kellyahern said:
Saddam failed to verifiably disarm of all WMD's as required by the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire Agreement. The strategy to contain him was crumbling with no sanctions or weapons embargo enforcement along the whole border with Syria by the year 2000!
Given this and Saddam's past behavior, the invasion and attack on four different countries, the near seizure or sabotage of much of the planets oil supply, the fact that the world is even more dependent on Eastern Saudi Arabia than it was in 1991 and Saddam was still in close proximity to Kuwait and Eastern Saudi Arabia with 450,000 troops, 2,700 tanks, unaccounted for stocks of WMD to include 1,000 Liters of Anthrax, 500 pounds of sarin gas, 500 pounds of mustard gas, 20,000 Bio/Chem capable shells and an air force that still had 300 combat aircraft, its rather obvious that regime change was a necessity.
North Korea is a totally different situation involving a regime that has not invaded or attacked another country in nearly 60 years, unlike Saddam who has attacked and invaded 4 different countries and used WMDs on the battlefield more times than any leader in history. North Korea has never used WMD on the battlefield.
At the same time, North Korea has spent decades massing artillery in the mountains just north of Seoul South Korea with its population of 10 million people. In fact it is the largest concentration of conventional artillery in the history of the planet, all of it well with in range of Seoul's 10 million person metropolitan area just across the border. Any conflict would like result in hundreds of thousands of deaths in Seoul with in the first few hours. This is part of the reason why Clinton did not use any military options in 1994 to stop the North Koreans from developing their first Nuclear Weapons, because the cost of doing so would likely be as great as if the North Koreans had actually launched an attack with such weapons.
North Korea is different from Iraq and Saddam, because it is highly unlikely that they would launch an attack given they haven't in 60 years, while Saddam's has launched more unprovoked invasions and attacks then any single leader over the past 30 years. Second, the cost of regime change in North Korea vastly exceeds anything that has been seen in Iraq. It would create the situation we have been trying to avoid on the Korean pennisula for the past 60 years. 1 hour of a war with North Korea would kill more people than have died in Iraq over the past 4 years, and that does not include the use of Nuclear Weapons by North Korea.
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