BRUSSELS -- The crisis in Iraq overshadows everything. Yet far more dangerous is the Korean crisis. At worse, the Iraqi crisis will lead to a conventional war with tens of thousands of casualties. In contrast, millions of lives could be at risk in the Korean crisis -- triggered by U.S. revelations that North Korea has uranium-enrichment technology -- if North Korea makes good on its threat to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire" and as a last resort decides to "go nuclear" and randomly strike Japan with missiles.
Washington expects to be able to easily repel a North Korean invasion of the South, but it will be frustrated if the North fails to play the U.S. game and merely uses its 2,500 rocket launchers and 10,000 guns dug in near the border to rain half a million shells an hour on Seoul and force the United States to invade the North. The U.S. estimates that in such a scenario up to 100,000 American soldiers would die.
The problem is that the world's press portrays the unloved North's leadership as insane and its motives as mysterious, and the U.S. State Department tends to view things in a "cowboy and Indian" world of black and white. But this is not so.