The War After Iraq
Posted By John Moore on March 6, 2003
A few months ago North Korea admitted to a nuclear program. Since that time it has been slowly escalating tensions with the United States. It has taken several steps to bring it closer to rapid production of a few nuclear weapons; it has threatened a US reconnaissance plane; it has made numerous bellicose statements.
Iran just admitted to having a nuclear enrichment program “for energy production.” Iran also has a significant ballistic missile system using North Korean technology.
Iraq, of course, is holding tight to its weapons of mass destruction, in spite of a huge financial cost and now the near certainty of war.
All of these actions threaten America. All of them can ultimately lead to terrorist use of Weapons of Mass Destruction in US cities. As Stanley Kurtz asserts, nukes in North Korea are likely to be sold to terrorists and set off in our cities. Ultimately Iran will be in a position to send terrorists with the same goal.
The timing of these actions is not accidental. All three nations of the “Axis of Evil” are threatening us at the same time. Iraq is almost certainly going to be defeated, but meanwhile North Korea is working at feverish speed to build nuclear weapons. Iran will follow shortly.
Both are counting on the relatively small size of the US military and our lack of world support to deter us from attacking them until too late. Korea holds Seoul hostage, and also threatens Japanese cities with chemical and biological weapons. An attack on North Korea would almost certainly cost millions of lives, most of them civilians in South Korea.
North Korea’s strategic goal is to conquer South Korea, and then become a regional power. The somnolence of the South Korean populace plays to their favor.
However, as Kurtz points out, the US cannot allow their program to proceed – even if we have no support from South Korea. A nuclear supermarket in Pyongyang is such a terrible danger that it cannot be allowed to happen. Thus war with North Korea this year is a very high probability.
Iran has no such deterrent, but is being careful not to be overly provocative. Iran is also the greatest single sponsor of terrorism, and the leadership has as deep a hatred of the US as does Osama. They hope to catch us in a fait accompli – achieving nuclear deterrence before we can attack them.
Iran has an achilles heel – their young population. Most of their population was born since the fall of the Shah. They long for freedom and hate the ruling Ayatollahs. Iran is not totalitarian (although heavily authoritarian), so revolt is not impossible. On the other hand, China had lost some of its totalitarian structure by the time of Tiananmen Square, and yet that rebellion was put down.
The US should try to exploit the anti-regime feelings, and hopefully the CIA can drag a few competent covert operatives out of retirement in order to do the job. Iran’s leaders, however, are betting that such efforts will fail.
They are also no doubt hoping that we will be exhausted politically, economically and militarily by the time we are through with North Korea. Furthermore, they can have reasonable expectations that world opinion will make it increasingly hard for the United States to operate militarily.
The US will soon face some terrible choices: forcing regime change in North Korea and Iran, or a return to nuclear deterrence.
The latter would have to take the form of a guaranteed massive nuclear strike against all possible suppliers of weapons of mass destruction in the event of nuclear terrorism in the US. Such a posture would put tens of millions of innocent Iranians and North Koreans as our stated target, a distasteful position. Furthermore, this approach will fail as soon as an enemy believes that our will to retaliate has faltered. In addition, corruption in the WMD countries could lead to unofficial weapons or material sales that would not be deterrable.
The more moral alternative is to prevent those regimes from achieving or maintaining their dangerous status, by any means at our disposal.
John, You are quite right to point out the downside of deterrence: If it fails and an American city gets nuked then we may not know who to strike back against. If we strike back against all possible suppliers then we would have to kill tens of even hundreds of millions, the vast bulk of whom would be innocent.
Deterrence is not a morally acceptable strategy first because it may fail and many Americans may die. But also once it fails we then we would then have a huge moral dilemma: we would have to kill large numbers of people.
No, we would not be exhausted by an attack on North Korea. The numbers I’ve seen for the cost to the US of a full scale attack on North Korea are somewhere in the $100 billion dollar range. That is therefore about 1% of the US yearly GDP. Even if it was 10 times that amount it would still be just 10%. To put that in perspective, in WWII the US was spending approximately half its GDP per year for war.
I think the most likely exhaustion suffered by the US would be political and social, not economic or military. After all, that exhaustion is what caused the loss of Vietnam.