Crazy aunt at it again

LITTLE ROCK — PRESIDENT TRUMAN: We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.

REPORTER: Will that include the atomic bomb?

PRESIDENT TRUMAN: That includes every weapon we have . . . The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of weapons, as he always has.

-Presidential press conference November 30, 1950 JUST WHEN the family is relaxing at home, taking some time off for the holiday-maybe the adults have already put the turkey in the oven-and everybody is settling around the TV for a little football, the crazy aunt in the world’s attic has to start screaming and banging her broomstick on the attic floor. Which is nothing new. But this time she’s lobbing artillery rounds, too. With deadly results. She must delight in making others miserable. And more than a little anxious.

This time North Korea’s regime isn’t just at it again.

Just being At It Again would mean threatening war with the South, the Americans, the world, all comers. . . . But this time the crazies running North Korea are making war, not just threatening it.

When news of the artillery barrage broke over the wire, one of the first people we saw asked: What pretext was the North using to shell the South? Note that he assumed, like most reasonable people, that the North had used a pretext. For it has no legitimate reason to start still another war on the Korean peninsula. You’d think the last one was bad enough. But after everything Pyongyang has done since that now Forgotten War-from seizing the U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968 to Tuesday’s barrage-nobody except a few remaining comsymps believe that deluded regime has a legitimate reason for anything it does.

The details are still coming in, and who knows when the whole story will out, or whose version will stand the test of time and historical research, but it appears the South was conducting one of its routine naval drills in some disputed part of the Pacific (something it does, oh, about every three months) and shelling only the waves-properly away from the North Korean shore. The North Koreans responded by bombarding a little island, a South Korean island, and inflicting death and destruction. South Korea responded to the response, and, well, that is how war begins.

BOTH SIDES are now threatening more attacks. And who’d bet against it? It’s one thing for the South Koreans to let threats roll off their backs, but when artillery rounds start exploding around your people, even South Korea’s leaders may take offense. To quote South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak: “Enormous retaliation should be made to the extent that [North Korea] cannot make provocations again.”

The South has gone on military alert, its president held an emergency meeting in his underground bunker,and you can almost hear the martial drumbeats in the background. Scrolling the internet, we came across a dispatch out of Inchon. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a story datelined INCHON, South Korea. We wish it had been longer.

South Korea’s president is speaking of “severe retaliation” by that country’s navy, army and air force. Uh oh. When South Korea’s leader starts sounding like North Korea’s, the world is suddenly an even more dangerous place. Considering that this country still has some 28,000 troops on the Korean peninsula, a full-scale war between these two cousins could pull this country into yet another violent conflict. On top of the couple we’re already engaged in on the other side of Asia.

Imagine what might happen if the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang decided to pull the lanyard on a howitzer aimed at some American barracks. Or if some general from the North misunderstoodan order, or a sergeant misread a map coordinate. . . . Along the world’s most militarized border, war-by-mistake is every bit as homicidal as war by intention. (See under Sarajevo, World War I.) HOW DID the White House respond to North Korea’s shelling of South Korea? Our president is said to be “outraged”-according to his spokesmen. That’d be something to see. A first. So unlike him. For has Barack Obama ever shown more than Thoughtful Concern on any matter, foreign (Iran’s nuclear program), domestic (the national debt) or in-between (the Gulf oil spill)?

Early on Tuesday morning, as the Koreans were collecting their dead, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, issued a statement calling on North Korea “to halt its belligerent action and to fully abide by the terms of the armistice agreement” signed in 1953.

His statement brings to mind a quote from that great American poet, Bill Murray. Or at least the reaction of his character when his pal Dan Aykroyd tells the demon in Ghostbusters to return “forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension.” Bill Murray just sighed as he replied: That oughta do it, thanks.

Dispatches from Washington Tuesday evening said President Obama wasn’t planning to speak publicly about the shelling on the peninsula, preferring to issue a written statement later on. It’ll doubtless be neatly typed. You have to wonder what Kim Jong Il and his generals think when they see the American commanderin-chief shrugging his shoulders while they attack the South, which is supposed to be an American ally.

Can you imagine a Harry Truman, or, for that matter a Reagan or Kennedy or Eisenhower or either Roosevelt just having an aide issue a press release when an ally comes under fire? Isn’t it time for the current occupant of the White House, officially acclaimed a great statesman by the Nobel committee, to say something to both enemies and friends to assure the peace? Or do we have to sit through another yawner from his soporific press aide?

YOU’LL remember that another president-this one known to one and all as Ike-was pretty good at keeping the Cold War cold. Mainly by making it clear he wouldn’t hesitate to make things hot indeed for those who threatened the peace of the world. The man had a natural knack for confusing all with his syntax, but now and then he would oh-so-casually let a comment slip that gave America’s enemies clear warning:

“. . . in any combat when these things [nuclear weapons] can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I can see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would a bullet or anythingelse.”-Dwight D. Eisenhower.

His critics called such statements crazy. Crazy like a fox. They preserved the peace. To quote the judgment of one historian: “In retrospect, it appears that Eisenhower’s may have been the best mind available, for he understood better than his advisers what war is really like. None of them, after all, had organized the first successful invasion across the English Channel since 1688, or had led the armies that had liberated Western Europe. None of them, either, had read Clausewitz as carefully as he had. That great strategist had indeed insisted that war had to be the rational instrument of policy. . . . He had therefore invoked the abstraction of total war to scare statesmen into limiting wars in order that the states they ran might survive. . . . That is why Eisenhower-the ultimate Clausewitzian-insisted on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place.”-John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, 2005.

As we write these lines, the current occupant of the White House remains silent, as in Silence Gives Consent. In this case, to war.