"Way outside the normal provocation"

First the attack on a South Korean naval ship. Then, the casual show and tell of the uranium enrichment facility. Now, shells falling on a South Korean village, killing at least two and sending inhabitants to Korean War-era bomb shelters. What the hell is going on in Pyonyang?

Who will flinch?

The Korea's game of chicken doesn't get all that much attention, but it seems like the two countries are intent on going to war. There are a lot of U.S. troops stationed in between them.

"A sour war"

From David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest War:

“It was simply a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on and on, seemingly without hope of resolution, about which most Americans, save the men who fought there and their immediate families, preferred to know as little as possible,” David Halberstam writes in “The Coldest Winter,” his stirring, wide-screen version of a war that established the pattern for ugly superpower confrontations to come.

In many ways, I think, we are still overshadowed by the competing visions of American military might -- a Greatest Generation notion of fighting "good wars" that can be decisively won versus the "die for a tie" realities we have had to deal with, beginning on the Korean peninsula. The trouble is, we have repeatedly tried to relive that feeling of unity of purpose and the reward of total victory by choosing to fight wars driven by murky motives, conflicts with no purpose whatsoever.