Sambal

If Kim Jong Il wanted to be a dick, he’d flip a low-yield nuke at Fukushima Daiichi right now.

Two reasons:
1. Poke Japan and the US in the eye, possibly contaminate a US carrier battle group (or two!);
2. Remind everyone that unlike Khadafy, he has not given up his WMD and therefore it’s not safe to play him like Saddam

Besides, what’s he got to lose? The dude’s dying anyway.

On the other hand, who’s to say that the CVBG Reagan isn’t there in part to make dumb moves by North Koreans less likely? That was the underlying purpose of their original mission to South Korea, right? I mean.. to take part in “war games”, which basically means the same thing – don’t shoot at SK Navy ships when you might miss and hit the Americans, okay guys?

And who’s to say that the Reagan hasn’t detached an Aegis cruiser and a couple of escorts and sent them to the Sea of Japan (oops I mean East Sea) to discourage any NK funny business while Japan is busy responding to natural disasters?

But what really makes me wonder is, where are the other carriers? Washington and Reagan are in Japan; Enterprise and Vinson are around the Arabian peninsula, and Lincoln is in the South China Sea.

So: two in Japan, two near the Persian gulf, and one in between. None of them are supporting current operations against Libya, oddly.

But they’re ideally positioned in case Neo-bama had decided, say, to preemptively decapitate or defang (by removing WMD capabilities) Iran and North Korea — the remaining two members of W’s “Axis of Evil.” And who’s gonna stop him if he wants to? We can see that even anti-war Democrats like Boxer and Pelosi are completely supine when it’s a member of their own party starting an undeclared war. And could Republicans really complain if the current administration started taking, what, 31 years of hawkish rhetoric seriously?

And if it worked out, Obama might even get another peace prize.