Comment Re:Motive (Score 1) 282
I wouldn't mind at all if North Korea were suddenly free and part of South Korea. Almost everyone in North Korea would be far better off. However, doing so by military force is utterly INSANE.
Even if China didn't intervene, the fact that millions of South Koreans live within artillery range of the border with North Korea means that in a shooting war with North Korea we'd probably be looking at tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties just for the South alone, and probably as many or more North Korean civilians just from economic hardships and displacement - and that's leaving out the North's ballistic missles, nukes/etc. So even if the worst case scenario doesn't occur, the minimum expected result is already horrific enough that no sane person would want to pursue it.
There would also be the North Korean people to consider. Even if we somehow freed North Korea from "Dear Leader" tomorrow, the North Korean people have been fed a steady diet of pro-North Korea propaganda for their entire lives. Following their leader is all they know. If North Korea came to America to "liberate" us from our government and install a North Korea style government, they would meet with resistance. (Our government isn't popular or perfect. But it is orders of magnitude better than NK's.) Even if we magically freed the North Korean people tomorrow, they would likely resist their new-found freedom as much as possible. It might be decades before they were used to freedom.