North Korea a joke -- until it isn't

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/1614809,CST-NWS-stein10.article

It's easy to laugh off North Korea, with its mouse-that-roared nuclear ambitions and loopy supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, a weird Kewpie doll of a man with fright-wig hair and a zip-up jumpsuit.

Sure, North Korea snarls and blusters, but aren't their people starving? What kind of threat could such a marginal tin-pot nation really pose to the United States?

At this point in the conversation, I always feel duty bound to point out that nearly 37,000 Americans died fighting North Korea and their Chinese overlords between 1950 and 1953, and while the public might consider war with North Korea a hazy improbability, somebody must view them as a true threat, because the United States has maintained a military force in South Korea for the past 55 years -- 28,000 American troops are there now. The reason the United States refuses to sign all those treaties banning land mines endorsed by the rest of the civilized world is that we want a little extra something to slow up the North Koreans should they decide to pour across the 38th parallel again.

I'm sure they give the Korean War a half hour in 10th-grade world history, but it obviously doesn't stick, which is a shame, because if more people recalled the bloody, frozen, grinding stalemate we fought there before Eisenhower got the heck out, leaving some of our POWs in Chinese hands (the war was over by July 1953, seven months after Ike was sworn in. Imagine how the chickenhawks would howl if Obama did anything like that in Iraq).

No comparison.

They're no real danger.

Doesn't matter if they howl. Who cares? He should get us out of Iraq. Why doesn't he?