I don’t think they would need much help ether. South Koreans are great warriors.

I watched some of thier training and was quite impressed. What a lot of people dont know is that they had 50k troops in viet nam and were probably the most feared of all the troops there.

My uncle served in the same area of operation with some of the ROC Marines in Vietnam. He said they were mean as hell.

I trained with them a few times and they are much disciplined and highly motivated.

Hehe I am going to remember that quote :) since Unless bush pulls out a ballanced budget out of his ass, finds Osama in his ass, or in general stops being a dumb shit... I think the chances are quite good for one of the retreads to make it into office.

John Kerry (49%) and George W. Bush (48%) remain in a statistical dead heat among likely voters, according to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll

Flip a coin 2% or less and it is anyone’s election...any beats on a Constitutional crisis

Where were you at? I was at Camp Howze in 96. ROC guys are pretty badass. Even our Katusa's were tough nuts.

I gotta tackle this one. As badass as the roc army is, the north has some serious toys and a whole lot of arty up in the mountains, most of which can range in 10Km or so.

Odds are the DMZ is just going to get leveled with the amount of fire power both sides are throwing. The last plans I looked at showed 100% US casualties (for the in country troops) and 40-60% SK prior to the US counter attack.


---------------

And everyone is forgetting the big reason we have been relucant to tackle NK - China. That sleeping dragon is awful big.

They came to us, I am fortunate enough to not have been stationed in Korea;)


Humm... can't discuss war plans but as you have seen in Iraq CAS is spooky accurate now.

It is now time for you to stop calling yourself a liberal. Seriously. For the record, I didn't give a shit about Kosovo any more than I do Iraq; the difference is how it was approached and the cost, both monetary and human. Clinton didn't put a HALF MILLION ****ING GROUND TROOPS into Albania, he didn't trivialize the UN's procedure, and he sure as hell wouldn't have committed the military force that he did to it without at least some semblance of approval from the public, which by the way actually ELECTED him, as opposed to the Supreme Court appointee currently occupying the Oval Office. I'm glad you had a fun vacation in Iraq but now that my best friend is over there and the "operation" basically consists of standing around and getting suicide bombed, I'm a little more vehemently opposed to Bush and his shitheaded war supposedly on terror. Someone should tell him to bum rush the Saudis while we're in the neighborhood; they're more responsible for 9/11 than Hussein. I'm not being soft on Hussein at all but I'm saying I don't much give a shit about foreign policing when our own country here at home is getting ****ed by its leadership on a more insidious level.


I too am all for the ousting of dictators. Let's start with Bush.


You mean factcheck.com? :evilaugh: Come on, Halliburton doesn't even pay taxes in this country, you honestly think there isn't some loophole by which Cheney could still be in their pocket? I realize that I'm purely speculating on this, but I don't think that my reasons for suspicion are unfounded.


"That's great! When do we start bombing western Europe?" -Get Your War On
Operative word: companies. Not governments. I realize that line might have gotten a bit blurred in the States in the last four years, but you should still at least try to seem that you're making a distinction between private corporations and THE ****ING UN.

Ok let me get this straight... a forum run by a Libertarian has a PROFANITY FILTER? What is going on here?

Joe set up the forums and he's a Democrat :)
There are (I THINK) 3 words filtered

F U C K
O U T W A R
O C Z

My unqualified ramblings on politics:

It's interesting to see that "liberal" and "conservative" don't really apply to the Democrats or Republicans in their current form. Certainly the balooning national debt , the large troop commitments overseas, and the large increase in govt jobs (Homeland Security etc etc) aren't conservative.

The politics of the US are interesting because you have large sections of the country that belong to a party for very different reasons. Take the NW US Republicans: those are true conservatives who want low taxes, small govt, and to be left the hell alone to do what they wilt. Then take the SE US Republicans: those are "moral" conservatives who vote Republican largely over abortion and gay-rights and desires for things like prayer in schools instead of evolution. The same is certainly true for the Massachusetts Democrat vs. the Californian Democrat.

My personal opinion on Iraq is that it wasn't over oil or immediate profit as much as it was about drawing the terrorism and our foes into a location where they can fight it out with our soldiers instead of with our civilians and our infrastructure at home. Makes sense to me; I'd assume suicide bombers get first crack at the hot virgins for "expelling the infidels". It also give us a strong presence near Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran "just in case".

I have a fear that, barring an improvement in our economy, after the Jan Iraqi elections Bush will begin to quietly withdraw from Iraq and the country will collapse into civil war. I honestly don't know though if that's better or worse than a draft and a decade of war in the streets of Iraq*. It's just something I can see coming.

*This honestly seems more likely with Kerry president to me...

There are a little over 100,000 Troops in Iraq... Not even close to half a million. Note they are all volunteer warriors not conscripts.


You obviously have no idea what a real dictator is or how people suffer under one.

Speculation- is just that

The French and Russian governments where in bed with the BA'ATHIST as were officials in the UN. Why do you think the UN is dragging their feet investigating the allegations?

Do you believe in peace at any cost? :shrug:

it is apparent that rabid and reason are antithetical

tg - you are consistently spouting nonsense, exaggerations and ignorant statements as if they were fact
come to the party, the world is as it is - not as your imagination would have it

I agree with your overall observation of the political landscape in America.

I think no matter what happens to the economy we will remain in Iraq... failure there will follow us home.

The reason why people are out of work is because the economy is in flux. Clinton was right when he said, “you might have 5 or 6 jobs in your lifetime”

Manufacturing jobs in this country are gone. By the time, we start to have large-scale manufacturing again; it will be completely decentralized and only require only a few people to run a completely automated plant. This happened to farms….how many people are needed to harvest wheat now?

What’s desperately needed now is Doctors, Nurses, Engineers etc… in fact there are an astounding number of visa issued for these jobs because we don’t produce enough of these professional ourselves. Kerry might have impress me if he would come clean like Clinton and tell people they have the wrong set of skills but I’m going to make sure you get the training you need and ensure you don’t loose your house.

"Kerry might have impress(ed) me if he would come clean like Clinton and tell people they have the wrong set of skills but I’m going to make sure you get the training you need and ensure you don’t loose your house."

to which the skeptic, looking at his record, would ask 'For how long will he hold that position ?'

so sad that the presidency is a question of marketing, but we have a business driven society; this is the 'logical' result

I agree it is very sad. I think we would be far better off if, speeches, interviews, debates, voting records, books and polity decisions; were main stimulus for the voter. I'd be happy to see the political commercial/marketing campaign go away. Just look at some of the comments in this thread…they just reiterate spin. :rolleyes:

At lest it seems people are genially interested in their republic this election.

A little levity..........

A teacher in a small Texas town asks her class how many of them are Bush fans. Not really knowing what a Bush fan is, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raise their hands except one boy, little Johnny.

The teacher asks Johnny why he has decided to be different. Johnny says, "I'm not a Bush fan."

The teacher says, "Why aren't you a Bush fan, Johnny?"


Johnny says, "Because I'm a John Kerry fan." When the teacher asks why, the boy says, "Well, my mom's a John Kerry fan, and my Dad's a John Kerry fan, so I'm a John Kerry fan!"

The teacher is a little put out about all of this. After all, this is Texas, so she says, "What if your mom was a moron, and your dad was an idiot, what would that make you?"

Johnny says, "That would make me a Bush fan."

nice
recast in Mass

. . . a Kennedy fan.

psychofunk already stated he was a party guy ;)

You do not need a missile when you have a suitcase.

You can ship 40 foot containers into any number of major US ports (Seattle, Baltimore, etc) with a 99% assurity they will not be checked or scanned in any way. You can then load these containers onto trucks and drive them with near impugnity to anywhere in the continental United States. Four devices?

New York
Los Angeles
Chicago
Washington DC

Which are you willing to sacrifice?

Kim Jong-il

MAD requires the overt threat of nuclear exchange by equally armed powers. The threat you describe above is purely asymmetric in nature NOT MAD.

As the asymmetric threat you have outlined….Checking every cargo container coming in to the country is impractical. The sad fact is that you and I will just have to live with the danger. This is a clear case where a good defense is a good offence….God Bless those Corsicans and their fine quotes. :)

Your so right on this one. The company I work for has anywhere from 1-3 containers a week come in and we have had a total of 2 inspected by customs this year. The thing that is even worse is we get containers cleared from customs before they even dock. Not to mention the fact that China has inspected more of our stuff then even the US.

Mutually Assured Destruction does not depend on equally armed powers - it merely reflects the concept that the best way to protect a population is to assure that any attack will be met with a comparative attack. While obviously the United States would not be using nuclear weapons against North Korea, the only way for a relatively small world power to make an equal strike against a major world power like the US would be to use Nuclear/Biological/Chemical Weapons.

If the US went into North Korea to oust Kim Jong Il, whether with conventional or Nuclear arms, their goal would be the destruction of the North Korean government. What would Kim Jong Il have to lose by striking a nuclear blow against the United States if he was already faced with a life in prison or a probable death sentence?

MAD is often viewed in a Cold War mentality between two big superpowers, but the concept is ancient - war is avoided by the belief that what could be gained is not worth risking what would be lost.

I'm not saying that every container entering the country can be checked - even if they were, nuclear weapons could still be smuggled in by boat, plane, via Mexico or Canada, etc. What I am saying is that invading North Korea when they have the deterrent of Nuclear Weapons is foolhardy at best.

BalefireX your description of MAD is dead wrong...look I will give you a flame pass because you are not a pro and likely too young to remember the cold war but at least learn the truth.

1. Robert McNamara former Secretary of Defense theorized MAD
2. Read the definition below

Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is the doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by one of two opposing sides would result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence according to which the deployment of strong weapons is essential to threaten the enemy in order to prevent the use of the very same weapons.

The doctrine assumes that each side has enough weaponry to destroy the other side and that either side, if attacked for any reason by the other, would retaliate with equal or greater force. The expected result is an immediate escalation resulting in both combatants' total and assured destruction. It is now generally assumed that the nuclear fallout or nuclear winter would bring about worldwide devastation, though this was not a critical assumption to the theory of MAD.

The doctrine further assumes that neither side will dare to launch a first strike because the other side will launch on warning (also called fail deadly) resulting in the destruction of both parties. The payoff of this doctrine is expected to be a tense but stable peace.

The primary application of this doctrine occurred during the Cold War (1950s to 1990s) between the United States and Soviet Union, in which MAD was seen as helping to prevent any direct full-scale conflicts between the two nations while they engaged in smaller proxy wars around the world.

Proponents of MAD as part of US and USSR strategic doctrine that believed nuclear war could best be prevented if neither side could expect to survive a full scale nuclear exchange. The credibility of the threat being critical to such assurance, each side had to invest substantial capital even if they were not intended for use. In addition, neither side could be expected or allowed to adequately defend itself against the other's nuclear missiles. This led both to the hardening and diversification of nuclear delivery systems (such as nuclear missile bunkers, ballistic missile submarines and nuclear bombers kept at fail-safe points) and to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

This MAD scenario was often known by the euphemism "nuclear deterrence." (The term 'deterrence' was first used in this context after World War II. Prior to that time, its use was limited to juridical terminology.) In France, "deterrence" was translated as "dissuasion," and in Russia, it was translated as "terrorization" -- a linguistic difference which highlights two particular interpretations of deterrence: one which is basically an extrapolation of rational politics, another which is based on pure emotional fear. These two notions of deterrence, and MAD, were often used interchangeably by both fans and foes of the doctrine, despite their apparent paradoxical intent.



...these basic definitions should never be an issue in the information age, don’t be lazy :drool: :drool: :drool: :drool:

I will vote for John Kerry. I think Bush is a danger to the world and my way of life. He has polorized the country and the world in a way that has never happened in the past. I enjoy traveling and honestly don't need any more anti american sentiment out there.

I could reference nuclearfiles.org, which states:
"MAD reflects the idea that one's population could best be protected by leaving it vulnerable so long as the other side faced comparable vulnerabilities. In short: Whoever shoots first, dies second."

It is a matter of interpretation, no need to be condescending about one's status or age - I certainly won't insult you because you feel differently about what is basically an issue of semantics.

I don't think that you actually disagree with my point that it would be foolish to attempt to overthrow a government with nuclear weapons; instead you appear to be focusing on my word choice... typical internet debate technique.

This is not semantics your application is incorrect. North Korea CANNOT destroy the US on the other hand; we could wipe North Korea off the map in a few hours.

I am not being condescending; you're just out of your depth.

I don't think it would be foolish if you knew where the weapons were located.

This is all really moot. North Korea has no energy. If we continue to cut them off and wait, they will continue to fall apart. What most people don’t realize is that more North Koreans will die from that policy vice war.

Would destroying a major US city destroy the United States? No
Would that be an acceptable thing for the US Governement to risk? In my opinion, certainly not.

You state that I am out of my depth, could you provide some facts to demonstrate your intimate knowledge of North Korea's nuclear weapons program or of Kim Jong Il's mentality?

I am willing to discuss this in a friendly manner, as intellectuals, but not if you insist on insulting me at every step. Obviously you feel that North Korea lacks the capability or will to detonate one of its Nuclear Weapons in a US city if attacked, can you back this up?