But the retaliation should be at sea to minimize escalation to all-out land war, lest Seoul be risked.
Austin Bay has a novel thought--retaliate at sea by seizing North Korean ships to pay reparations to the government and the families of the dead sailors:
Destroying selected Northern naval facilities by air attack is an option, though this involves striking land targets, which Kim's propagandists would portray as escalation.
Explicit naval tit-for-tat, which exposes and exploits North Korean strategic weakness before a global audience, has more political impact. Seoul and Washington should consider seizing North Korean ships in open waters around the globe. Ships and cargoes could be held pending reparations. In Asia, Pyongyang might route its ships through Chinese and Vietnamese coastal water (paying bribes to local coast guards in the process), but eventually they will encounter the U.S. Navy. The maritime cowards will encounter cameras and appear on YouTube. The Google world will get it.
In the Rhineland fiasco, the Western allies lost face. This Korean confrontation is also about political face, and it's time Kim and his killers lost theirs.
South Korea and the U.S., its closest ally, cannot avoid forcefully responding to the Cheonan attack because it prefigures a more terrible future where a further emboldened, fully nuclear-capable North Korea acts even more brutally.
We shall see what happens. The threat of North Korean invasion allowed North Korea to get away with many outrages in the past. South Korea now could destroy North Korea if it came to general war. I think it is time to send the message north that the balance of fear has shifted dramatically in Seoul's favor.
