The Invisible Hand

Let Them Eat KimChi

So the North Koreans want to humiliate the United States to show how bold they are and the South Koreans want to humiliate the United States to show how naïve they are. Well I have the perfect solution. Give them what they want.

Specifically, President Bush should immediately withdraw the 57,000 US troops standing guard on the southern border of the 38th parallel.

Against a force of more than a million DPRK troops, the American soldiers’ only mission is to die in great numbers when the Korean War resumes. No point wasting manpower, especially if you intend to win the war once and for all.

A hasty withdrawal of these GIs would leave the South Koreans facing an armed horde of ravenous clones without their trusty Yankee barbarian friends to share the joy. This might reshape public opinion in a direction more appreciative of American military support.

For the North such a withdrawal would be even more ominous. Kim Jung-il would recognize that the price to the Americans of whacking his rouge nuclear reprocessing facilities would have been cut in half as if in a unilateral post-Christmas clearance sale. He would be advised to watch the next 50 showings of Ice Station Zebra in a hardened bunker.


The world could hardly complain . . . withdrawing tens of thousands of troops from a global hot spot is the opposite of sabre rattling, right? Heck, there might even be a Nobel Peace Prize in it.

And the cherry on top of all of this would be that Saddam would now have to worry that those 57,000 American soldiers are now free to catch some much needed R&R at one of the many luxury resorts in the Tikrit metropolitan area.


Ah, the world is an oyster and the Marines are a blunt, sturdy Sani-Safe knife