David Warren takes a very sober look at Korea:
And now, Korea
As if Iraq were not enough pain, the news has broken that the United States and its North Pacific allies are in lethal confrontation with North Korea.
From the beginning of this series of "Commentary" articles (the first of them written on Sept. 11th, 2001) I have been predicting a great war. This is not what anyone could want, but in the old Beatles lyric, sometimes you get what you need. In the months after 9/11, and through the battle for Afghanistan, I argued that we were still in a phase not entirely unlike the "phoney war" of 1939-40, which seemed to be all posturing and threats with little real action. It has continued to the present, with all sides manoeuvring for the greatest possible advantage when true fighting begins. All signs suggest this phoney war is finally coming to an end, and that terrible things are about to happen.
At a moment possibly chosen for its tactical effect, on the debate at the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. would still like to get a serious resolution supporting the disarmament of Iraq, the Bush administration announced what it had learned from North Korea almost two weeks before.
The incident happened during talks, early in the month, between the North Koreans and a U.S. delegation led by James Kelly, assistant secretary of state. The North Koreans were not only accused of secretly continuing the nuclear weapons programme that they had committed themselves to abandon in 1994, but given what I understand was irrefutable proof. The North Koreans denied this with their usual theatrical fury.
The next day, after apparently discussing the matter all night, the North Korean delegation appeared, now led by a higher ranking official, Kang Sok-joo, their deputy foreign minister. In a very belligerent tone, he told the Americans that not only was the nuclear weapons programme very much in business, but the regime had far more powerful weapons already deployed. He appeared to be announcing that the North Koreans now considered the 1994 agreement to be abrogated, a dead letter.
That agreement was made by former President Bill Clinton, building on private diplomacy by former President Jimmy Carter, the recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. It was made in defiance of warnings from across the "right" of the foreign policy spectrum that it was catastrophically naïve. In return for a promise not to develop nuclear weapons, and restricted monitoring provisions, the North Koreans were offered advanced nuclear reactor technology which the Clinton administration believed (again over objections) to be essentially useless for the purpose of developing weapons. The North Koreans also became major recipients of U.S., South Korean and Japanese foreign aid, including much-needed food and oil, in exchange for their undertakings.
The treaty should have been blown out of the water in September 1998, when the North Koreans tested a multiple-stage (i.e. transcontinental) missile, firing it right over heavily-populated Japan. There has been no satisfactory co-operation on weapons inspections since 1994, when the North Koreans also abrogated agreements to allow general U.N. inspections -- and were forgiven for that. (The U.N.'s Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency still monitors only one reactor, located at Nyongbyon.)
A series of other provocative acts were also ignored by the Clinton administration, which earnestly believed carrots and no sticks were the way to tame the psychopathic North Korean leadership. (It is a position often tried, but which has not yet worked, in recorded human history.) The Clinton effort was joined in its later stages by the outgoing South Korean President, Kim Dae-jung (another Nobel peace laureate), who adopted the "Sunshine" policy of handsomely rewarding North Korea in return for mere promises and a few public relations stunts. This in turn is a major issue in the current South Korean presidential campaign.
Despite its excruciating failure, the "carrot" instinct is so deeply ingrained among the bureaucrats in e.g. the U.S. State Department, that even at this moment, within the Bush administration, there are diplomats arguing that the North Koreans have been "misunderstood", that they are really just trying to open a new dialogue. The belligerency of their statements, and the candour of their confession that they signed the 1994 agreement as a con and a sham, is passed off as "cultural" -- a terrible, if characteristically unconscious slander against the whole Korean people.
The reality is that the U.S., and the world, are now staring down a regime which is demonstrably mad, which considers itself to be struggling for survival, and which probably does have the means to annihilate some millions of people in South Korea and Japan, if not farther afield. (We simply do not know if they have successfully developed missiles that could reach North America; or other means of delivery.)
We have, in other words, right on the table, exactly what the Bush administration says we will be facing in Iraq, if we don't soon change the regime of Saddam Hussein. I was quite struck, in consulting my usual suspects within the Bush administration, to realize they are now more worried about Korea than Iraq; and by the tone of "trying to remain calm" emanating from Seoul and Tokyo.
Add to this what has just happened in Bali; simultaneous Al Qaeda attacks in Kuwait, Yemen, Afghanistan, and possibly even the suburbs of Washington, D.C. We further know that Al Qaeda and affiliates are doing everything in their power to trigger war between Pakistan and India in Kashmir, and between Israel and its neighbours, from Syria and Lebanon. While the formal diplomatic world may have its eyes focused on the Security Council, that is not where an event of any significance is unfolding.
In North Korea, as in Iraq, there is no certain way to tell the extent of weapons development, from spy planes and satellites. And there is no practical way to infiltrate human agents into the core of a totalitarian regime, as Western intelligence has discovered again and again. The most you can hope is for defectors, from whom a great deal has been learned about both countries; but any conclusion at all requires an educated imagination, informing hard decisions on whom to believe.
So we have the military equivalent of Pascal's Wager. If your enemies are bluffing about their resources, or really don't have the weapons you suspect, then there will be no great harm in going in to find out. If they are not bluffing, and are lethally armed, then the sooner you go in the better. My own reasonably educated guess is that they are not bluffing; that terrible surprises are in store from each of the members of the "axis of evil", and the terrorists they sponsor. And one cannot look at the number of fuses now lit without anticipating a rather large explosion.
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