Last week, George W. Bush blew off questions concerning North Korea and stayed resolutely on message: He’s going to clean Saddam’s clock either with the United Nations or as the lonesome hawk – an objective that’s being both applauded and denounced from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Supporters claim Bush is doing God’s work. Detractors compare him to a farmer charging off to stomp a rattlesnake in the south 40 while the kitchen is on fire.
The problem is, the paranoids from Pyongyang might burn down our house before we can “cut off the head of the snake,” as Colin Powell promised to do to Saddam in 1991 before he and Poppy Bush blinked.
Experts on North Korea all agree that the Hermit Kingdom is a threat. Most see it as our country’s most serious military worry, while many agree with my favorite Korean expert, Hugh Blanchard, who says, “Not only do they want to get our attention, they want our money, our food, our fuel and whatever else they can extort.”
And as Stanford University’s Stanley Kurtz points out: “The Korean situation is an even more acute problem than our problem in Iraq. Most disturbingly, the two crises together point to a dangerous new dynamic, in which our newfound power and vulnerability combine to isolate us from our erstwhile allies, seriously complicating our prospects for success in the global war against terror.”
North Korea is reported to have nukes, and for sure it has long-range missiles, a huge arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and a large, forward-deployed army with thousands of guns within striking range of the Demilitarized Zone, which divides the two Koreas – where 10,000 soldiers from the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division sit alongside the backbone of the South Korean army.
“To get our attention,” Pyongyang recently intruded into South Korean airspace with a MIG fighter, fired anti-ship missiles into the Sea of Japan as a message to our Navy and intercepted one of our spy planes in international skies, apparently attempting to force the aircraft to land in North Korea.
We’ve responded to these moves by escorting our recon aircraft with armed jets, increasing the number of fighter-bomber aircraft within range of North Korea and repositioning other war toys and boys as our latest countermeasures in a chess game both sides have been playing for 50 years.
And we should, of course, expect still more nasty tricks, such as the infiltration of Special Forces across the DMZ or along South Korea’s coastline. Which will, of course, provide more opportunities for escalation and miscalculation – the stuff that wars are made of – as when North Korea grabbed an intelligence ship in 1968, shot down one of our spy aircraft in 1969 and chopped up American soldiers with axes in the DMZ in 1976.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed back then. But now, under North Korea’s unpredictable playboy heir – “Great Leader” Kim Jong Il – who knows?
Our intel folks say that Kim & Komrades will soon be churning out nuke material galore. With North Korea’s long track record of supplying lethal weapons to the highest-bidding global bad guys, we can expect terrorist gangs like al-Qaida and various rogue states to very quickly become nuclear capable.
Bush said last week that if Washington’s efforts to close down Pyongyang’s nuclear apparatus “don’t work diplomatically, they’ll have to work militarily.”
Have no doubt the United States can turn North Korea’s nuclear factory into a pile of radiated rubble in a Gen. Curtis LeMay first-strike minute. But because more than a half-million brainwashed North Korean fanatics are eyeball to eyeball with the South Korean and American soldiers dug in along the DMZ, they and millions of civilians also within range could well become body-bag filler as soon as our first bomb falls.
If Bush goes for the military solution, the world could well be facing the biggest casualty count since the Vietnam War.
The obvious solution is for the Sons of the Fathers to talk. But since Bush has consistently ignored this option because he doesn’t want to reward the blackmailers, he should at the very least immediately order the buckle of the belt – the 2nd Division – to move muy pronto south of the Han River, out of the beating zone.
