North Korea vows nuclear retaliation for USA-SO.KO. military drills

[Rath]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Rath said:

Joking right? Assasinating them would make problems worse, especially in Iran. Iran has a grass roots progressive movement, it's best left alone if it's to flourished. In N.Korea assassinating Kim Jong Il would lead to certain war and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths.

This is a classic realpolitik reasoning, similar to what prevented France and UK from having Hitler killed asap. And guess what? Things just kept on going worse and at the end of WWII half Europe was given to Stalin (that actually initially planned to share it with Hitler, before Hitler's folly screwed up their plan, and was never punished for this, he eventually grabbed what he wanted with UK and USA permission instead).

So an assassination, even with its worst consequences, would just be a lesser bad. In Iran's case it would be necessary to kill the most integralist ayatollahs too, leaving alive the moderate ones, and obviously also the highest ranking pasdaran officers, so a well organized conspiracy would be necessary. But in North Korea, Kim's death would at the very least bring the limited positive effects of Stalin's death in the former USSR.

Stalin wasn't assassinated. Kim Jong Ils natural death (which probably isn't far off) will hopefully be good for N.Korea, assassination almost certainly wouldn't be, it would be a very legitimate casus belli.

Also you think there would be any moderate ayatollahs left after you assassinate half of them? They'll all become radicals.