DRUMS OF WAR

Kasich: We Should ‘Eradicate’ North Korean Leadership

Suggests doing so without “having a war.”

If push comes to shove with North Korea, Gov. John Kasich believes the Trump administration should move to assassinate the top leadership of the rogue state's military. “I believe the best way to solve this problem is to eradicate the leadership… those that are closest to making the decisions that North Korea is following now,” Kasich told reporters at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington, D.C. “The North Korean top leadership has to go, and there are ways in which that can be achieved.” Tensions have been rising with North Korea in recent weeks, and the Trump administration has repeatedly signaled that it would be willing to use military force to confront the Hermit Kingdom's regime. But Kasich thinks that the view of a large-scale war with North Korea would be far too costly in terms of human life. “Moving big warships in and having a war, I don't think that's going to work,” and could lead to a million deaths through a conventional war, Kasich argued. “Too much loss of life.” The alternative would be to have a series of raids and targeted actions against the members of the regime's top echelons, replacing them with a more “benign leadership.” It’s an option that Kasich, as a 18 year veteran of the House Armed Services Committee, believes is within America's power to do. “Now you have to have very good intelligence, you have to have the ability to do things very quickly, and I think that is not beyond our capability,” he said.

—Tim Mak

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