Editor's Corner: Let’s take a look at North Korea

Let’s say I am your neighbor, and you look over the fence at my yard one day and you see me pointing a high-powered rifle at your house. Wouldn’t you react with alarm? Wouldn’t you call the police?

Maybe you would even pull out a rifle of your own and point it at my house.

However you reacted, you would be alarmed. You would think you were in danger, just because I was behaving that way.

Well, let’s take a look at North Korea. While that country isn’t exactly a neighbor, it is a neighbor of South Korea, which is an ally of ours. U.S. troops — 28,500 of them right now — are stationed there as part of a long-standing arrangement in effect since 1950. They are there to help defend South Korea against — you guessed it — North Korea.

We are talking about the same North Korea that has been lobbing intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the United States. We are talking about the same North Korea that has been threatening to attack Guam, a U.S. territory. We are talking about the same North Korea that continually violates the treaty that suspended the Korean war by firing indiscriminately into the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone.

Is it not rational that we would behave (as we have) toward North Korea by speaking out against North Korea in the United Nations, which oversees the Korean peace treaty and looks with alarm on the development and testing of nuclear weapons?

Is it not rational that we would brandish our own considerable weaponry against the land of the Kims and the home of the unfortunate?

The murderer who runs North Korea, Kim Jong-un, most recently had his own half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, poisoned in the Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia, airport. Prior to that he had ordered the murder of several of his relatives and other individuals whom he thought might oppose him.

Let’s see now: He’s a murderer, he plays with nuclear weapons, he commands a 2 million-person military machine, he continually threatens the U.S. Yet, many believe he’s just a harmless lad with a bad haircut.

I, for one, am glad President Trump is standing up to Rocket Man, as he has been dubbed, to let him know there can be serious consequences to his behavior.

Ditto for Iran.

They say the best way to prevent a war is to be ready and willing to win it. Those have been proven wise words.