Kim Jong Il at the OK Corral
Posted: February 5, 2003
Patrick J Buchanan
Is Kim Jong Il seeking a showdown with the U.S. president who told the world he personally "loathes" the North Korean ruler?
Does Kim intend to force Bush into a humiliating retreat from the vaunted Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive strike," as Khrushchev was forced to publicly retreat in the Cuban missile crisis?
What other explanation is there for Kim's brinkmanship?
In recent weeks, North Korea removed U.N. cameras and broke the seals on its nuclear reactor, ordered U.N. inspectors out of the country, and renounced the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now, satellite photos reveal that North Korean trucks may be transferring spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon reactor to a nearby reprocessing plant. There, the plutonium can be extracted for nuclear weapons.
Within "weeks and months," says Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency, North Korea may be producing atom bombs. Nor has Kim tried to hide what he is up to.
He has thrown up an in-your-face challenge to the president who, in last year's State of the Union, declared to the world, "The United States ... will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Remarkable. Iraq denies it has weapons of mass destruction. U.N. inspectors cannot find any. Yet, Iraq faces invasion. But North Korea brazenly fires up a plant to produce fuel for atom bombs, as President Bush offers repeated assurances he has no plans to attack.
This cannot continue. For if North Korea has decided to build a nuclear arsenal, not only is the Bush Doctrine dead on the Korean peninsula, the balance of power in Asia is imperiled. For if America does nothing, while Pyongyang goes nuclear – despite the president's vow he would not permit it – U.S. credibility, on which all our Asian alliances hinge, will be gravely eroded.
George Bush's America will have been faced down by a tyrant.
As of today, no one knows whether North Korea has perfected an atom bomb it can deliver on target. Kim has never conducted a test. But if North Korea turns out enough fissile material for half a dozen bombs, and Bush does nothing, the option of a U.S. pre-emptive strike vanishes. Put bluntly: If that Yongbyon reprocessing plant is not shut down by Kim, or destroyed by U.S. air power by April, U.S. credibility will be shredded in Asia.
But what is Kim after? Does he want war with America?
This seems improbable. Though North Korea – with its 11,000 artillery tubes on the DMZ, its hundreds of missiles and a handful of atomic bombs – could kills scores of thousands of Koreans, Japanese and Americans, Kim cannot win a second Korean War. Yet, such a war would bring the destruction of his country and the end of his regime.
The more likely answer is that Kim seeks several goals, all of them attainable. The first is security from attack. The second is to force Bush to accord North Korea recognition and respect. The third is a renewal of fuel and aid to keep North Korea alive.
Kim is not a madman. He has seen how, when Red China went nuclear, U.S. threats ceased, Nixon came to pay his respects and Beijing was handed China's seat in the U.N., while Taiwan was expelled. America then abrogated its defense treaty with Taipei and shifted its embassy to Beijing. U.S. investment poured into China, and America escorted Beijing into the World Trade Organization and now permits China to run a trade surplus at our expense of $100 billion a year.
Even George Bush kowtows. When a Chinese MIG crashed into a U.S. surveillance plane in international airspace, Bush and Secretary Colin Powell repeatedly expressed sorrow for the death of the crazed Chinese pilot, and paid to have our plane crated up and shipped home. Kim wants the kind of deal the Chinese got.
Now, with the world watching, he is demanding that the Americans negotiate directly with him, as he moves closer to producing weapons-grade plutonium.
President Bush has very few options. He can bomb the Yongbyon reprocessing plant and risk war. He can seek U.N. sanctions, which Kim says would be a declaration of war. He can refuse to negotiate, as Kim defies his ultimatums and acquires enough fissile material for a dozen bombs.
The president and Powell have apparently decided that the way to win this showdown is to smash Iraq to show Kim what happens to regimes that defy the United States. But even before Baghdad is occupied, Kim may have enough plutonium for half a dozen atom bombs. What do we do if he then says, "OK, come and get 'em."
By the way, who was it that put all that bellicose Axis-of-Evil rhetoric in the president's speeches in the first place?
wnd.com
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The unintended consequences of war
Posted: February 3, 2003
Patrick J Buchanan
Rarely do wars, once begun, work out as anticipated.
As 1898 began, William McKinley could not have dreamed the year would end with America annexing the Philippines. Yet by December, the United States, having routed Spain, had launched a three-year war to crush Filipino resistance to U.S. imperial rule.
By 1900, with his "Open Door" policy, McKinley had embroiled us for a century in the politics of Asia. All this came as the consequence of a war begun because a U.S. battleship blew up in Havana harbor, almost certainly an accident for which Spain bore no responsibility.
When Wilson took us into the Great War "to make the world safe for democracy," he could not have known America's victory would lead to a communist Russia, a fascist Italy, a Nazi Germany, a bloated British Empire, and a second war far bloodier and more destructive than the first.
When he hailed Neville Chamberlain for risking war with Nazi Germany over Poland in 1939, Churchill could not have known that Poland and nine other Christian countries – as well as China – would end up in Stalin's grip as a result of the war he had urged on the British people. "We killed the wrong pig," he is said to have muttered in belated regret.
But if the results of wars won can leave nations with ashes in their mouths, the opposite is also true. America fought to a draw in Korea. Yet, because of our resistance to Stalinist aggression, South Korea became a pillar of Free Asia and Japan stayed in the Western camp until America's decisive victory in the Cold War.
South Vietnam fell in 1975 – a defeat for American policy, if not U.S. arms. But that heroic struggle in which 58,000 Americans died bought for Southeast Asia 10 years of time in which freedom took root.
When President Bush's father was about to launch his war to liberate Kuwait, this writer predicted it would be the first, not the last, Arab-American war. The second is now at hand.
No one knows for certain how it will play out. Most Europeans and Arabs, and many Americans, fear a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq will lead to a Middle East upheaval in which Islamic extremists, hell-bent on a war of civilizations with the West, could come to power.
Neoconservatives, wild for war, predict a "cakewalk" that liberates the people of Iraq from a bloody tyrant and begins the long-overdue democratization of the Arab and Islamic world.
Militarily, Iraq does not appear a major problem. An Iraqi air defense, unable to shoot down a single U.S. plane in 40,000 sorties over that country in 10 years, cannot long withstand U.S. air power that can deliver 1,000 smart bombs and cruise missiles on target each day. And Iraqi ground forces cannot long resist Abrams tanks that can guarantee the kill of an Iraqi armored vehicle with every shell fired. Thus, the great question: What comes next?
The War Party sees the occupation of Iraq, like the occupation of Germany and Japan, as an opportunity to convert hostile Arab nations into peace-loving and pro-Western societies. Faced with U.S. military supremacy, the Arabs, they believe, will at long last accept benevolent U.S. hegemony and the permanent presence of Zionist Israel in the heart of the Middle East.
The antiwar camp fears that the result of a U.S. invasion of Iraq could be a Middle East that more resembles the Europe of the 1930s than the Europe of the 1950s. When Arab regimes fall, the new regimes could reflect the resentment and hatred of American power that is now pandemic among these peoples.
In the final analysis, the divide is over how best to prevent another 9-11, how to keep America secure and at peace in a world where we are not loved, and, by some, no longer feared.
Was 9-11 the result of a policy of nonintervention in the Islamic world? Or did terrorists come over here to massacre us in our homeland because we were over there intruding massively in their part of the world?
One camp, call it the Wilsonians, believes that only when the world appreciates that the United States is the pre-eminent world power, and that democracy is their future as well as ours, and that any who defy us will be crushed, can we be truly secure.
The other camp believes that the way to keep America free and secure is to stay out of wars that do not affect our vital interests, and let alien societies work out their own destinies. As time was our ally in the war against communism, which did not work, so time is our ally in the war against Islamism, which also does not work.
But President Bush has decided this time to go with the Wilsonians, and he is taking us all with him.
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