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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

Controversial opinion: the United States and South Korea should have gone to war with North Korea during the 1990s, when North Korea was at its weakest, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. North Korea did not have nuclear weapons then. Doing so might have cost the lives of thousands of South Korean civilians, but North Korea would not have nuclear weapons today, or an army of cyber criminals, and the future peril of war with a nuclear armed North Korea would have been staved off forever. The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care, as long as NK ceased having a national government and armed forces of its own. Most reasonable people will agree that having one fewer nuclear power would be a gift for global peace and stability.

They say to give peace a chance. Maybe, in some situations, it is war that should be given a chance.

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US was pretty close to a preemptive strike in the 90s.

There were estimates of massive SK casualties just via artillery strikes. (1M+, Seoul destroyed, ...). NK also had chemical/biological weapons...

There was also always a threat of nuclear escalation via China if US went too far...

> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care

China wants what is currently in place, it's doubtful they would have not intervened as they did in Korean war after which war becomes one of attrition and keeping the Chinese out of SK...

Yeah. Living in South Korea with the threat from North Korea in the 90s was probably the closest I'll come to (well, hopefully the closest I'll come to) to understanding what it was like for my parents' generation (Baby Boomers) growing up with the constant threat (real or perceived) of nuclear war.

NK was almost certainly not going to initiate a war, but they had everything in place to decimate SK if one began by the 90s at least.

Yep, you got it.

The joke is: "when US claimed you have wmd, you better actually have it"...

NK has been behaving quite bad comparing to some other countries that got US invasion. The reason that they were not invaded, is mostly that they indeed have the stuff that can scare away US.

How did those wars started in the early 2000s go?

Initially? Successfully. Coalition forces overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's baathist government in Iraq. It was the subsequent occupation and nation-building stage where things became hairy.

Which is why I suggested to hand off North Korea to China once its government has been defeated. China will use the cheap labor and vast mineral resources of the country, NK's citizens will see major improvements in their quality of life.

To overthrow the Taliban means destroying them. They only retreated. You declared victory foolishly way too early. You didn't realize this was a decades struggle and, of course, lost that conflict.

You also lost Iraq considering you killed 200,000 innocent men, women, and children, setup a terrible government, and a military that conceded so much, ISIS took over large parts of the country and neighboring countries. You had to start yet another war to clean up and now are just awaiting the next ISIS-like event because you destabilized an entire region.

These wars were total and utter disasters and crimes against humanity. Stop defending them.

The US did not lose in Iraq and it didn't kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Iraq today is a free-standing nation, capable of charting their own path, courtesy of their significant oil revenues. The US is no longer required to prop them up and the US does not dictate their policies nor does it occupy the nation.

The civilian deaths you're referring to were the result of a civil war between the Iraqi people. They were killing each other. The long oppressed Shia majority and the Sunni minority. That's not uncommon throughout history, see: US, Russian, French civil wars, to name a few prominent examples. The US also butchered itself in a civil war, we were no better in our internal conflict. The French, British and other European powers were not morally responsible for those deaths, despite the elaborate roles the European empires played in helping to cause the US civil war (eg European slavery), as well as influencing or shaping the US colonies and infant US nation.

It took many decades for the US to organize itself properly after its founding, it was a very messy process. And even then, it ended up in a bloody civil war, before a greater degree of stability was achieved. Why should Iraq be held to the absurd expectation of instantaneous, miraculous stability so soon after regaining their independence from Saddam's dictatorship and then the chaotic US & allied forces occupation? Iraq is commonly treated quite unfairly in judgment when it comes to a political process that can take a long time under the best of circumstances; they're held to an unreasonable standard that just about no nation could live up to, especially given the context.

>The civilian deaths you're referring to were the result of a civil war between the Iraqi people.

If I set a house on fire, any deaths that result from people trampling each other or jumping out of windows are my fault. If I claimed they liked each other or committed suicide, I'd be laughed out of court and (rightly) into prison.

Not when that house is in the middle of an oilfield, waiting to go up at any moment. At that point, it's the fault of the person who built it there.

That Saddam Hussein seems like a very bad man. We should prosecute all those who helped him come to power, and keep him there, supplying him with weapons etc. Same with the Taliban.

Our initial goal in Afghanistan was to get Osama bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda. We did succeed at that 10 years later in a different country.

The Taliban did not plan or take part in the 9/11 attacks.

Oh, how quickly people forget.

> Doing so might have cost the lives of thousands of South Korean civilians

It would have been closer to hundreds of thousands. And it would have cost tens of thousands of American lives as well. To defeat and pacify North Korea you'd have to occupy the nation with an enormous military force, upwards of a million total soldiers or more. That's assuming China tolerated it, which is very unlikely. The terrain in North Korea is almost ideal for guerilla fighters, and it would present a brutal challenge to any occupying forces.

China was significantly responsible for making North Korea what it is today. They like having North Korea as a stick to poke the US, South Korea and Japan with. North Korea is a wildcard that makes the region very complicated and dangerous for the anti-China alliance. They have very little interest in seeing it dismantled. If China had wanted North Korea, they would have taken it a long time ago; it's a rather trivial bit of land next to China; but in its present use, North Korea can be exceptionally useful to China, it's a net positive asset in its present form. They're already a quasi vassal of China, they're hyper dependent on China for almost everything. China gets a lot of upside from the arrangement, with few downsides.

> The US and SK could have handed over NK to China as an industrial colony for all we care

Absolutely not. That's among the worst things the US and South Korea could have done. Assisting China in territorial expansion, de facto helping China to conquer another part of Asia, would be grotesque.

There's no moral argument for claiming other nations have a right to dictate to the North Korean people that they are not to have their own nation. The two Koreas have been separate for a long time now, it's not like that separation just happened a few decades ago. If they want to unite with South Korea, then they should be allowed to. If they don't want to, that should be respected as well. Forcibly handing them off to China and dissolving their nation without their input would be an extreme violation of human rights.

North Korea as a nation belongs, properly, to the people of North Korea. Not to China. Not to the US. Not to South Korea.

I might buy the self-determination point of view if the ordinary people of North Korea had any input on their governance, which they hardly do. North Korea is ruled by the Kim family like a monarchy. There are no elections, no referendums, no multiparty system.

It does not matter. The people have to figure it out. Opposition and subsequent toppling of the authoritarian government should be a natural course without any external influence.

It's very Kissinger-like behavior to not even care about the extra millions of North Koreans that would have killed during the North Korean Famine.

But what about China backing the sovereignty of NK? Or if they decided once we left to just reestablish a sovereign power within NK?

China fought the UN in Korea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

Exactly

War was give a chance and the North won, with of course China threatening to move in on the action as well as the Soviet Union. UN forces continuing to fight in that region over the long debunked "domino theory" would have led to WWWIII, perhaps even a nuclear holocaust for what? Some peninsula? Same with Vietnam which the US lost? Its not worth it.

Revising that was decades later would have been political impossible, ethically evil, and set off the same China/SU hostility chain that leads to WWIII.

We are constantly giving war a chance. The problem is we rarely give peace a chance. Imagine if instead of blowing up children and women in Afghanistan for two decades we asked the Taliban to the parliamentary table and built a government with them? They'd be the most powerful party, but it would have saved tens of thousands of innocent civilians lives and literally everything would be better off today there. but instead we listened to people like you, fought a foolish war, put in a "democracy" that, of course, failed within weeks. The same way it would have in NK, assuming a second NK conflict wouldn't lead to WWIII, which it most likely would.

Remember when you say go to war, you're asking the West to murder hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. America is happy to do that and calls its "democracy" but they are simply crimes against humanity writ large. The war on terror has at least 380,000 innocent civilians killed. Stop killing people. Stop making war the default goto. Give peace chance. Its not your job to be the world police or tell China or NK what to do. You're just a bloodthirsty keyboard commando who wants to contribute to crimes against humanity. If I was you I'd reflect on what you've written today and think about why you're carrying water for the mass murder and human rights violation machine we call the US military.

Is it better for 5 people to die and 5 people to have all of the UN Human Rights, or for 5 to be slaves and 5 to be subjects of a despot?

There's no wholly good answer here. There's a valid argument for both; you're making the latter, if I may be so presumptuous.

what a false dichotomy. 1. why does the US get to make this choice for others, and 2. the actual outcomes are nothing like this, name the countries the US destabilized that are now bastions of human rights. the track record is horrendous and the only reason we have not been rightfully forbidden from meddling is brute force.

For a while, women in Afghanistan could be educated and visible in public again, like 70 years ago.

If you choose not to intervene, you have still made a choice.

"Never Again", yet Rwandan genocide, Serbian massacre, Uyghurs in camps, Darfur, Syria, Daesh, Qatari slaves... whether you intervene or not people will suffer.

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