The Young Turks, as I did here, ask why America fears Iran but mocks North Korea:
They’re onto something, aren’t they? I guess Japan and South Korea need a better lobby. The one obvious difference is salient to international law and the justice of any pre-emptive attack on Iran. Iran’s leadership has said it is not developing nuclear weapons and that it is a religious duty never to use nuclear weapons – let alone ones that would level some of the most sacred sites in Islam. North Korea’s Kim Il Cartman, in contrast, has nuclear capacity, and has explicitly threatened the US mainland.
Totten tries to decode North Korea’s recent actions:
Kim almost certainly isn’t serious, but what if he is? How would we know? His attention-seeking theatrics are identical to the behavior of a lunatic hell-bent on blowing the region apart. If war breaks out next month, everyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the Korean Peninsula will slap their forehead and see, with the clarity of hindsight, that every warning we could possibly need, want, and expect was right there in front of us.
The North Korean military is nothing like Saddam Hussein’s or Moammar Qaddafi’s. Pyongyang has such an enormous array of artillery batteries targeting South Korea (the capital, Seoul, is only 30 or so miles away from the border) that hundreds of thousands of people could be killed over the weekend. North Korea would eventually lose at the hands of South Korea and the United States. It would be finished forever as a state. But the cost in lives would be unspeakable.
The regime is like a honeybee. It can sting only once, then it dies. But it’s like a honeybee the size of a grizzly bear.
The Dish 