Both U.S. military and civilian leaders seem a bit nonplussed about the North Korean attack on a South Korean fishing village. With the American Armed Forces tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House is reluctant to up the ante in the highly militarized Korean peninsula. So the American response has been rather tepid. The administration accelerates the schedule on pre-planned U.S.-South Korean naval exercises, essentially the same response to the sinking of the Republic of Korea’s Cheonan that killed 46 sailors earlier this year.

Yesterday, we saw how Kim Jong-Il regime interpreted our response to the Cheonan incident: toothless.