What We Could Do About North Korea

RUSH: Snerdley and I were talking back there in his little cubbyhole — actually he has a palatial office with a conference table and a satellite room. We’re sitting back there watching all this and Snerdley says, “What would you do? Seriously. What would you do about this North Korea situation?”
I said, “Well, you know?” I went through the whole gamut of possibilities.
We can’t send any Special Forces in there at this stage. We don’t have enough troops in South Korea to mount any kind of a ground assault, and that’s not necessary here anyway, just like it isn’t in Iran. Basically militarily… We have to do something. Folks, Iran is watching this. A whole bunch of other pretenders and terrorist organizations are watching this, and if we don’t do anything outside of what we normally do: Utter statements of condemnation or issue statements of condemnation; go to the United Nations and, you know, bellyache and whine and moan up there, nobody’s going to take this threat seriously, least of all the Iranians or other little terrorist organizations who have grand designs. One of the things we have to consider, though, is that North Korea has become an exporter of dangerous military technology to places like Iran, and they work with, I think, the Chinese in exporting things to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and other places. It seems to me at the very least that we have to put some kind of naval blockade outside of North Korea to stop the delivery of material to that country and to keep anything from getting out. That seems to me something reasonable and doable.
I know people will call it a provocative and unnecessary step. It’s going to provoke the North Koreans. The liberals are going to say everything they always say, and if we’re going to be paralyzed because of what everybody in the world says about us then we deserve for every country in the world that wants a nuke to get one! If we’re going to be obsessed with what people think of us, especially when the subject is our own national security, then we deserve what we get! This whole notion of being concerned what people think and the diplomatic reaction and so forth and the “unnecessary provocation a blockade would cause. Why, we can’t do that! It would destabilize the region, destabilize the world,” is then saying, there’s nothing else we can do. We can’t do anything to protect ourselves because protecting ourselves, defending ourselves — the people of this country — is an unnecessary provocation and will destabilize the circumstance, and so basically what we’ve done is sign a suicide pact with ourselves versus all these little tinhorns who want these kinds of weapons because to defend ourselves is just going to provoke them further! To defend ourselves is going to make us even a bigger enemy at the United Nations.

It’s ridiculous to listen to this kind of thing, to get caught up in this kind of thing. It’s a result of guilt and the desire for acceptance on the part of some people by others. It’s frustrating. Here’s another thing the president could do — and if he does something like this we’ll never know it. He could send a little personal communiqu? to Kim Jong ll and say very simply, “Do you like living? Do you want to keep watching your porn videos that Madeleine Albright tells us you enjoy? You want to keep drinking your scotch? Because if you want keep doing all that, there’s a way you can. We might even send you Mark Foley at the end of the day, if you’re good,” and we’ll never know if something like that happened. I’m serious: “Do you like living? Do you want to keep drinking your scotch? Do you want to keep eating your dog? Do you want to keep watching these little X-rated films that you like so much?” and the only way we’d know is if Kim Jong ll waved the letter: “Look what I got,” which is probably why we couldn’t do it because he probably would, but it’s a circumstance that’s far more serious than how it is being portrayed on the news today.
It’s a second or third story. It doesn’t get much time. It’s not near the priority, because it serves one purpose for the Drive-By Media and the Democrats, and that is the opportunity it presents him to say, “Bush fell asleep on the job. Bush is looking the other way! Bush is distracted by his own decisions, Iraq, other meaningless excursions in the war on terror.” Now, they don’t want to carry it too far, because it is a nuclear weapon that was tested, and this guy, Kim Jong Il, is very unpredictable. So they’ll get their perfunctory statement out like Mrs. Clinton did, and continue to harp on some of the other things.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
One thing nobody wants to say is this really isn’t about North Korea. It’s about China. Everything is. Iran is about China. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is about China. We trade with China; in the process, we have opened up all kinds of avenues for them to steal. Bill Gertz’s book is detailed on how they have stolen technology. The Clinton administration working with China to help them finally get missiles and satellites into orbit when they were unable to do that. The real problem here is China, and if you think we’re going to do anything about China, you’re in dreamland. The Chinese are who prop up the North Koreas. You note the Chinese came out and condemned this. They were among the first groups that condemned it, but they also then said, “Ah, we must not take any action. It would be unnecessarily provocative,” or some such thing.
The Chinese are just happy as pigs in a pigpen over the instability this is causing. They love nothing more! They’re not threatened by the North Koreans. North Korea? The Chinese could swat them away inside of a half hour if they felt the need to, just like anybody else could. (interruption) No. (interruption) What do you mean “reverse domino effect”? The Chinese are worried if North Korea falls, that that means China is going to fall, and everybody else could fall and that’s why…? (interruption) Well… (interruption) Look it, the Chinese, forget North Korea, think Taiwan. The Chinese have got designs on taking back Taiwan, and we’re going to at some point be tested there. We have this pact with the Taiwanese. The Chinese may fear the reverse domino effect: if North Korea is liberated, that that could open up fears in China that they’re going to be next. They’re too big for that. Liberating North Korea? Do you mean liberating by turning them into a democracy or just getting rid of the nukes? (interruption) Regime change? Regime change is not going to do it. Ah, no, no, no. The regime change in North Korea is not going to frighten the ChiComs. The ChiComs are too big. The strategy that would be required would be you have to think Reagan and the Soviets and how did we do that.

Look how long it took in that Cold War before Reagan came along and got serious about it. And even after Reagan came along and was serious about it was for all intents and purposes 17 , 18 years from the time he was serious about it, and he had allies around the world helping him, by the way, Margaret Thatcher and so forth. Reagan didn’t care what anybody thought of him. He walked out of a meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, and everybody thought, “Oh! We’ve lost the chance for peace! Oh, this is horrible,” and basically, you know, Gorbachev had proposed this: “You get rid of yours; we’ll get rid of ours,” and Reagan said, “Oh, no. It’s just the exact opposite. You’re going to get rid of yours, and we’re going to build Star Wars,” and so the meeting ends, and everybody was panicked — except George Schultz, who said he’d never seen his president at a finer moment in his life than that, but, you know, dealing with China is going to be a long-term thing.
If you have the equivalent, all right: We spent Russians, Soviets, into bankruptcy. They could not keep up with us militarily. The Chinese can’t either, unless they steal stuff from us, technology, and they’re doing it. So it is going to require some sort of a grand strategy. Some people think, by the way, if you put a blockade up and prevent things getting in and out of North Korea, that that is an act of war and that a war would start because of it. That would be the essence of a declaration of war, that the Chinese wouldn’t put up with it, and the North Koreans wouldn’t put up with it, and there was a reality. We have been at war with North Korea before. There was the Korean War, and it went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You know, that’s not negative. It’s just reality. And there is unfinished business there as a result of that.
It’s a very complicated issue. But I can tell you this. It ain’t going to get solved at the United Nations. It isn’t going to get solved at the Security Council. It isn’t going to be solved with diplomacy. It isn’t going to be solved with meetings, resolutions, ceasefires or whatever it is these diplomats come up with. Plus you’ve got the Russians out there practically applauding this for their own perverted reasons. They have reasons. They like world being destabilized and so forth! (They’re not exactly the model of stability themselves.) It’s a real serious problem. It has been building. Everybody has known this nuke test is coming, and it still is not being treated as the serious event and occurrence that it is in terms of our national security. It’s being dealt with only as a political issue and, “How does this hurt Bush?” or, “How can we make it hurt Bush?” So once again, as far as the critics, media, Democrats and liberals are concerned, national security is not even on the radar screen for them.

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