While Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says publicly that the U.S. can fight at the same time in the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia, nobody in the military is ready for a disastrous second Korean War even without fighting in Iraq. Certainly, nobody in the Bush administration wants one. Even without nuclear weapons, the North can launch a brutal attack on Seoul using conventional arms. Accordingly, the president's jeremiads against the "axis of evil" now look like posturing.
