Over at Open Source, Adam Morris of Brainysmurf fame writes yet another splendid piece, this time on North Korean refugees. As one might expect, I have some reservations with Adam’s piece. I agree that North Korea exceeds Iraq in terms of both threat level and human rights abuse, but unlike Iraq, North Korea’s proximity to major urban centers in South Korea and Japan would have made taking military action it against exceedingly costly even if we weren’t burdened in Iraq. Our Iraqi commitments do not preclude us from “going after them” - the DPRK’s artillery and rocket forces (much of them trained on Seoul) do. Adam’s comparison of North Korea’s domestic crisis to that of China’s during the 60s and 70s seems quite appropriate, but for perhaps more reasons than he writes. Even if the world had known the full extent of the horrors the Chinese experienced during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, like North Korea, there would have been precious little the outside could have done about it without risking a costly war that no one wanted. Look, you don’t need the United States to take out the Norks. Frankly, the South Koreans could march north and reunify the country tomorrow if they wanted to - the problem is, they don’t want to, for the perfectly understandable reason that they do not wish to lose Seoul in the process. In the end, our commitments in Iraq have not, IMHO, taken away any of our “cards” with the North Koreans - invasion was never an option to begin with.
And coincidentally, Mr. Morris characterizes Bush’s justifications for war in Iraq as “new,” but I’m not sure if that’s entirely appropriate. In fact, “mass graves, murderous regime, [and] violation of UN resolutions” seem disturbingly similar to the rationales given for the Balkan Wars of the Clinton Administration - one of which led to the dismemberment of a UN member state sans UN approval and the empowerment of Muslim terrorists freedom fighters in regions of Kosovo, all based on “sexed-up” allegations of human rights abuses by the Yugoslav Army and paramilitary forces. There are differences, of course - unlike Iraq, there were few geopolitical interests at stake [for the US] in the Balkans, and unlike either Bosnia or Kosovo, the Iraq War ended with American forces overturning a brutal and corrupt regime. You can criticize Bush for adopting two Third World hellholes despite having initially opposed the idea of “nation building.” But it’s incorrect to say that the Administration’s current justifications, as they are stated by Adam, for going to war in Iraq are a recent development in international relations.
My criticism aside, Mr. Morris’s piece is an insightful one. Go read it.
UPDATE: Over at the Gweilo Diaries, Conrad contibutes his own (much more eloquent, as usual) thoughts on Adam’s piece.
9 Comments
Thanks, but I hoped my piece was more about the inablity to US to do anything at all. Invading or some sort of use of force is of course an option, one that would probably be perilous as you pointed out, but I tried to bring home that the US is at China’s beck and call.
Morris trots out the standard liberal canard about how Bush is supposed to have said the threat from Iraq’s WMD was imminent, which is, of course, a load of hogwash. Bush did not say the threat was imminent - he said that it was folly to wait until the threat was imminent.
There’s a considerable difference betweeen the ongoing atrocities in Kosovo that Clinton dealt with, (though I was critical of him for not interrupting it sooner) and the decade-old atrocities of Hussein.
Yeah, Hussein put down armed uprisings against him, as any leader in any country would. He maintained his brutal prison practices. But his ‘genocidal’ era was effectively ended by the first Gulf War, even if he retained his ambitions to regain his previous capacity for horror.
Kosovo was more of an immediate ethnic killing field, though the rationale was not so much humanitarian as it was the problem of refugees pouring into neighboring European countries.
You’re correct about the risk to Seoul, but Adam’s point has merit: short of a nuclear confrontation, we’re stretched too thin to use any other military leverage against a country that is immediately far more threatening to hundreds of thousands of Americans than Hussein was.
In terms of immediacy, we pursued the wrong threat.
Mr. Hayden,
The US is not stretched too thin. The Navy and Air Force are completely available as very little of either service is deployed in the Persian Gulf at the moment. Frankly, these would be the US primary arms in any war with North Korea. Nearly all the ground fighting would have to be borne by the South Koreans. Even so, the US still has up to 8 divisions it can deploy to Korea if necessary, probably more than we can sustain over there, if combined with the burden of supplying the South Koreans as well.
A couple of things. As far as “ongoing atrocities” are concerned, take a look at the HRW reports on Kosovo - OK, hardly the nicest way to fight a civil war, but given KLA activities in the region (it was an ethnically-based seperatist insurgency, afterall), hardly unexpected, and definately not “genocide.” And the worst of the “ethnic cleansing” (if refugee numbers are anything to go by) took place AFTER NATO bombs started a’droppin’ - and you can read that in a number of different ways. Anyway, I’m not sure if I can agree with your “immediate killing field” hypothesis, but it probably warrents more discussion.
And as for the US being stretched too thin to deal with the Norks, well, as luisalegria points out (as did a friend of mine in the elevator today), the Navy and the Air Force are the arms you’d probably want to call in for this job, and they’re relatively unburdened at the moment. Assuming we didn’t want to actually invade the place - which we don’t - there’s no problem, and the threat of a bombing campaign is one the North Koreans take very seriously. And frankly, even if the Norks did decided to respond by moving south, the ROK military is more than up to the challenge - they do have 600,000 (better armed, better fed, and better trained) men under arms, and the entire area north of Seoul is designed to stop a Nork invasion.
Well you do have a point about our options being limited but I don’t think you can say that there are no more cards to play and no leverage over China. There are still a lot of factors and certainly a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes in with China, Japan, S. Korea, Russia and maybe we should include Taiwan and Australia to boot.
America’s biggest threat remains Middle Eastern terrorism. Our quagmire in the Persian Gulf has gone on for 12 years. But now there is a possible way out/long term solution with Saddam gone and the U.S. pulling out of Saudi Arabia. If Iraq can catch up to/join its Northern Kurds in the creation of an economically viable democracy, the dynamics of the region will be permanently changed for the better.
People continue to believe that Iraq and N. Korea were separate policies (an either/or military choice). Of all the motivations behind the decision to attack Saddam, few mention that it had a definite effect on the N. Korean situation. Critics will point out that this makes N. Korea more likely to pursue Nukes. I personally think that they’re intent on doing so no matter what. But the idea is turn up the pressure on Kim and the other countries involved. When you negotiate with the Norks you cannot take the war option off the table.
Btw, in toppling Saddam, we also took out a valuable client of N. Korea as the Kay report indicates. Many customers remain but this has got to put a huge damper on the Nork weapons sales worldwide. Especially the news that N. Korea never delivered the missiles that Saddam paid handsomely for.
Let’s not lose sight of my original point though. I wasn’t arguing that we should attack North Korea (as Conrad insinuated), but that the logic the bush administration is operating under makes N.K. a bigger threat and is a more “evil” empire. I really do think that the increase in defections is a sign that North Korea’s regime is going far worse than Saddams’ previous one, and I do think it has foreign policy implications.
Personally, I agree with you that NK is probably much worse than Iraq, both in terms of threat level and human suffering. Yes, according to the SOME of the logic offered by the Bush Administration in Iraq, NK would be a much more rational choice. But foreign policy principles are only guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Issues of realpolitik come up all the time, and from the very beginning the Bush people made it very clear that North Korea is NOT Iraq. The geopolitical and military realities are different, and just because the Bush administration applied a certain logic in Iraq does not mean he can (or even should) apply it in North Korea. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your argument, but you seem to be criticizing the Bush people for using one rationale in Iraq, but not applying the very same rationale to North Korea, a state that seems to fit to a T the criterea used in Iraq. If so, you’d be right, but then again, if you can find me a president that hasn’t cast aside his principles when geopolitical realities intervened, I’d be truly surprised.
BTW, I hope you’re right on the defections.
Marmot, you don’t know how glad I am to be able to discuss this with someone who actually takes the time to look at my argument. That hasn’t happened in other corners.
Your issue with realpolitic is taken, and you are indeed right to point that out. I also do not think that we should hold presidents or administrations to the lofty, impossible goal of having the same policy. Yet that’s not what I’m getting at. I wanted to say something more along the lines of, if Bush’s (new) justification for Iraq is what it is, then looking at North Korea they qualify too. That’s not really the same as saying as crying foul just because I see contradiction.
Anyway, about the refugees, I plan on blogging on that more. Say what you want about how it changes our view of the norks and Iraq, if it really is as bad as I think then it’s big news in itself.
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TITLE: North Korean refugees are on the rise,
BLOG NAME: Brainysmurf
and I find a connection to Chinas history. I write for the kicking group blog that if what we saw happening in the 1960s where the amount of defectors was really our only guide to knowing just how bad things…
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TITLE: Korea Briefing: 2003-10-14
BLOG NAME: Winds of Change.NET
OCT 14/03 TOPICS INCL: Must-read article; Asian values; Total Recall in SK too?; Wider regional role for USFK; NK Developments; Nukes updates; What to do about NK?; Lifestyles of the Rich and Stalinist; ROK forces to Iraq?; Food aid to NK; NK’s economy…