LOS ANGELES -- Many fretful observers, on both sides of the Pacific, are convinced that U.S. military action against North Korea is inevitable. But this gloomy doomsday scenario, it seems to me, becomes increasingly improbable as time goes on.
The gloom originates on the Korean Peninsula, engulfing a paranoid Pyongyang and a shaken Seoul. Recharged with fright in Beijing and Tokyo, it spreads eastward and wafts ominously over America's West Coast, otherwise a happy home to the world's largest Korean diaspora.
The fear here in America is that once Washington finishes in Iraq, it may punch Syria's lights out, wash up and catch its breath for next year's presidential election, and then hit the Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- which is neither a democratic republic nor of the people.