I dunno - am I crazy to believe that we should have shot down the North Korean missile? How else do we stop them from perfecting this technology? Shouldn't that be our goal? Cause this tech is just gonna end up in Iran - hell, they no doubt funded this thing - so we just allowed Iran to add another component to its emerging nuclear threat. And China's motives here are murky to say the least - they say they oppose the launch, but then they do nothing when N Korea ignores them - sounds to me like they're ok with it for reasons which are not entirely clear, although one assumes they see the implied threat as being useful to them - whatever, I gotta think China is encouraging it, either directly or through acts of omission, because I have a hard time believing they'd be tolerating this slight otherwise.
The point is, by not shooting it down we're enabling a lot of disturbing dynamics to percolate and god knows what's gonna come of that. Now I'm sure some game theory tree can explain why my contention is not 'optimal' - but I can't play game theory - I know the consequences of shooting it down could prove quite bad but that doesn't then imply that the consequences of not shooting it down will perforce be better.
I mean, what if the 'caution' exhibited here is perceived as weakness, a reluctance to engage, a signal of an American retreat, relatively speaking, from the region at some not too distant date - what does that lead to? How do the intentions, motivations, perceptions of the various players change under the influence of such? China just buzzed Japanese airspace the other day over the disputed island chain with a 'government' [not military] plane and Japan in response scrambled eight, eight F-15s - how long before the PLA ups the ante by using a military plane to push the envelope? Japan shoots down a Chinese plane and all hell will break loose. If Japan perceives America as no longer being a reliable partner in the region, don't they change their whole military posture which right now is constitutionally quite restricted?
Now of course I'm not saying you can draw a straight line from a failure to bring down N Korea's missile to an outbreak of hostilities between Japan and China - never mind what it portends viz Iran - what I am saying is that it seems absolutely foolish to act as if a line of some sort, possibly quite convoluted, can't exist simply because we might prefer to believe in the primacy of more amenable scenarios that only in a putative or highly conditional sense seem more reasonable.
