Free falling ................ waiting for anti-Godot.
If North Korea was behind the attack, it would be the bloodiest single incident since an uneasy truce brought the Korean War to an end in 1953.
It also leaves Lee Myung Bak, the South Korean president, with a decision to make on retaliation or ignoring the provocation according to analysts.
"This puts Lee in a very difficult situation, but I do not think that an Israeli-style, targeted response is likely," said Aidan Foster-Carter, an expert on Korean affairs at Leeds University. "That is because the United States won't have it and there is the danger that any retaliation will descend into a horrible war."
Describing the attack as "calibrated and deniable," South Korea has little choice but to take its complaint to the United Nations, he said, although that is unlikely to have any impact on the North Korean regime and will not assuage public anger in the South.
Read it all at the Telegraph. (hat tip Armaros)
The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America
To pull a salient quote from Victor Davis Hanson:
All I can make sense of is, he has a very different view of the world. This view is anti-platonic. And I say that, not to be condescending, but Plato said that the natural order of the world was chaos, it was war—peace was a parenthesis, it had to be achieved and worked at. I think in the Obama view that men like him that are charismatic, articulate, they can change the world because it's naturally a peaceful thing until people like George Bush rush in and through their stubbornness—"smoke 'em out dead or alive" vernacular—destroys it, but the fact of the matter is the only reason there is any semblance of peace and tranquility in the world today is because in places as diverse as the Aegean, planes over-flying in Greek airspace daily, where there's near fighting on Cypress, or whether we are talking about the Korean Sea and the Philippines and Taiwan and South Korean democracies not going nuclear because the United States is there, or whether Russian ships keep out of Norway every hour—all of that is predicated on the presence of the United States.
To be frank, or to put it a different way, Vladimir Putin doesn't give a damn that Barack Obama is African American. And the Chinese autocrats do not hear very well "hope" and "change"—it doesn't translate to Chinese very well—and the Europeans don't care if he has a nifty jump shot. All they want to know is half the world are vying to try to take advantage of regional opportunities if the United States is not there to stop mold, and to stop rust, which is the natural organic order of the world. They take advantage of it and our friends are there waiting to see which side to join. All of our friends in Europe know that, and Australia and South America. They don't have deities. Nations don't have deities like Barack Obama, they have interests. And their interests are predicated on who is going to win and who is going to lose. Into that void comes Barack Obama.
UPDATE: OT related: And why not right next to Japan? Just to show who is the new boss in the Pacific. Now that Eastern Europe was served up like the head of John the Baptist.Carter was a neocon compared to this. He brought Spain into Nato and boycotted the Communist Olympics.(thanks to Armaros)
And this: Obama's "world without Western Nuclear Weapons" is taking shape, all right.MOSCOW, April 22 (UPI) -- Russian warships in the Sea of Japan tested supersonic missiles Thursday during joint maneuvers, the Russian navy announced.
The Russian navy, through its press service, said three warships fired supersonic cruise missiles as part of an exercise in the Sea of Japan.
Inshallah, comrades ...
