It’s amusing to see such “serious” Democratic Party policy experts as former VP Walter Mondale and former Clinton administration Secretary of Defense Willam Perry advocating a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s potential ICBM launch site.

Is this a foray into opening a new Democratic front against the Bush administration? That is, to continue describing the war in Iraq as a pointless mistake but to demonstrate national defense gonads by saying that Bush is being too easy on North Korea and should attack now?

And if this assault on North Korean territory should suffice to set off Kim Jong Il’s hair trigger and send a million DPRK troops over the border, what do they say then? “Whoops?”

Perry anticipates such a scenario thusly:

Though war is unlikely, it would be prudent for the United States to enhance deterrence by introducing U.S. air and naval forces into the region at the same time it made its threat to strike the Taepodong. If North Korea opted for such a suicidal course, these extra forces would make its defeat swifter and less costly in lives — American, South Korean and North Korean.

Ah, just as easy as that, huh? And the millions of South Koreans in Seoul who are sitting in the cross-hairs of the biggest pre-arranged artillery barrage on planet Earth? I guess they should just take a few days off and go to the beach!

And what do you tell the people of America, who are hardly prepared to deal with the deaths of unknowable thousands of American soldiers in a new war on the Korean peninsula (potentially a nuclear war) that would be just about certain to make the Iraq war look like — if I may use the term — “a cake walk?”

One line of VP Dick Cheney’s response to this garbage, I must say, is worth all the paper that William Perry’s opinion piece was printed on.

“If you’re going to launch strikes at another nation,” Cheney told CNN in an interview, “you’d better be prepared to not just fire one shot.”

Indeed. Intercepting the missile after launch is another story. It would be only prudent to to do that if the trajectory is pointing towards the United States. Doing it would both deny the North Koreans the full data they would like on the missile’s performance, as well as discouraging further development. On the other hand, if it were known that the U.S. attempted to shoot the missile down and failed, that would be both a propaganda victory and a source of encouragement to Kim Jong Il.

None of these decisions are easy ones. Thankfully, there are currently adults in the White House to make them.

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