This is why America is bad ass. Don't fucc with us.




WASHINGTON (Dec. 23) - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned North Korea on Monday against seizing on Iraq to press a nuclear weapons program and said Washington could fight and win two wars at once.

''I have no reason to believe that you're correct that North Korea feels emboldened because of the world's interest in Iraq,'' he told a reporter after Pyongyang took steps over the weekend to unfreeze a nuclear reactor.

''If they do, it would be a mistake,'' he added at a Pentagon briefing, saying the U.S. military was perfectly capable of fighting two major regional conflicts at once, if necessary.

''We are capable of winning decisively in one and swiftly defeating in the case of the other,'' he said. ''Let there be no doubt about it.''

North Korea said on Sunday it had dismantled U.N. monitoring equipment at a nuclear reactor it had mothballed under a 1994 non-proliferation deal with the United States aimed at ending its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Pyongyang said it was reactivating the Yongbyon reactor to generate electricity. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, said the North also had broken U.N. seals on about 8,000 spent fuel rods in a cooling pond at Yongbyon -- a possible prelude to recovering weapons-grade plutonium.

The Clinton administration had been prepared to go to war in 1994 to bar the reclusive communist state from extracting plutonium that could be used to build as many as five or six nuclear bombs in as little as four or five months.

Asked if President Bush's administration would stick to such a policy, known as the ''red line'' beyond which Washington would brook no North Korean brinksmanship, Rumsfeld said, ''The situation today is somewhat different from then.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell consulted France, Russia and Britain on Monday and said the United States wanted a peaceful resolution, said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker.

''We will not give in to blackmail,'' he said. ''And we're not going to bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements that it has signed.''

''PERFECTLY RATIONAL''

Rumsfeld said diplomacy ''seems to me a perfectly rational way of proceeding,'' drawing a distinction with Iraq, where he said many years of diplomacy had fallen ''flat on its face.''

''The situation in North Korea is a fairly recent one,'' he went on. ''The diplomacy that's under way there is in its early stages with the United States and the interested neighboring countries.''

In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov accused Bush on Monday of having goaded North Korea by branding it an ''axis of evil'' state along with Iraq and Iran. Bush did so in his State of the Union address in January.

''How should a small country feel when it is told that it is all but part of forces of evil of biblical proportions and should be fought against until total annihilation?'' Mamedov told the Vremya Novostei daily newspaper.

The State Department dismissed his comments as absurd, noting they contrasted with the official Foreign Ministry reaction.

North Korea said it was unfreezing Yongbyon after the United States and other countries halted fuel supplies to sanction a once-secret highly enriched uranium program acknowledged by Pyongyang in October.

Rumsfeld said the country had no need for the reactor, which was at the heart of a crisis defused by an oil-for-nuclear compliance deal known as the 1994 Agreed Framework.

''They don't need a nuclear power plant,'' he said. ''Their power grid couldn't even absorb that.''

Analysts said Pyongyang appeared intent on leveraging U.S. preoccupation with Iraq to press its demand for a nonaggression pact and an end to what it views as a U.S.-led economic isolation campaign.

''The North Koreans probably have concluded that they have some flexibility now in committing provocative acts without a high risk of U.S. retaliation,'' said Larry Niksch of the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a policy research group, said Pyongyang may have concluded that a victory in Iraq would boost U.S. clout with reluctant partners, adding to its isolation.

Peter Brookes, the Pentagon's former chief policymaker on the North, told Reuters Pyongyang was involved in a ''very dangerous game of brinksmanship, extortion and opportunism.''

yup america can win both wars, no doubt about that

didnt the u.s. got their asses kicked by the north koreans during the korean war???

didnt the u.s. got their asses kicked by the north koreans during the korean war???

Technically the US/Commonwealth never lost, but we never won. We had air/naval supremacy over Korea but over land the war was going nowhere which forced the US/Commonwealth around the negotiation table. It was a stalemate.

word ^ altho the hundreds and thousands of Chinese troops that poured into the Koreas helped