Just wanted to toss some ideas out - sadly, I no longer have time to think seriously any more. So I'm not (planning on) making a coherent argument, just a series of observations.
First, has anyone thought about how astonishing this is? For the last decade, American defense strategy has been predicated on the possibility of two simultaneous wars being fought - and the example was always, always, Iraq and North Korea. Well, guess what? It looks like the odds are pretty good that this is going to happen. Of course, since we've spent the last 10 years cutting the defense budget by something like 50% in real terms, it's going to be kind of difficult to actually _handle_ simultaneous crises, the way we're supposed to be able to. Militarily there's no doubt in my mind that we could win, but it will be a lot harder and bloodier (most of that blood will end up being South Korean, sadly) than it would have had to have been. Second, I've heard a lot about the 37,000 American soldiers on the DMZ, and correctly so. Why, exactly, aren't our allies helping out in the defense of a fellow democracy, as they're supposed to under the UN Mandate. That's a rhetorical question, of course - I think we all know the answer. But what I don't hear much about is that there are _600,000_ South Korean soldiers guarding the DMZ. Could the South Koreans stop North Korea without us? I don't know, to be honest. Probably yes, but not quickly. Those 37,000 troops aren't just a trip wire - they're easily more effective than 10 times their number of soldiers from North Korea, and quite possibly even more so than that. Remember that in the Gulf War not a single American tank crewman was killed by enemy fire, while the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in ground combat (not aerial bombardment, but fully-fledged tank battles larger than anything since the Second World War) was at least in the tens of thousands. But we should remember that unlike, say, Kuwait, South Korea is a democracy that makes real efforts on its own behalf and that possesses a formidable army. Third, the extent to which the South Koreans are legitimately pissed at the US is probably underplayed in the American media. We _really did_ support a sequence of military rulers there. We didn't (as it is often said) help suppress the democratic movement, but we didn't do much to help it along during the Cold War either. That was a tragic mistake on our part. OTOH, the extent to which we did help the South Korean democratic movement along once the Cold War was over is understated as well. As is the fact, of course, that without us there wouldn't _be_ an independent South Korea in which to have a democratic movement. Something, that, unfortunately, doesn't get talked about much in South Korea nowadays. Fourth, South Korea really is acting like a typical nascent democracy. New democracies and democratizing countries are usually fiercely nationalistic - look at India, or the US in the 18th-early 19th century, Germany during the interwar period, Japan before WW2 (although that's a more complex case) and so on. A lot of what's happening in the relationship between the US and South Korea is probably best thought of as growing pains from a population that has absolutely no experience in making any decisions for itself. They want the benefits of American protection, but total freedom to make their own policy unconstrained by American views, and so on. It's kind of ridiculous, but it's not exactly surprising. Fifth, this is a really sucky situation, isn't it? There isn't any real way out, so far as I can see. I should say that I (at the time) supported the Clinton Administration in its handling of the 1994 crisis. In retrospect I think I was probably wrong, but given the (really bad) cards they were dealt, they handled it fairly well - about the only security situation of the whole Administration where I would give them even a passing grade. Unfortunately, they got hoodwinked. That's what comes of listening to Jimmy Carter, I guess. Some portion of our current problem is, I think, a product of the fact that the Administration taught North Korea that we _really were_ willing to pay blackmail. I do note that for all the uproar about _Bush's_ unilateralism, it's little noted that Clinton was (in this situation) far worse, committing the South Koreans to a possible war with North Korea without even mentioning the possibility to them. Bush is, at least, talking to the ROK. A great deal of the tension between the two countries actually stems from the actions of the previous Administration, in my judgment, although such tension is almost certainly inevitable. Sixth, I have to disagree with Dan on the extent to which the Bush Administration has been relying on bluff. I don't think they're bluffing - they are willing to attack if necessary, just as Clinton was, they just don't want to. They also are making a reasonable (if not correct) judgment about the relative rationality of the North Korean and Iraqi governments, as I've written earlier. A large part of their decisions have been screwed up by the rank irresponsibility of the current ROK government, something that they _could_ have anticipated, but that it's certainly understandable if they didn't. It's very hard for people outside of the government (it certainly is for me) to understand how consuming the work is, and how little time you have to stop and think. One Asst. Sec. State from the Clinton Administration who was at the Kennedy School once commented to me that he didn't understand what people meant by "keep this on your back burner" because for the whole time he was in the government, his desk had been on fire. That's a good point, and one I think it's easy for us to underrate. The American government has been on a war footing for more than a year now dealing with a crisis of global complexity and enormous scope, and the sheer intellectual resources of the group - even an Administration as prodigously gifted as this one - are probably getting swamped. The seventh is that, to me, the North Korean situation underscores the extent to which it is vital we topple Saddam Hussein before he acquires nuclear weapons. We are constrained in dealing with North Korea because it has the potential to kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of innocents if we act against them. Its acquisition of nuclear weapons is thus, in a sense, a little less worrisome, because they could already have killed tens of thousands in Seoul - it's just that now they can also kill hundreds of thousands in Tokyo. The real danger is that they'll give the nuclear weapons to someone else. In Saddam's case, however, he _doesn't_ have that capacity - he really can't harm anyone outside of Iraq except by giving them WMD, and even that is a lot harder than most people think - _unless he acquires nuclear weapons_. In which case it becomes a lot easier than most people think. (Two old jokes on that subject, both true, sadly. "Q: How do you smuggle a nuclear bomb into the US? A: Wrap it in cocaine." And "Q: What's the best way to get a nuclear bomb into the US? A: FedEx.") The moment he gets more than one or two nukes, he becomes almost untouchable by us, because it gives him the capacity to incinerate Tel Aviv. That, I'm sad to say, probably wouldn't bother much of Europe, but it's unacceptable to the United States. Thus to me this crisis reinforces the absolute necessity of removing him from power, even as it makes it considerably more difficult to do so. Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
