What will Obama do ?
TOKYO — North Korea may fire a long-range ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July, a Japanese news report said Thursday, as Russia and China urged the regime to return to international disarmament talks on its rogue nuclear program.
Read Story at FOXNews
He will Hope the rocket Changes course.
He will probably take Michelle and the girls shopping on AF1.
G, I can just picture him sitting in the Oval Office, looking at a blank teleprompter screen, wringing his hands ‘Please, PLEASE change course!’.
This guy probably thinks it is a sophisticated form of pizza delivery. But its not.
He’ll probably think “damn, there go 4 electoral votes”.
So what would you, sage as you think you are, do if you were president today?
The other phone is ringing also :
The U.S. military is tracking a flagged North Korean ship suspected of proliferating weapons material in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed last Friday, FOX News has learned.
The ship, Kang Nam, left a port in North Korea Wednesday and could be carrying weaponry, missile parts or nuclear materials. The U.S. military has been tracking it since its departure.
Dan,
“The ship, Kang Nam, left a port in North Korea Wednesday and could be carrying weaponry, missile parts or nuclear materials. The U.S. military has been tracking it since its departure.”
Be a shame if it took a torpedo out in international waters..over a deep ocean trench. Who would ever know unless, of course, the ship was being shadowed by a N. Korean sub.
NoVisa,
“So what would you, sage as you think you are, do if you were president today?”
I believe that everyone on this site (the ones that post and a few others) have spines. Let your mind think “tragic accident sinks ship at sea”.
For the spineless-like Obama and yourself it’s “I hope this just goes away. I think I’ll have another beer and play some hoops!” I doubt that you would play hoops so I’ll change that for you to “blame Bush for allowing this to happen”. Now go play with your dolls.
ACT,
One thing that I WILL blame on Bush, is the flicker of freedom we are seeing in Iran.
Right you are dans.
Let us all keep in mind Obama’s statement during the campaign that he wouldn’t waste money on “unproven” ballistic missile defense systems.
RWK, how soon we forget..
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/16/lawmakers-question-obamas-missile-defense-cuts/
“So what would you, sage as you think you are, do if you were president today?”
How about a statement such as: “Sending a missile in the direction of any United States territory would be gravely unwise.”
Call China and Russia and let them know we mean business, and tell them that they ought to assure that none of their people should be in N. K. in case there is a launch. That we consider N. K. a nuclear nation, and a missile launch toward our country would be considered a probable “first strike” nuclear attack.
President Hopey Changey would never make a call to the Russians or the Chinese with the Red Phone on his desk in that red is such a threating color.
Rahm, can someone get me the powder blue Hopey Changey phone ? I need to call the Chinese to see if they will have a talk with that cute little Korean fellow with the bad haircut.
Are you kidding me? How long before this “flicker” (and that’s all it is) is credited towards Obama’s conciliatory speeches towards Iran?
Basically, they’re going to say that he took “The Great Satan” off the table as the great external enemy the regime could rally the people around. Once that happened, implosion …
The true power in Iran still lie with Khamenei and the other mullahs – even if they decide to sacrifice Ahmadinejad, nothing changes in Iran. And it’s not like Mousavi is such a bargain …
The thing that regime is going to find out, though, is the harder they squeeze, the more the people will fight back. Shah Pahlavi could explain it to them …
Anyway, wonder what Obama thinks *now* about that missile shield? And I wonder what he’d think if that occurred when he was vacationing there?
Nothing like an ICBM headed your way to clarify your thinking …
I noticed that the talk of decmissioning missile defence as been absent the past few weeks. hmmmm.
Guys, may I opine that this thread is not us. We are not in the habit of sniping willy-nilly at our own national leadership in times of genuine international crisis or war. It’s those other guys out there who do that. We, by contrast, tend to rally to the cause of our national interests. Even if we do not like the guys in charge in the Oval Office, we offer our considered thoughts on how a crisis can be best solved rather than denigrate our own national leadership. Legitimate assessment, legitimate suggestions; and legitimate critiques: that’s what we do. Demeaning and making nasty with our crisis leadership: that turns us into those other guys. I don’t know about you all, but imitating those other guys is not something I personally want to do.
Obama is facing a problem that neither Clinton nor G. W. Bush were able to resolve. In my opinion, he is dealing with a group of nutcases in Pyongyang. Unfortunately, those nutcases have a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, not to mention a couple of low-level nukes, that would have made Iraq’s Hussein blush over his own military nakedness. Even the Chinese, with a huge stake in all this, seem to me to be perplexed about how to put this nasty tom cat into the gunny sack — and the Chinese are the ones who allowed these nutcases to exist by expending thousands upon thousands of their own troops more than 50 years ago.
Point out what we consider to be policy errors? O.K. Urge the national leadership to follow what we believe to be the best course? O.K. But try to kick the stool out from the top guy in a genuine international crisis just because you don’t agree with him politically on a whole lot of other things? That is not us.
Let me give you briefly a personal epiphany on this. Picture a river in South Vietnam. That river is right on the DMZ, and the enemy has made it the most heavily mined river in the entire country. On one side of the river are U.S. Marines dug into foxholes. On the other, enemy saboteurs, sappers, snipers, and mortar and RPG crews who totally ignore the meaning of DMZ. In the middle, a patrol boat with an officer and six men, all armed with grenades and machineguns.
There is a major battle going on a few miles inland. The US Marines are fighting like Hell against North Vietnamese troops. Shells from the cruisers of the Seventh Fleet are flying directly overhead in the direction of the battlefield. A hospital ship is offshore, and the choppers are busy flying back and forth between it and the battlefield. You can see and hear them as they flash past on their gruesome missions.
The radio on the patrol boat crackles. A call from the battlefield to the hospital ship, from what was surely a grizzled old Marine sergeant. Did my buddy make it? Sorry, Sarge, he didn’t make it. You can hear the moan of sorrow right over that radio. The six men in that patrol boat turn as one toward that young officer. What the Hell are we doing, their eyes seem to ask.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch (America being the ranch), those other guys I mentioned in the first paragraph are busy undermining the Commander-in-Chief and starting to make him weak in the knees for political reasons. The young officer looks across at the DMZ, at an enemy country which U.S. military power could obliterate in a matter of days. He realizes that, because of the politicians and the carpers back home who are undermining the national will, we, the troops, are being left to die one by one in a war that seems to become stranger and stranger by the day. The young officer realizes that the objective now of just about everybody here is not victory but, rather, to survive personally.
That young officer is no longer young. He intensely dislikes just about everything about the guy currently in charge in the Oval Office. But there is no way in Hell that this once-young officer is ever going to be a participant in undermining the national leadership in a moment of international crisis. Criticize policy when he thinks it may be leading us all unnecessarily into danger he will most assuredly do. But make jokes and try to kick the stool out from the legs of the C-in-C when the fat is in the fire and the troops may be in danger? No way in Hell. That is not us, guys. That’s the way of those other chaps, and we are not them.
Wolverine
I LOVE YOU> I LOVE YOU>
We, who have been around a while, have an understanding that’s lacking among many of the younger ones.
Wolverine is absolutely right…. as usual
And before you guys get too huffy about Obama, remember 3 years ago on July 4, NK shot off a missile towards Hawaii. It failed badly, but it was still a launch. There was barely any reaction from the White House at that time.
And for the record… yes the are pundits in the media crediting Obama for the Iran protests.
Wolverine *is* right – but at the moment, I don’t perceive there’s fat in the fire.
A case in point – I had serious doubts about the invasion of Iraq. But once the shooting started, no more (out loud) doubts.
But as to this situation, I think it’s relevant to point out when a hypothetical future situation (NK launching a missile in the general direction of Hawaii, probably not able to reach it (yet) and probably not carrying a warhead) when the hypothetical so poignantly illustrates the short-sightedness of the President’s view on missile defense.
In fact, I can’t think of a better time to point it out. If now now, when?
Now, (as though anything we say would effect the administration, anyway), when the shooting starts, I’m all in.
Oh, and while I certainly don’t credit the President for the Iranian protests, I think his very low-key manner was and is the appropriate response – any overt comments will only backfire.
Squiddy, I have no quarrel with your expression of views on missile defense. That I consider a legitimate subject to raise at this very moment.
What concerns me more is that ship which just left N. Korea, reportedly carrying nuclear proliferation materials. The applicable UN resolution is weak, as always. Navies of the member states are authorized to stop that ship on the high seas. However, they can only search it IF THE NORTH KOREANS GIVE THEIR PERMISSION! Now, in my view, there is a fat chance of that. The N. Koreans are already screaming that any interference with that ship would be an act of war. In my view, our only option at this point is the one cited in the article: follow this critter to its first port of call and try to deal with it there. Hopefully that port will be a gutsy country like Singapore and not some dicier place like Myanmar (Burma).
Under most circumstances, I would suspect a lot of bluffing in a situation like this. I still have hope that this may be the case. However, we go beyond the UN resolution in this particular situation and we could be dealing with a bunch of nuts who are both unbalanced and heavily armed. We already fought one long and bloody conflict against these nutcases only a few short years after we had won the greatest world war war in the history of mankind. The nutcases in charge now are the descendants by ideology and blood of the same nutcases who started the first one. Nobody knows which way these people could bounce, not even the Chinese, I would guess. For that reason, I believe we have got to close ranks with Obama on this, not as a Democrat or a liberal but as the one guy ultimately responsible for our security, including millions of S. Korean allies and thousands of U.S. troops still on the ground in S. Korea. Giving advice, solicited or unsolicited, in a case like this is a go for me. But I think putting politics in the back pocket is also necessary.
I agree with Squiddy’s last para in #23. We get too loud on this and we give full ammo to the Iranian authorities to hang people quickly left and right on a charge of treason in collaboration with an enemy power. In fact, I would think it wise to shut up even about the possible effect of Obama’s Cairo speech on all this. Those mullahs and their henchmen can turn even that into a charge of treason under foreign influence.
In my view, these Iranians have spent the last quarter century getting themselves into this theocratic pickle and should be allowed to formulate their own way of getting out it. I think the last thing we should want is to say what Bush I said to the Shias in Basra after the Gulf War, see them rise up in revolt after such encouragement, and then get slaughtered by the dictator still in power. Unless we are actually ready to provide much more than verbal support, we should be very careful about how we handle these things.
We all know that if a ballistic missle hits the Hawaii office where they keep his “real” Birth Certificate, and it obliterates it….at least it’s a guarantee that his other 800 lawyers couldn’t make.
Right?
Many of the protesters were not even alive when the Shah was overthrown. They are trying to formulate their own way out, and we should give them all the support we can.
squiddy,
” I had serious doubts about the invasion of Iraq.”
As did I. At the time I wrote a letter to then President Bush pointing out to him that Mexico was a much greater risk to the U.S. than Iraq.
Needless to say he failed to see my reasoning.
Someday, Dans, we may be able to find that letter in the Bush Presidential Library!
“In my view, these Iranians have spent the last quarter century getting themselves into this theocratic pickle and should be allowed to formulate their own way of getting out it.”
Touche’
“I think the last thing we should want is to say what Bush I said to the Shias in Basra after the Gulf War, see them rise up in revolt after such encouragement, and then get slaughtered by the dictator still in power.”
I have something of a personal connection to that incident; we *knew* what was happening, when it was happening and didn’t lift a finger to stop it. We had forces a scant few miles away from Basra, so distance wasn’t an isssue.
Wherever the fault lie (the buck stopped at Bush Sr’s desk), we’ve paid for that bit of malfeasance in our own blood many times over.
“Unless we are actually ready to provide much more than verbal support, we should be very careful about how we handle these things.”
Completely agree. But I can’t help but think that all those Iranian IEDs, EFP’s, weapons, explosives, ammunition, etc, that we’ve intercepted coming across the Iraqi border? Now would be a real good time to send them back – see how *they* like it …
When you send engines of death across borders in an effort to aid what may be in your own view a justifiable and needed revolution against tyranny, you should first have a known quantity on the receiving end. Otherwise, you may well be wasting your time and treasure and possibly be abetting bloodshed without any true purpose vis-a-vis your own national interests. You may get some chaos but you also may not get the end you really want, all the while embroiling yourself in a feckless conflict. Instead of making considered policy with at least some knowledge of the true conditions, you are simply casting oil on the flames and hoping it might work out. That is not policy. It is gambling.
So far, all I have seen in Iran are outraged citizens demonstrating against the results of what they claim to be a fixed election. Some observers claim these demonstrators are seeking political liberty and are worthy of our help. Perhaps. But what I would like to see first is whether this movement in Iran shows signs of being genuine and sustained, whether the anger is sufficient to facilitate self-organization and an intense effort toward genuine democratic change. Or is this simply an internal squabble about which autocrat should be in charge?
I think it is a mistake to base your policy on deaths in a few days of street demonstrations, horrible as those were. That kind of thing can and has happened in many instances in many countries. If you will study history, you will notice that the French king, realizing the risks involved in the possibility of getting his own country into yet another war with Britain, did not come to our aid just because some colonial citizens were killed in a Boston street demonstration or fired back on that green in Lexington. He waited to see if we were for real and had what it took to fight a long and hard battle.
My own inclination at this point would be to study not just the street demonstrations but any available intelligence on what is happening afterwards before committing myself to yet another conflict in the Middle East. We have already got a pretty full plate as it is, and downing even that meal is still proving to be very difficult.
But, as I opined elsewhere, if the situation in Iran takes a real turn for the worse, i.e., a widespread bloody retaliation instead of some effort by the mullahs to move toward domestic peace through accommodation here and there, a whole different set of circumstances will force Obama to go back to the policy drawing board.
And then there are the Israelis and that potential Iranian nuclear threat. Tough one absolutely. But we sure had better have a solid grasp on what we are doing.
If you look back and remember how the Iron Curtain countries managed to free themselves from USSR, you’ll see that it was through years of erosion of power caused by he average people.
When it was happening in Hungary in 1956, we promised to help the Hungarians and left them high and dry. Bush I did the same to the Kurds after his wildly successful Iraq war. Thousands of Kurds had to flee into the mountains.
The Prague Spring in 1986 had incredible possibilities, but the US stood on the sidelines, although the erosion had gone so far that freedom, such as it was, eventually came to be.
What I’m trying to say is, that what’s going on i Iran has be become a “grass roots” movement.
Jack
Might have been one part of it, but the people’s will was what eventually sank the USSR.
Lovisa,
Don’t forget the Bay Of Pigs..
Don’t forget their crippling cradle-to-grave socialism. 0bama hasn’t.
Jack,
What the libs love to forget that the wheels were coming off the USSR. The people were poor as hell. Parts of my family still lived behind the iron curtain. The situation was pathetic. Empty stores, empty wallets, empty stomachs. Herring and boiled potato three times a day.
Family would visit, and weep in the super markets. It was really sad. The economy there was so bad that people made more of a living on the black market than anything else. The quality of the goods produced was a joke. ‘they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work’, was the refrain.
Look at China, they went quasi capitalist. They created an export economy, and the result was money flowing into the country. The people riot when they are hungry, especially when freedom is absent.
I hear that what really turned Ельцин from socialism was a visit to the West. He went into a Texas supermarket and was simply stunned at the quantity and quality on the shelves. He later went to England and saw the Queen (or perhaps it was Maggie), and asked her, “How do you feed the people?” He received, he said, simply an uncomprehending stare for a moment or two, then she said, “We don’t.”
jacob
Guess you haven’t seen the reports about the poor Chinese.
dans
What about the Bay of Pigs? We messed up royally thinking we were going to turn Cuba around.
We went into Iraq. Saddam got killed but we’re stuck there for a long, long time. Same’s happening in Afghanistan. And now, some are urging the President to get tangled up in another country while North Korea is playing cat and mouse with us. Get real!
Yes, we are in hock big time to the poor Chinese, are these the reports of which you speak ?
“we’re stuck there for a long, long time”
Not true, in 2005 the Dems said they would get us out of Iraq. In 2007 Obama said he would get us out. Are you accusing them of lying ?
Lovisa,
Hopeless as ever. You point out the part of the population that is still poor, they were poorer yet before the market reforms. Then there are the several hundred million whose lifestyle’s drastically improved after the market reforms. Get this through your head — there is no system in which all share in equal outcomes, except one. That one is where all are equally miserable, except for a tiny fraction at the top. Socialism levels the playing field by paupering those on the top, the poor stay poor, the middle class vanishes.
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