinated developing countries were with obtaining arms. You could have their populace starving into oblivion yet getting bigger and more destructive arms always stays at the top of the list as if paratrooping, highly trained and specialized monkeys armed with nuclear arms and standard issued double REPLICA Snatch prop guns would invade at any given moment.

[Plow]

The infrastructure was already there, we just blew it up and paid Cheney's friends to fix it afterwards.

It wasn't even until March of this year that the Iraqis allowed foreign interests to pass 49% of control, meaning we, and the rest of the world, had virtually no meaningful input into decisions until then.

[Therin]

I'm for bombing NK if we can do it swiftly and quickly and end the conflict without sending out American soldiers to the field, because that would be a massacre. SK shouldn't even be at risk if the campaign is done right.

[Beckwin]

My reference to past civilizations pertains to the attitude that the US is this evil monster destroying the world, when in fact in terms of the history of civilizations (even a few hundred years ago) the US isn't that bad.

Thanks for skipping the rest of my post, I guess you probably ran off to prepare for China being the "super power" when the US loses it, cause things are going to be real fucked up, hello Tibet.

I've seen figures pegging the US at 10,000,000 lives. Not exactly sure how that compares to Rome or Greece, but hey.

[510Meeze]

The infrastructure was already there, we just blew it up and paid Cheney's friends to fix it afterwards.

It wasn't even until March of this year that the Iraqis allowed foreign interests to pass 49% of control, meaning we, and the rest of the world, had virtually no meaningful input into decisions until then.

The US ran the controlling arm of the Iraqi Govt that controlled the oil, I think thats having meaningful input The Washington Monthly

[510Meeze]

I've seen figures pegging the US at 10,000,000 lives. Not exactly sure how that compares to Rome or Greece, but hey.

Considering there was only between 100-500m people in the world at the time, I would guess not that many. Can you link the figures for me, I'd like to see what they peg the US for.

I'm for bombing NK if we can do it swiftly and quickly and end the conflict without sending out American soldiers to the field, because that would be a massacre. SK shouldn't even be at risk if the campaign is done right.

The problem is that war is a business that the US is involved in. The US doesn't spend money on defense because we can quell any uprising with what they have, They spend money on defense because senators and governors and house reps have companies in their back yard that will get the fat contract when one is put up for bid. The only way to sell this to the American is for them to see dead soldiers.

The American public also believes that bombing raids swell the innocent civilian death toll. While a bomb will kill more innocents, the conflict may be completed faster. Look at the 8 year conflict in Iraq, about 100k civilians have been killed. A strong bombing campaign may have ended the war a long time ago, it also would of cause more infrastructure damage to the country that we are obviously financially interested in, so there is another face to the war.

[rezn0r]

nuke ourselves just to confuse them

[Rhinox]

nuke ourselves just to confuse them

lol that would show those gooks

[Baha]

There is no way a preemptive strike will knock out Nk's artillery. Not nearly all of it anyway. First Gulf War is probably the best example of a well-executed, large scale preemptive airstrike. The first targets were mostly infrastructure: radar sites, palaces and airfields. Iraq fired Scuds into Israel as a reprisal, and it took weeks to destroy all the Scud launchers, some even requiring ground operations.

Now add 13,000 pieces of artillery to the short-range missiles, and you're fucked. Artillery's just as mobile as Scud launchers, their firerate is much higher, and NK is not an open desert/shooting range like Iraq. You can't even hope for bad accuracy like the Scuds on Israel, the range is much shorter, and artilelry will likely be trained on Seoul year round.

At the very, very best it'll take days to knock out NK, and artillery doesn't need nearly that much to blow the hell out of Seoul.

[Beckwin]

here's one link that starts delving into the lesser reported death tolls of the 20th century, but this isn't exclusively at the hands of the US:

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls

As you can see, the Vietnam conflict alone claimed 3.5million lives, and most of those can be easily linked to US action or causal relationships. Gulf War 1 and the following sanctions claimed over 500k. Tack on another 100,000 or so for the current Iraq War. There's also the decimation of the Native American populations, deaths due to slavery, etc. I'll work on finding the articles that discuss a cumulative kill count for the US.

The point I'd like to make is that the US only appears to be less brutal out of necessity. As products of their respective eras, the Greeks/Romans/etc not just could glorify death and conquest, but were so often more politically successful by doing so, appealing to a completely different mindset on the value of life and different religious beliefs while the US cannot outwardly glorify it while maintaining political viability at home or abroad. However there were eras in American history where brutality was tolerable and indeed was glorified- slavery, Manifest Destiny, Mexican-American War, and so on... mainly along racial lines. those with lesser developed civilizations and "tribal" minds were killed in scores and we championed it as a service to them and our divine right. Frankly some of that attitude still manifests today, but we're witnessing a trend of growing aversion to barbarism.

[Priran]

use nukes

and if that doesn't work, use more nukes

[510Meeze]

here's one link that starts delving into the lesser reported death tolls of the 20th century, but this isn't exclusively at the hands of the US:

Twentieth Century Atlas - Death Tolls

As you can see, the Vietnam conflict alone claimed 3.5million lives, and most of those can be easily linked to US action or causal relationships. Gulf War 1 and the following sanctions claimed over 500k. Tack on another 100,000 or so for the current Iraq War. There's also the decimation of the Native American populations, deaths due to slavery, etc. I'll work on finding the articles that discuss a cumulative kill count for the US.

The point I'd like to make is that the US only appears to be less brutal out of necessity. As products of their respective eras, the Greeks/Romans/etc not just could glorify death and conquest, but were so often more politically successful by doing so, appealing to a completely different mindset on the value of life and different religious beliefs while the US cannot outwardly glorify it while maintaining political viability at home or abroad. However there were eras in American history where brutality was tolerable and indeed was glorified- slavery, Manifest Destiny, Mexican-American War, and so on... mainly along racial lines. those with lesser developed civilizations and "tribal" minds were killed in scores and we championed it as a service to them and our divine right. Frankly some of that attitude still manifests today, but we're witnessing a trend of growing aversion to barbarism.

The link you posted shows that during the phase of the Vietnam war that the US was involved in came to 1.7m deaths (3.5m was the whole Indochina War) with 1m going to the Vietcong. So the US can take credit for the 1m (everyone else were really bad shots).

"those with lesser developed civilizations and "tribal" minds were killed in scores and we championed it as a service to them and our divine right."

I like this quote because this will happen when/if China takes over as the super power. They haven't developed their way of thinking as far as we have, and still feel there is a divine power given to them. The "trend of growing aversion to barbarism" is something that the western world has done, the rest of the world is very much dog eat dog.

I think losing that thinking to avert mass killing in the "super power" mode of thought is a dangerous thing that will set the world back 300 years.

Someone said China wouldn't back North Korea on this, that may be true, but they also aren't going to be first in line to back up the US if something kicks off.

We need to promote forward thinking, but at the same time, we need to communicate with undeveloped countries in their language, and thats violence.

[Plow]

The US ran the controlling arm of the Iraqi Govt that controlled the oil, I think thats having meaningful input The Washington Monthly

The key to that article is this:

As for who's getting the lion's share of the revenue, it's impossible to say. The CPA keeps a very tight lid on their books, and I'm not sure anyone outside the government truly knows for sure where the oil revenue goes or what it's spent on. However, it is spent on reconstruction, and since the reconstruction contracts are mostly in the hands of large Anglo-American companies, and these companies appear to employ very few Iraqis, it's a pretty good guess that the bulk of the money is going to....Anglo-American companies and the citizens of their respective countries.

Even the oil profits make their way to U.S. hands via construction and repairs.


Anyway, the only way this really relates to the topic and hand is this:

It's not the resource (i.e. the oil in Iraq, and lack thereof in NK), it's the raw money the country controls as a result of the resource.

In other words, N.K. isn't "not worth it" to the croneys because we can't go in and steal their resources directly, it's because if/when we have to go in and rebuild, they don't have any way to pay for the construction.


Edit: Also, give me 30 minutes with current U.S. intel and I'll develop a plan of attack that will eliminate 99% of NK's threatening capability to anyone outside their borders within the first 30 seconds to a minute.

Call it America Fuck Yeah ism all you like, our military capabilities are light years ahead of what the vast majority of us can even fathom.


I'm not saying "we can do it" is an argument that we should, I'm saying "we can't do it well enough" is the worst possible argument you can come up with for why we shouldn't.

[Beckwin]

I hope you're trolling at this point; your assessment of the non-white world is bigoted, grossly generalizing, and disgusting.

The aversion to barbarism is a popular idea among people, and believe me, it's not exclusive to whites/Westerners. However, it is still something not embraced by all Western governments, particularly our own. Have you been paying attention the last 8 years? Large civilian casualties, torture, etc. So the argument that things are gonna get barbaric if China steps up as the world power is ridiculous, because things are already barbaric. My point was strictly about the presentation of our barbarism these days.

Our domestic spin machine is quite good. It's produced popular consent and general complacency regarding all kinds of slaughter in our country's past and present. In many parts of the world, however, the actions of the US government have been seen in a much more negative light. You need to consider other perspectives, especially with your theoretical China scenario: in that sense, there'd really be no difference, because you could bet your ass that their spin and propagandizing is on par with our own, which would lead to Chinese with parallel thoughts to your own- China's not bad compared to past brutality (they'd talk about how awful Japan was); these other nations only respond to violence and we have to do what we have to do.

And I'd argue that an aversion to barbarism and encouragement of non-violence was propagated in modernity by a little brown man from India, and then championed at home by a black man from the south. And then you mention Tibet... hi there, Dalai Lama. And how about that dark-skinned, "tribal minded" guy from South Africa? On that note, there's scores more notable popular figures against barbarism from Asia, Africa, and South America, but they are marginalized in the scope of our centric educations and public discourse.

On that note, observe other isntances of barbarism in recent times... The Troubles in Ireland, Bosnia/Herzegovinia, Chechnya, various other Russian conflicts... your generalizations are now bordering on absurd, because now we're getting to white-on-white conflicts. Sure, there are less occurences in the Western world (internally, at least) but that's fairly attributable to less poverty and better standards of living. Now consider where a lot of that wealth and those standards were built from...

it's late here and I'm starting to lose coherency in this post, but I hope to Darwin that you're starting to pick up on this all.

[Beckwin]

plow, some articles for you:

North Korea: The War Game - The Atlantic (July/August 2005)
Inside America’s (Mock) Attack on North Korea | Danger Room | Wired.com
Foreign Policy: Is North Korea a Paper Tiger?

Please reconsider your America-fuck-yeah-ism stance. There's no doubt that NK would lose, but there's little doubt there would be carnage on both sides. You're basically asking to fight the VC again, except they have a big opening barrage.