we'd be in a far better negotiating position, both with nk and iran, if our entire fighting force werent kneedeep in blood and sand in Iraq.. we have very little weight to throw around, anywhere, as a result of this and our piss-poor economy. north korea would be very hard to engage, as their massed artillery emplacements overlooking seoul could destroy the entire city in a matter of hours.

If our military werent so bogged down in iraq, we could have placed paratrooper brigades in Okinawa, and made them a credible deterrent against North Korean action, as there would be a possibility that the artillery emplacements could be stormed without using tactical nukes. iran would be tricky as (see above) Bushco's mismanagement has bottled up our military to the point that we have no capacity to wage full-scale conventional war with any real army, which Iran has, (compulsory service--800-odd thousand new raw recruits per year, fully operational special forces groups, functioning air force, etc...) and theyd be fighting on their own turf. there is a real danger that any conflict there, given our terribly weakened conventional forces, would escalate into all-out nuclear war, which could very well mean the endtimes that the theocrats are so anxious to see occur. Nukes getting set off in the Middle East would raise the interesrtt and anxietty of every oil-consumng nation on earth, which includes, of course, all the countries that have nukes of their own, like Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the nuclearised EU nations and many others.

That same scenario applies to Noth Korea, by the way. If we attacked their reactors, and North Korea responded by destroying Seoul (and the 30,000 US troops stationed there), cries among the Pentagoners would be screaming for tactical nukes to wipe out the NK artillery. China would be very upset if we did that. . China essentially owns our national debt at the moment, due to Bushco's fiscal mismanagement. They could crash our whole economy with about two dozen phone calls.

Reaganomics and offshoring has essentially destroyed our domestic manufacturing base, forcing us to acquire a huge percentage of our goods abroad, so a collapsed US economy at this stage would be even more difficult to recover from than the Depression of the 30's.

Your boys are bad for business, bad for security, bad for health care. They're patently incompetent, and it has nothing to do with any personal antipathy.