I’m not sure how afraid to be of North Korea’s threats to attack us with nuclear weapons. But the media sure are calming me down. North Korea is “bluffing,” says the Washington Post‘s Max Fisher. Richard Engel says that Kim Jong-un, the north Korean leader, is merely whipping up his people with frenzy to consolidate his political control over the North Korean leadership– “talking war to stay in power.”

Time says that Kim Jong-un isn’t suicidal, and any attack would destroy his country. On MSNBC this week, Jim Maceda said Kim Jong-un just wants credibility with his top brass; and that the worst thing he’s going to do is attack a small South Korean ship. The crisis is behind us, Maceda said.

At the Times, Mark Landler and Choe Sang-Hun say one day that administration officials see North Korea “blustering” not acting, then a day later that Kim Jong-un is playing poker with us:

American officials… believe they can wait out Mr. Kim’s threats until he realizes his belligerent behavior will not force South Korea or the United States into making any concessions. “Right now, they’re testing the proposition that we’ll choose peace and quiet, and put it on our MasterCard,” said a senior American official…

The idea that North Korea is merely bargaining was echoed last night by neoconservative Ari Fleischer, on Erin Burnett’s CNN show Out Front; he said that we should stay calm because the North Koreans are trying to shake the world down for more aid. And this happened before, in 1994, he said. Ho hum.

So North Korea can be contained and deterred? Would the media ever adopt this realist position vis-a-vis Iran? There we are supposed to go to war to keep Tehran from acquiring nukes, and we also acknowledge Israel’s right to go to war– something that the Times says that we don’t grant the South Koreans, who are of course right next door. Japan is not even mentioned in that article, though Japan is closer to North Korea than Israel is to Iran.

The Times story, which is not even on the front page, also says that the U.S. can parry any North Korean attack:

The last time the United States seriously prepared to shoot down North Korean missiles was the summer of 2006, when the defense secretary at the time, Donald H. Rumsfeld, ordered the Army to prepare to intercept a long-range Taepodong missile from its antiballistic missile base in Alaska during a North Korean test. But the North Korean missile broke up in flight. Last month, as the North escalated its threats, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that the United States would bolster long-range ballistic missile defenses in Alaska and California.

But could we deter Iran in the same manner?

The Times says the U.S. has assured South Korea that we will do the job for it; South Korea need not get a nuke. Of course that non-proliferationist argument does not extend to Israel, where Israel’s need for hundreds of warheads is understood as a natural response to the Holocaust.

And where a rightwing prime minister finds a chorus in the US Congress and media when he draws cartoonish doomsday charts to suggest the end is near–



Netanyahu at UN last fall

Oh wait, is it possible Netanyahu is just bluffing to get things out of us? Perish the thought.