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SPEAKING FREELY
Why the US won't attack North
Korea
By Brian Johnson
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have their
say. Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
It is important to
understand the United States' actions and rhetoric
toward Iraq in analyzing how the US will deal with the
Korea problem.
Jee Hyung Kim's Speaking Freely
essay in the March 15 edition of Asia Times Online was
titled Fellow Koreans, see the
danger. I don't know if "danger"
is the right word to describe what the United States'
actions will be, but it is important to understand that
America's interests in Iraq and North Korea are totally
different.
Kim stated: "We still don't know why
Bush wants to attack Iraq; all the reasons he has given
seem suspect." There are many good things the
administration of US President George W Bush expects out
of the Iraqi War, but the main reason for instigating
this war is to remove the potential for an aggressive
nuclear power in the Middle East. This was viewed by the
decision makers as practically inevitable within a
number of years, as things were going. That is the
simple explanation. All of the talk about other weapons
of mass destruction, chemical and biological, is for the
purpose of showing legal and rhetorical reasons for the
urgency of the war. There are so many chemical and
biological weapons floating around in the world that
removing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's stash is not
going to eliminate the potential availability to
terrorists. The true urgency for the war has to do with
domestic and international political timing.
The
Bush administration truly believed that Saddam's Iraq
had a very high possibility of obtaining nuclear weapons
in a number of years. Such a military capability by
Saddam would have increased the dangers to US troops in
the Middle East dramatically. It would have increased
the cost, in lives and money, of taking military action
against the aggressive Saddam, potentially beyond the
point that an American public would accept. Bush could
not simply base his timing on Saddam's progress toward
nuclear capabilities. He had to consider the
imperfections in estimates by intelligence that can be
off by years. Most important, the leader of a democracy
cannot just pick the day he wants to go into a
preemptive war. He must base his timing on domestic
politics. That is not crass cynicism; it is simply a
fact in a democracy. The ideal political timing for a
president to push for a preemptive war might exist only
once every few years, or far less frequently. Throw into
the mix that the logistics of war in Iraq require
several months of lead time, and is unwise to conduct
during the summer months, and you basically have the
Bush team seeing a political opening and making
necessary use of it.
However, in looking at the
North Korea problem, one cannot transplant the actions
in Iraq to the Korean Peninsula. Iraq sits on and near
two-thirds of the world's known oil reserves. An
aggressive dictator controlling part of it, and
threatening the rest, automatically draws the US in. But
what is America's interest in the Korean problem?
The current security arrangement with South
Korea represents a leftover obligation from the Cold War
where the United States' interest was containment of
communist expansion. The threat of communist expansion
is gone. Today, the US has far less at stake in the
Korea problem than either South Korea, China, Japan or
Russia. Any one of these players, or some combination of
the four, is capable of carrying the load of maintaining
and/or obtaining stability on the Korean Peninsula if
the US would simply show that it will not. I submit that
Washington's actions show that this is its belief.
The US will not preemptively attack North Korea.
If you watch the United States' actions, far from taking
preemptive action on the Korean Peninsula, the goal will
be to dislodge itself from being the major player in the
whole North Korea problem without creating a precedent
of looking as though it is running from an aggressive
power. One strategy is to get the other players involved
through multinational talks. This is why the Bush
administration refuses to get involved with bilateral
talks. You will probably never hear the Bush
administration say it, but the US wants out of Korea.
Brian Johnson is
based in North Carolina.
Speaking Freely
is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
(©2003 Brian Johnson.)
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