Clinton SecDef: Korean War This Year, Bush Blamed
Tue July 15th, 2003 18:50 MSTFormer Clinton defense secretary William Perry warned today that the nuclear program in North Korea “poses an iminent danger of nuclear weapons being in American cities.” Perry is considered an expert on Korean military issues.
And Perry is certainly right. The North Koreans could fabricate nukes and sell them to terrorists, who could relatively easily smuggle them into US cities and detonate them.
Strangely, Perry blames Bush for the problem because Bush will not hold unilateral talks with North Korea. Perry psychoanalyzes Bush: “My theory is the reason we don’t have a policy on this, and we aren’t negotiating, is the president himself. I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him.”
But Perry ignores the fact that the US has been trying to negotiate with the Norks. What Bush refuses to do is hold bilateral talks. It is the North Koreans who refuse to talk under any other circumstances.
So Perry would have Bush give in to North Korean demands (always a dangerous thing to do with tyrants). Then apparently magic would happen and the Norks would stop developing these weapons. This magic is invoked through bribes, of course.
After all, the administration he served in used bribes. History would indicate that this hardly worked, or we wouldn’t be in the current situation. The Norks have admitted that as they were receiving the bribes, they were also working on building nuclear weapons in direct violation of the agreements!
Sure… a bribe might push the problem down the years a few years (it allowed Clinton to avoid an embarrassing Korea problem). We could just buy most of the warheads from the Norks for a billion dollars apiece, every year, into eternity, and hope they didn’t sell any others to terrorists.
Is this the policy Perry advocates? He calls for “Coercive diplomacy.” This means that you offer something while backing it up with an iron fist. Of course, he didn’t say what should be offered, or what we should do with our “iron fist.” Certainly his administration relaxed its fist while paying out huge bribes.
The related Washington Post article suggests that a focus on Iraq by the administration “has allowed the North Korean crisis to spiral out of control.” In other words, Bush can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
This seems unlikely, although certainly our greatly reduced military has made military options difficult.
In fact, the Bush administration has been dealing with the Korean issue all along. They have tried multilateral negotiations with the Norks and Chinese, and have been pressuring China, South Korea and Japan (which no longer needs pressurizing) to assist, and they have been threatening North Korea. The administration also moved a heavy bomber force to Guam, within 4 hours flying time of Korea, and made sure it was known to the Koreans.
It is the press which has been distracted by Iraq. Most Americans still don’t know that there is a very dangerous threat in Korea. The press will, of course, periodically discover it as they did today, and tell us that it is Bush who has not been paying attention.
One thing for sure… the time of decision is near. The US must:
1) Convince the Norks to give up their weapons program, and to do so in a way that is verifiable and not quickly restartable. Doing so with bribes (as Perry recomments) means giving in to nuclear blackmail, which would encourage other rogue nations to follow Koreas example. It is also very unlikely that a paranoid closed society like North Korea would allow sufficiently intrusive inspections to guarantee that the program was terminated. After all, the 1994 precedent is not comforting.
or
2) Destroy the Nork program by bombing. This may be difficult if the material has been taken underground. It also runs the risk of triggering a bloody war, with South Korean civilians bearing the brunt of millions of casualties. This war can probably be deterred with proper preparation.
or
3) Allow the Norks to continue a while longer. At that point, the program would probably be unstoppable without the loss of one or more western cities. A likely action by North Korea would be to smuggle a few nukes into western cities, and then inform the US this had been done. Or, they would put some on their IRBM’s and aim them at major Japanese cities. They have been recently working on the technology necessary to trigger Plutonium weapons and miniaturize them for missile delivery (they may have access to partial or complete US W-88 plans via Pakistan via China).
One thing is for sure. If we don’t do something, some of these weapons will end up in the hands of terrorists, and will likely explode one or more US cities within the next couple of years.
Although it has taken longer than this blogger expected (and recommended), the time for action is drawing near.
And, of course, feel free to delete these comments when you fix the typo. Nice editorial and I agree with your assessment!
Your assessment is quite correct, as far as it goes. Perry’s hyperventilating and gratuitous psychoanalysis aside, the danger seems real. But I wonder if North Korea is potentially a very big distraction from the longer and bigger war on terror/nuclearized islamism?
The preferable policy is to handle the ‘norks’ with a combination of threats (nuclearized Japan, nuclear annihilation) and some cash for energy. Take our troops out when any reasonable deal is made (this actually makes it easier for us to attack them, and scares the hell out of them).
The bigger problem is the 70 or 80 nukes in Pakistan that are liable to fall into the hands of the islamicists, and the developing nuclear program in Iran. Given the wretchedness of our overtaxed intelligence services, the situation could easily be much worse than we think.
North Korea is potentially very dangerous, but they have no plans to dominate our civilization, and have no value as fly paper for terrorism, like our presence in Iraq. A large military engagement by us in a Korean war would make the islamicists very happy indeed…they would find that much to their advantage right now.
And in the end, regarding Perry’s ultimate credibility, he is one of the architects of our current difficulties…..
Cliff,
Thanks for your comments. And certainlly the Islamicists are the largest threat.
However, the critical issue with the Koreans is related to post-9-11 thinking: a rogue nation with WMD’s may choose to anonymously sell them to the Islamicists.
I do not expect North Korea to nuke us. I do absolutely expect them to sell nukes to Al Quaeda and I expect them to smuggle them into the US and set them off.
This is why Korea is such a crisis.
As far as threats and cash (which is essentially Perry’s recommendation), the problem is that there is no way we can verify that this will solve the export problem. It is pretty easy to smuggle a baseball sized hunk of plutonium out of a country the size of Korea… especially given that they have land borders with both China and Russia (both countries full of corruption), and a large submarine fleet.
So we can pay them off, and they can sell the nukes anyway. And when one goes off, we may not even be able to tell that it was a Korean nuke (as opposed to, say, a purchased Russian suitcase nuke).
See my older article and its referenced Kurtz article for more on this.
As far as Pakistan, that is very scary too, as I don’t know how long it will be before the Islamofascists take over. I have seen reports that indicate that the US may have some direct ability to keep Pakistani nukes out of their hands. In any case, if the Islamofascists take over, the Indians will destroy Pakistan and its nukes very quickly. So that situation *may* not result in loose nukes.
Iran is another serious problem - addressed to some extent in the article referenced above.
John
You’re quite right that we can’t guarantee that the norks will keep their stuff at home. But it comes down to an evaluation of relative risks and rewards…there is no perfect certainty here.
First, the islamists remain the point men of the threat. The norks are at most suppliers. The norks will not plant nukes in American cities out of their own agenda, the islamists will.
Second, the norks are now essentially criminals, not ideologues. They may appear crazy, but their threats and noises are calculated. And they are quite desperate to keep themselves in power.
We should not tie down large amounts of military resources on suppliers. We should focus on the center of the threat, and keep our eyes and resources focused on them.
I am not saying the norks are not a serious problem, or that we might miscalculate, but a rational evaluation of relative risks and rewards seems to me to point to keeping our resources on the point of the main threat. If the islamists get that we will not be distracted, they will be less likely to plant a nuke here, regardless of how they acquire it.
Finally, even if the norks do sell the islamists a nuke, and it goes off in an American city…the point remains the same. Even in those circumstances, the islamists must remain our primary focus. We will have to figure out who to destroy when that happens.
It would be helpful if we could attack them all, but right now that seems unlikely given our limited military resources, short of using our nuclear weapons.
I agree with your characterization of the Norks.
However, a critical reason to focus on the suppliers is that there are few of them and creating nukes requires quite a bit of infrastructure and imports. Thus they represent a centralized point of the threat, and an identifieable, critical target. They have *already said* that they intend to sell their weapons. Another is that they may sell their weapons to anyone with the bucks. The Islamists are only the most obvious customer. Saddam might buy a bomb to take revenge, using his substantial intelligence agency in the US to plant it. The Norks might sell a bomb to a rogue arm of the IRA which would blow up London. They might sell one to a rich Timothy McVeigh, who would blow up Wichita or somewhere. They might sell one to the Chechens, who would blow up Moscow, possibly triggering the Russians to launch a spasm attack against us and China with their still plentiful thermonuclear weapons!
Furthermore, these sales are hard to deter. Preventing North Korea from nuking the US directly is pretty easy… deterrence. The criminals don’t want to be vaporized. Preventing the Norks from selling the weapons to some random group is much harder, as they may be able to achieve deniability (was it a Nork nuke or a stolen Russian nuke or a stolen Pakistanian nuke or what? who do we retaliate against?). Furthermore we need to act before the plutonium is dispersed and hidden. We also need to act before their own deterrent is created, in the form of nuclear armed IRBM’s (Japan) and ICBM’s (US mainland).
Look at it by analogy. Consider them as the WMD arsenal of the Islamists. To defend against the Islamists, an obvious move is to attack, among other things, their arsenal.
The Islamists themselves are too diffuse an enemy for a focus on them to provide a significant change of stopping a nuclear attack. They are multiple groups, not closely tied together, and often impossible to penetrate due to their use of family or clan ties. This is why they represent a very different type of threat. You say to focus our resources, but which ones? What do we do against the Islamists (other than mount a needed much stronger propaganda war)? Which resources would you focus on what? Which of these resources would be unavailable if we attack the Norks?
It is precisely these questions that lead us to focus on the suppliers - especially of nuclear technology which is particularly deadly and yet particularly difficult to make.
By analogy, consider the Israeli problem with Palestinian terrorists. They know where many are, but not where all are. They know who most of the leaders are. The enemy can be attacked within minutes of the decision to do so. And yet, they have been unable to stop the terrorism. Imagine if a few of the suicide bombers were carrying nukes? There would be NO Israel (which, incidently is one major goal of the Islamists).
So I think we have to consider the Norks (and yes, they most closely resemble organized crime) to be an important part of the Islamofascist threat and the current situation to be a major crisis.
Or, as I said in the one article, the *combination* of rogue states with WMD’s and Islamofascists is the great danger we face. Without either of those, the threat would be much less. We could deter the Norks. Islamofascists without WMD’s can do far less damage while we are trying to destroy their base.
The Islamists have literally millions of willing young men to recruit from. We will never be able to kill them all. It will also be very difficult to keep them out of the US - especially with our current too-PC policies. Furthermore, they recruit within the US, mostly from the already-muslim population and the black criminal population (who often turn to Islam).
Thus defeating the Islamists will take a long time and will ultimately require destroying their ideology. They have few bases, no centers, present no targets except people, and those people are relatively easy to replace.
Dealing with the Nork problem cannot be a distraction from dealing with the Islamicists. The worlds only hegemon MUST be able to deal with multiple serious threats at once.
I think our biggest failings in the WOT are:
1) We have not done enough on homeland defense, partly out of PC reasons, partly out of funding reasons, largely out of
bureaucratic reasons, anr partly out of political reasons. But there is NO WAY we can adequately defend the homeland against WMD’s that are the size of a suitcase and can destroy a city!
2) We need to greatly expand our army. We may have to *occupy* several countries at once (Pakistan or Saudi Arabia come to mind) and our foreign “allies” have simply let us down almost across the board (except for parts of the Anglosphere, and the “Slavic Brigade”). The rest are like UN “peacekeepers” - if there is going to be shooting, they are either not going to be there, or they are going to laager up and hide.
3)The Bush administration needs to make a major presidential address and a PR push to wake the country up to the real nature of the danger we are in. Americans instinctively realized after 9-11 that we were in a deadly war. Many, especially on the left, have forgotten.
4) The administration needs to listen a bit to those of us who want serious control of our borders and to discredit those who want open borders (including their regular ally, the Wall Street Journal editorial page). Right now, fear of alienating the Hispanic vote is inhibiting this… and we need a solution to the US-Mexico travel/guest-worker issue to satisfy the hispanics AND allow us to take those borders.
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