The New York Times reports (reg’st req.) on the Bush adminstration’s continuing confusion about how to handle the DPRK, although the piece indicates that they may finally have conconcted a Plan Nine From Crawford.
The comments by the official suggested that the long debate in the administration over how to handle North Korea may be coming to a boil. President Bush is to meet with the president of South Korea, Roh Moo Hyun, on Friday, at a moment of unusually high tension between the two allies over North Korea.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, responding to a reporter’s question about the Defense Department official’s remarks while she was traveling to an Organization of American States meeting in Florida, said it would be optimistic to assume that a decision would be made that quickly. She said neither she nor Mr. Bush had a timetable in mind
[...]
One senior administration official who has been deeply engaged in the debate all but rejected the idea of making a new offer to North Korea.
“How many times do you bid against yourself?” he said in an interview. “How many times do you do that?” The official, who insisted on anonymity because President Bush had not yet made a decision on how to proceed, said Mr. Bush’s message to North Korea would remain clear: “You come back to the table to give up the nuclear program and discuss the June proposal.”
Mr. Bush has been criticized by some officials who have left his administration for failing either to offer North Korea enough of a carrot, or a stick.
Say, when an A-Bomb explodes, does the blood of the vicitims boil for a moment before they’re vaporised, or are they just zapped?
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This Friday’s Rho-Bush meeting is so historical. This is what I think will be said:
Bush: “Are you with me? I am going to take NK problem to UN”.
Rho: ” No, you cannot. NK will be so angry.”
Bush: “F***. From when did you start working for NK? Are you man enough to stand up for your country? Who do you work for any way?”
Rho: “I do not want to hurt my own people.”
Bush: “Who is YOUR people?”
Rho: “Koreans”.
Bush: “North or South?”
Rho: “Both”.
Bush: “You can not f***ing have it both ways. Get the hell outta here.”
The U.S. announces that it will pull ALL of troops out of Korea right away. Koreans go bonkers realizing they have no way to defend their country. Pres.Rho, with his left-wing ideology, gets isolated from mainstream Koreans.
“…at a moment of unusually high tension between the two allies over North Korea.”
Um….is there any other kind of moment?
But seriously, is the ‘tension’ right now any different 6 months ago? Or is the reporter just trying to fit in with the doom gloom crowd?
Baduk I think you posted the exact same thing in another thread. I’m almost certain of it.
Not in another thread, but in different blog. I posted this in Nora’s blog.
You caught me reading nora, oh god.
/me holds head in shame
Plan nine?? I must be ignorant. I was still waiting for plan one.
I think it’s a reference to Plan Nine from Outer Space.
i thought that crawford was just for clearing brush to clear the mind. do they actually plan down there?
baduk, you’re about right with the conversation, but things won’t go to the UN yet. yet.
Thanks for enlightening me on Plan Nine from Outer Space. I followed the link and discovered the movie aptly describes not only Bush?€™s Korea plan, but the Roh administration as well. A viewer described the movie as
Thoroughly Inept But Quite Watchable
I’m with Scott-in-Japan.
If you listen to the media, in Korea and the US and elsewhere, and listen to the experts, the tension “has been (is) building” on this issue, always “on the verge of” something major, it should be like a black dwarf after a supernova — by now, it should be sucking the enire world into a vortex.
Instead, today looks a whole hell of a lot like last year.
The vast majority of all this talk is basded on one very huge misconception –
that something can be done.
It’s very easy to say “solve the problem” because we naturally believe a solution can be found for everything.
That isn’t how it works all the time.
A solution that makes sense will not be reached until the regime in Pyongyang is gone and North Korea is opened up.
Or another solution will not be found until the United States regime decides to accept as the “best solution” possible painting a pretty face on a pig — accepting to give North Korea much needed regime strengthening material aid for a curtailment of its nuclear bomb making potential — while accepting that North Korea will keep some nukes, keep developing them more quietly, and will retain the option of going back to full throttle when it sees fit.
Why is this?
North Korea believes deep in its heart it cannot withstand opening its nation to the kind of inspections that would be necessary for anyone without their head up their ass (willfully blinding themselves). The inspections would have to allow many teams to go anywhere in the nation and such inspections to continue periodically forever.
Pyongyang either kicks out or frustrates into leaving not so pro-American humanitarian groups who want to do nothing more than feed and aid its starving citizens.
If someone can tell me how a bleeping deal on the nukes is realistically possible given this basic fact, I’ll flap my arms real hard and fly over the moon.
The second major reason why a solution is not, was not, and will not be at hand is
“Mr. Bush has been criticized by some officials who have left his administration for failing either to offer North Korea enough of a carrot, or a stick.”
The truth is that there is no good solution. Both the Bush administration and its predecesor can be critized for their “failures” in this area, but such “failures” are endemic to democratic governments when faced with ruthless totalitarian opponents.
The military saying is that “no plan survives contact with the enemy”; another variant is that “the enemy gets a vote”. The bottom-line truth is that the North’s nukes are a “brilliant” achievement, built upon the bones of its own dead. This accomplishment is analogous to Stalin’s ruthless industrialization of the early 1930’s, for which he found the capital by exporting large quantities of grain while ruthlessly starving millions of peasants (who were all potential political opponents of communism). This forced industrialization later enabled his regime to survive the overwhelming German onslaught of 1941-2, just as the NorK’s nukes now give it the ability to survive as long as it can hold together internally. And the long-term survival of the DPRK regime is now an almost explicit ROK political objective anyway and will remain so no matter what future ROK political party holds office.
A bold break with the status quo is called for by both Roh and Bush (though sadly, I doubt if we will see anything of the kind).
But if Roh has the courage of his convictions, he ought to propose (and Bush ought to agree) that a withdrawal of US forces is the type of attention-grabbing move needed, while continuing with the alliance and the defense guarantee. Then Roh can continue openly with an all-out appeasement policy of “economic incentives” to the North; such measures seem to have wide popular support in the South (?). While bringing in China as a strong partner to restrain any aggressive NorK moves. (BTW, the word “appeasement” is here used as an objective statement of a political strategy, not in a pejorative sense).
China has a strong interest in peace on the peninsula and with their backing NorK could be restrained diplomatically from undertaking a new Korean war. This way we can prevent any further “experiments” as to what actually occurs to the human body during the first nanoseconds at ground zero.
I don’t have any idea as to what will happen in the next ROK elections, but some of you guys seem to think that Roh is toast. So what has he got to lose by trying a bold approach? The economic interests of the PRC are a strong lever, yet unused on the North; the lever can only be brought to bear when a US unilateral withdrawal forces China to step in and take over the role currently played by the US.
This China potential is what keeps such a solution from being analogous to “Munich” IMO. Also, the geography of the region matters (that’s why it’s called “geopolitics”); the US will retain a strong presence right next door.
It’s a “win-win” for everyone involved, and is the best way to prevent a war.
If the U.S. pulls out of Korea, then Korea will go nuke. Korea will develop nuke with vengeance like the NK is doing now. In addition, Korea will develop missile technology (it is a little known fact but the U.S. is limiting Korean missile technology development).
Korea will be full of nuke. Nuke bombs, missiles, etc. Moreover, it will sell those nuke technology to almost any nation that can afford it. SK will have no qualms to sell nukes to Iran, Palestinian or any Arab nation.
The U.S. will have no say about any of this. Just like it has no say about what the French and the Germans do.
It is a tough call.
“But if Roh has the courage of his convictions, he ought to propose (and Bush ought to agree) that a withdrawal of US forces is the type of attention-grabbing move needed, while continuing with the alliance and the defense guarantee.”
This is the worst case scenerio to me.
I agree with a later post today by Marmot — that nations sometimes make terrible mistakes, so the confidence that North Korea would “never” attack the South is misguided — how much so, only time will tell.
Pulling USFK out might give North Korea the confidence it needs to initialize its own long sought unification plan.
Also, South Korea can defend itself, but will it? Will it take the money and resources it needs to convert the South Korean military into a strong enough deterent force that will convince Pyongyang an invasion of the South would result in the death of North Korea?
The worst case to me is that the US leaves, the North attacks, and the US throws soldiers back in — basically a Korean War II.
If we leave, we should leave for good. No more boots on the ground - even if North Korea attacks again.
If we are going to keep our committment to send tens of thousands of our ground troops to defend Korea in a war, then we should keep enough inside South Korea to deter and to fight.
For myself, I’d prefer taking USFK out with the understanding ground troops are not going to be reinserted.
There’s not enough there now US, not to fight a large scale conventional war.
I agree it should not be a US primary responsibility to fight the ground battle in a hypothetical future Korean war. I wouldn’t rule out a reinseration of any US ground troops however; such a mission needs to remain as a contingency for whatever US Pacific command troops are available in the event of a war (essentially none right now, except for maybe the Marines on Okinawa; the Army division in Hawaii is probably tied up with helping out in Iraq, at least part of the time).
US air and sea power is definitely not tied down in Iraq and can be readily available to blast whatever targets President Roh and his generals decide need to be taken out in the event of war.
Or not; the decision of whether to call for the use of such resources should be placed entirely on him and all of the ROK citizen voters.
This is the reason I remain uneasy with the current level of announced troop withdrawals. The idea before was that we kept enough troops in South Korea to deal with a North Korean invasion - not enough to stop it from gaining ground once the attack was unleashed, but enough to fight a good delaying action until more US units could join the fight.
I would seem logical to me that at some point in the downsizing of USFK, we tip the balance against being able to fight the effective delying action —- and tip it toward a token force.
I hate the idea of a token force very, very much.
A trip wire without enough punch is the worst case for me.
I favor removing all and committing air and sea forces if the war comes, but with an understanding up front that ground troops will only return in the type of sitaution the UN loves — when the fighting has ended and they play an almost exclusively policing role (if they come in at all).
If USFK leaves, you guys always have Fat Don’s Expat Platoon:
Alarmed by North Korean sabre rattling (1), and with little faith in emergency evacuation plans, a band of expatriates has formed a guerrilla unit to resist an invasion from the North while demonstrating that their love for Korea goes beyond the weekly white envelope stuffed with Won.
Mr. Biden, suggesting that some of those comments had been calculated to slow diplomatic progress, asserted that the administration had been “paralyzed by internal policy divisions on North Korea.”
I got a Bad Feeling about this.
I missed this last comment of Shelton’s with the link.
Marmot, this is why it would be very useful, if technically possible, to include a “most recent comment” time stamp for each topic on the front page(s), maybe right below the byline.
Maybe you could put a “recently commented on posts” list on the right. This way we wouldn’t miss some interesting comments on older posts.