Replies

"If the public knew cities would be destroyed they would overwhelming support invasion of NK."

Perhaps if the public were informed of the seriousness of the threat, they'd give some support. Thus far, the issue has been entirely swept under the rug. President Clinton signed the Agreed Framework and then pretended North Korea no longer existed, and President Bush fired out some angry rhetoric publicly, then asked the North Koreans if they'd like to have a little chat about this whole nuclear weapons thing. Meanwhile, the North Koreans have been openly threatening war on the US, and have been threatening to destroy our allies in the area. We appear unwilling or unable to protect them, which looks real good to our other allies around the world who may be looking for our protection at some point in the near future. Since we're inept and paralyzed in the protection of South Korea, they've begun cozying up to Red China in an effort to get some sort of protection. China, in turn, has been working to aid high ranking North Korean defectors who are working to destabilize the regime, and has been lining up tons and tons of firepower along their North Korean border. (Ok, so the Chinese claim their military units are there for 'immigration control', but where are tanks, artillery, jet fighters, and bombers needed to control immigration? Who's jumping their border; the Incredible Hulk?)

"no President will perform an all-out invasion of NK unless they attack first."

The North Koreans won't attack first unless their first-strike capability is such that they can vaporize their enemies. Even then, it'll take someone slightly nuttier than Kim Jong-il to go ahead with it. However, if Kim Jong-il feels his rule is threatened - militarily or economically - then he'll likely launch a massive first strike with every bomb, missile, and man he's got to propel himself into the history books. If he's going down, he wants himself immortalized.

"Seoul has 9.5M people. No one in their right mind would just write them off."

Certainly not, but if I were the leader of South Korea, I'd quietly start evacuations now and very quietly ask the US to come up with a plan to end the North Korean crisis as soon as possible. I'm not entirely writing off the city, but unless the North Korean military basically en masse refuses to fight (very unlikely due to Kim Jong-il's regime's 1984ish tactics), it's unlikely that much of the city will survive even a few days of war.

"So there will have to be a smarter way via SWAT teams, perhaps targeted cruise missle strikes (much of their operation, however, is underground) etc."

If we're finding it difficult just to get HUMINT in and out of North Korea, I highly doubt we're going to be anywhere nearly as effective as we'd like in getting sabotage teams to have the success necessary to save us all a lot of trouble. We tried that approach with Saddam, and the CIA was embarrassed a number of times by Iraqi intelligence, which wasn't much to write home about. The worst of which was when the Iraqis called the CIA on their own radios to tell them not to expect the speedy return of the agents sent into Iraq.

As for cruise missiles, you highlighted just one problem with them. Clinton wowed us all with his frequent use of cruise missile attacks against enemies. Wowed, of course, because they were so incredibly ineffective. What was it President Bush said? Sending a million dollar missile to blow up a ten dollar tent and hit a camel in the butt? They're great for taking out wide-open military targets that are readily identifiable from the air and from space, and they're effective as part of an integrated campaign. What they cannot do is take out embedded targets, camouflaged targets that aren't identified, or win any war for you. At best, they're useful for softening up hard targets so that air power can soften them more, so that ground units can come in and win with far less resistance. Even that is severely limited by North Korea's terrain and preparation. They've been expecting superior American air power for the past 50 years and have prepared very appropriately. We could carpet bomb the northern end of the DMZ with MOABs and we'd still not get all their emplacements.

"I just hope someone in this admin has a plan because we have a serious problem here and in Iran."

I hope so too, but I'm not seeing it. We did a good job of planning with Afghanistan, and a good job of planning the conventional war against the Iraqi government's military forces. Otherwise, we don't seem to be doing much of anything about Syria, Iran, or North Korea. I think that it's no coincidence that we're seeing China and Russia allying against us. They've been quietly supplying weapons and technologies to North Korea and Iran for a number of years, but now that we've shown weakness in not dealing with many of the situations that have developed, they're openly defying US power. I think we need to yank our troops and equipment away from NATO commitments (let some of our 'allies' handle these never ending missions) and start really slamming some of the countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea, that have been causing us so many headaches.