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ANALYSIS
Why Iraq matters more than North
Korea
By Marc Erikson
It's
odd, isn't it? North Korea probably has at least a
couple of nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles to
deliver them to the South and to Japan, perhaps even to
Alaska. Iraq most likely doesn't have nukes - unless
some bandits of a former Soviet republic sold it some.
Why then, as none other than Saddam Hussein has noted,
is the United States on Iraq's case and threatening and
preparing for military action against it while it wants
to resolve the nuclear row with self-admitted nuke
constructor North Korea by diplomatic means?
In an article
in this edition of Asia Times Online, Beijing correspondent
Francesco Sisci provides part of the answer.
"North Korea was once strategically important because
it had the Soviet Union and China behind it. Now this
is no longer the case; moreover, China and South Korea,
which fought against each other over North Korea half
a century ago, have an idyllic relationship and both
work in strong partnership for a peaceful transition
in North Korea. The mainstay of the Cold War in
East Asia, the confrontation between Beijing and Seoul,
has disappeared since the two countries established
diplomatic relations and even more so after the
launch of South Korea's Sunshine Policy toward the North.
With China having possibly a better relation with the
South than with the North, with Russia following suit
and much weaker than it was 50 years ago, Pyongyang's
threat can no longer be the trigger for a global
crisis, but is only a worrisome issue, strictly localized
... the US can't accept being pushed around by threats
coming from a country wielding its missiles like a
bully in a saloon in a spaghetti Western."
But
that's not the whole story. The reasons the
administration of US President George W Bush, in the
words of a Washington insider, has adopted an attitude
of "if the fellow [North Korea's 'Dear Leader' Kim
Jong-il] wants to be clobbered, let him take a number
and wait his turn; let the UN worry and deal with this"
are not limited to North Korea's diminished strategic
significance and clout or, for that matter, the
inconvenience of dealing with two members-designate of
the axis of evil at the same time. The Bush team -
rightly as I see it - regards Kim Jong-il's regime as an
ossified ideological relic with no future potential for
attracting adherents to its creed, while Saddam
Hussein's regime, while it lasts, in effect anchors
Islamist fascism in the Middle East and the Muslim world
beyond.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his
Tikriti clique are not themselves the principal
exponents of the Islamist fascism invented in its
current form by Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb
(see the AToL series Islamism, fascism and terrorism,
November-December 2002) and practiced and promoted by
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the network's chief
theoretician and strategist al-Zawahiri. But by
controlling a nation state with substantial resources,
they backstop and support several Islamist terrorist
(mainly Palestinian) outfits and, more important,
function as a reference point for other corrupt and
dictatorial Arab regimes. Disarming this clique and, if
need be, expelling it from Iraq would send the strongest
possible signal to the rest of the Arab world as well as
the mullahs in Iran that in-depth political change can
no longer be postponed. It would at the same time at
least begin the process of and create the circumstances
for undermining the ideological hold and initiative
Islamist fascism now has as an admired protagonist force
among Muslim youths worldwide.
In that sense, disarming
Saddam is no end in itself of US foreign policy.
It is envisaged as a catalyst for comprehensive political
transformation in the Middle East and Southwest
Asia, with democratic Kemalist Turkey as a model.
It is envisaged as well as a critical stepping stone
for constructing a global security consensus and system
with the support of China and Russia in which proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist
action under whatever spurious guise is anathema
and dealt with promptly and comprehensively. The
United States could have gone it alone in Iraq and still
could and might do so. Its choice of going to the United
Nations Security Council and building a consensus there
reflects the desire and determination that broader regional
and global goals stay untainted (or at any rate
least tainted) by the charge of self-serving
unilateralism.
In a post-Saddam context defined
by a new security regime, the North Korea problem can be
dealt with in the fashion German unification was
achieved peacefully in the post-Soviet context. The one
critical caution and danger is that Kim Jong-il,
perfectly able to read the handwriting on the wall and
already having taken dramatic unilateral steps, can and
will not step back from the brink and will not let
Washington's benign-neglect attitude pass, but will
instead up the ante. For that, he has several options:
withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty,
launching a ballistic missile across Japan as in 1998,
testing a nuclear warhead if indeed he has one at the
ready.
Simply to stand down after mobilizing the
population for war won't be easy. But even in the face
of new Kim taunts, Bush can maintain his
give-diplomacy-a-chance stance. Kim is not suicidal. The
likelihood that he will launch full-scale war against
the South is minimal.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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