What to do about North Korea?
Worst-case scenarios, North Korea could:
1) Collapse -- that is what China and South Korea worry about. I don't think we care too much about this outcome. Unfortunately, that is why we cannot get South Korea and China to help solve the crisis, because they care about this deeply and we do not.
2) Decide to go out in style and invade Seoul or nuke Tokyo. Japan cares about this deeply but we are not overly concerned -- which is why Japan is only partially on board with us and is at the same time rearming and making its own war plans.
3) Sell nukes to the highest bidder. This is our hot button. And it is the most realistic concern for us. It is also the most difficult to stop and may be closer than we think to becoming a reality.
What can we do?
1) Attack now, surgically or otherwise, recognizing that this would be a real war against a real army with enough firepower to overwhelm and destroy most of a large modern city -- Seoul -- killing tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days. This could happen at any moment, given the hair-trigger between North and South. A single miscalculation by either side at any time could start a war -- an instant overnight war.
2) Threaten, isolate and bluff. This is the stuff of idiots -- and it is the approach Bush took. It pisses off China and South Korea and it feeds the paranoia of the North, prompting them to be ever-more crazy and dangerous, in a country where crazy knows few limits.
3) Engage North Korean. This has flaws and takes time, but is the right approach if you combine carrots and sticks and if you have the time to do it right -- and time is what we have wasted these past two years.
The truly stupid option is # 2, and that is what Bush has been doing.
The first option, an immediate bloodbath, is hard to swallow, but it is better that #2. It is not clear that we have the military to spare for this job as we are stretched very thin because of Iraq. We could simply pull out all the stops and nuke them 100 times over -- but that is close enough to sheer madness that it would be a tough sell -- even for a low brow like "bring-em on" Bush.
The third option was tried with little success by Clinton. The goal was slow thawing between north and south. The "axis of evil" speech more or less killed this option in the short term. If we are to engage, we will need a better approach than Clinton. There is nothing more subversive than KFC chicken and Pepsi. But we don't have time to waste. I am afraid we wasted the opportunity to find a peaceful way out and we must brace ourselves for our failure -- we must prepare for war with North Korea. We can, at the same time, flood the North with US consumer goods and hope that the North prefers to live long enbough to enjoy an unlimited supply of snack foods and other toys. If war comes, we cannot expect it to be like the wars we have seen recently -- this one will be a war that will come like a sudden storm out of the night, and by morning the stench of death will be smelled a thousand miles away.
Perry is right. We must engage with everything we have got to engage with -- including building a new North Korea team shielded from the ideological idiots int eh White House who need to be muzzled, given their rabies shots and quaranteened for a few years. At the same time, we must prepare for war, because it appears that the axis of evil speech has set us on a path that God himself might not be able to deliver us from. And in this war, we must be prepared to kill millions of people. What is unfolding in North Korea is a tragedy of immense proportions. |
