"Taepodong aimed at Hawaii": Missiles, mouths, and other things that can be shot off

Wouldn't you know it? I go into retirement — at least for a month while I get things in order — and then North Korea shoots off its much-touted Taepodong-2, plus six others for good measure.

I'm sure this was a ploy to get me back in the blogosphere. Or to get the US to meet with them in two-way talks and extract billions of dollars in concessions from them. Either/or.

Frankly, I'm glad they shot it off. Too many question marks when the thing was on the launchpad — Will they or won't they? Will they shoot it toward Japan again? Will they aim it at American territory to prove the point? Should the US shoot it down now? How can we work the slang term "dong" into the news story without looking like we're working the slang term "dong" into the news story?

Now that they've shot it off, the question marks are mostly gone. Sure, there are newer question marks, but they are smaller and they're accompanied by big fat exclamation points, plus maybe a few periods and semicolons.

The launch has occurred and we know the results. And that's a good thing.

First, we know that the North Koreans are brazen enough in their brinksmanship to thumb their noses at world opinion. But is this new information? Hell, no. It is merely a reinforcement for those who forgot. Maybe it's a lesson that the Roh-Chung administration needed to re-learn, so again, it's a good thing.

Second, the damned missile didn't work! This ooh-so-scary missile that groups like CBS News kept drumming into people's heads, telling us that the North Koreans "have enough plutonium to build about eight nuclear weapons and a missile that can reach all the way to the West Coast of the United States."

The same missile that former Clinton officials William Perry and Ashton Carter (not the guy from "That's '70s Show") said should be shot down while sitting on the launchpad in North Korean territory (and idea which Vice President Cheney wisely shot down himself).

In other words, North Korean has blown its wad. It was talking tough, acting tough, calculating how many billions of dollars in concessions it would squeeze out of Washington...and its missile was a dud. The Fourth of July displays being shot off around the same time were probably in the air longer. [Oh, and that's another thing: any news outlet that tells you that the North Koreans launched the missiles on July 4th are mistaken, though a number of them have been highlighting the test-firing being on Independence Day].

So we still have the brazen brinksmanship of Kim Jong-il. And we have no working Taepodong-2. We have Tokyo fired up — which is not necessarily a good thing — but we also seem to have Seoul fired up, not just the Hannara opposition but the Blue House as well.

And maybe this will deflate some of the doom and gloom that the US press — the liberal outlets in fact — have been putting forth. The op-ed by Perry and Carter suggesting a pre-emptive strike, the "this misile can reach all the way to the West Coast of the United States" scare tactics.

I guess some among the Democrats, as well as the liberal media, are trying to underscore an anti-Iraq theme: because Bush has gotten us bogged down in what was an elective war that had nothing to do with the War on Terror, we have been less capable of handling things that really matter, like the North Korean situation.

Okay, maybe there is a point there, but scare tactics are not the way to go. This is perhaps the left's version of "the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But starting a likely war over a missile that had not yet been fired, may not in fact be illegal to test-fire, and may turn out to be a dud, is not the most prudent thing.

The Bush Administration is telling us we need to stick to diplomatic efforts, even if they are "slow and cumbersome," which encourages me that they're being appropriately cool-headed (and perhaps their hands are tied just a little thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan).

But others won't let this go. The mainstream conservative Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun of is telling us that the Taepodong-2 shot off in the wee hours of July 5, had it not disintegrated less than a minute after take-off, was aimed at Hawaii.

The Los Angeles Times article I linked above used the same phrasing: the missile allegedly "had targeted the U.S. state of Hawaii."

Are we back to a situation where fear-mongering in the press will rule the day? What is the goal on this particular matter? In Japan, is it for justification for shedding the trappings of the pacifist constitution? In the US, will this be used to jump-start NMD again (national missile defense)?

These ominous descriptions of North Korea read to nuke Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu can't be by accident. Maybe there is no sinister plan, but the meme is now out there and can be nudged in that direction.

Might I remind everyone that we already have a great form of deterrence already in place to prevent a nuclear attack on Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Japan, etc.: it's called kicking their ass.

Remember what happened the last time a foreign entity used Hawaii as a military target? A sleeping giant awoke, and that attacker was destroyed.

Ditto with North Korea: any missile attack on any part of US soil or the soil of a US ally, would invited complete retaliation. A singed and smoldering DPRK leadership would be dumped onto the dustpile of history.

In fact, in some ways I was thinking — before the Taepodong-2 failure — that this was a possible outcome: the missile would be launched, it would accidentally land on Japanese territory, and the incident would be seen as a justification for taking out the DPRK government.

I wasn't hoping for that, because it would make Seoul a very dangerous place for about 72 hours, but in the end, so many problems would be solved. Maybe that was what enticed Bush and his handlers about going to war to oust Saddam Hussein. The problem not predicting the unforeseen results: Bush-41 wisely thought it was imprudent to march into Baghdad, and his son proved him right (sort of). It's imprudent to march into Baghdad and expect everyone to be one big giddy mass of USA-loving liberatees. Planning better for resistance is prudent.

Maybe in North Korea there wouldn't be much resistance — though guerrilla warfare could last years — but the reaction of our good friend China would be a wildcard. It's a dangerous thing to think invading another country would be a cake-walk.

At any rate, not a whole hell of a lot has changed. Some people are now paying attention. If the co-worker described here really was reacting the way she was described as reacting, then she's an uninformed idiot for not realizing that she has been vulnerable to attack by flying objects from the north all this time. The Taepodong-2, even if successful, does not change that for her.

The idealist leftists currently running the government here (with approal rankings hovering around 20%) have been given a wake-up call. Some in the South Korean media have been saying that the Blue House has been humiliated by this failure of South-North dialogue, which is why Seoul is now inclined to see eye-to-eye with Tokyo and Washington. Sending no more fertilizer and rice to the North is probably prudent — Pyongyang needs to see that its acting out has consequences.