"one can't help noticing that when ever North Korea act particularly paranoid about the US attacking them, the Bush administration goes, "huh?"

What does "huh" mean, though? Is it really "paranoid" to be worried that a hostile superpower with a record of attacking other countries, when it sees fit, might see fit in this case.

I'm convinced that North Korea is so out of the mainline of any US calculations (to the minor extent I think such calculations exist) that the Administration is genuinely surprised when North Korea assumes they're next.

BTW, all superpowers should be considered hostile and became that way by attacking other countries even it it required establishing some minimal pretext to do so. Shall we discuss the growth of Empirial Britain as an example? Compared to that the US is very nearly the Boy Scouts most of us want to believe we are but never were. We've been acting with relatively restrainted imperial tendencies from our beginning despite the myth we cherished we were different from other powers.