North Korea and Iran: Part Two

Welcome back to my multi-part series on Iran and North Korea. There are just around three options to eliminate the problems posed by these countries that I outlined in the last post.


1. Going to war.

• Personally, I don't think that there is really an option of going to war with these two countries. I think it would be like Iraq, but worse. We don't have the troop levels, the international support or the domestic support. It would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides and really just wouldn't be worth it at all.

2. Sending in specialized strike teams to eliminate the enemies nuclear facilities.

• To me, this doesn't particularly solve anything in the long run. First of all, anything that we destroy can and will be rebuilt, so it is not a long term solution. Secondly, destroying something on North Korean or Iranian soil will just give these leaders more of an opportunity to turn the population against up, and bring about hatred in the form of national unity.

3. Eliminating the leaders of these countries.

• This is against U.S policy, and would have to be done very sneakily so as to make it look like an accident. This is because if it does not look like an accident or natural causes, it could unite the country under an extremist successor and we would be worse off than when we started.
  

I think that in the long run, a combination of the second and third courses of action are what is best for U.S interests. If we destroy their nuclear facilities, and eliminate their leaders, either through intimidation, taking away their porn collections or killing them in a mock accident, and then line up a successor that is actually fit to rule, everybody would be much better and we would only have to China and Russia to deal with and oh yeah Osama bin Laden. But seriously, any sort of assassination or "shock and awing" out of power should only be used as a last resort when peaceful negotiations fail, and a threat to U.S interests seems very imminent.