LONDON - The execution of Saddam Hussein
was the easy part. Now the question is what to do
about that other despot, the one at the far
eastern end of US President George W Bush's "axis
of evil", North Korea.
The difficulties
confronting the forces of the United States, not
to mention its British ally, in resolving the war
in Iraq may seem trivial compared with the
firestorm awaiting anyone so bold as to
try
to drive Kim Jong-il from power in Pyongyang.
Kim may rank among the world's
bloodthirstiest dictators, a rival for cruelty
among Asian potentates to Pol Pot at the height of
his power over Cambodia some 30 years ago, but the
notion of removing him causes tremors from Beijing
to Washington.
In the aftermath of the
failure of a week of six-party talks in Beijing
before the Christmas break on North Korea's
nuclear program, the participants are again
immersed in their usual palaver about
jump-starting the talks, keeping alive the spirit
of negotiations over North Korea's nukes. As South
Korea's newly installed foreign minister, Song
Min-soon, put it, the process has "more merits
than demerits".
The hanging of Saddam,
however, evokes disturbing comparisons between his
record and that of Kim when it comes to crimes
against their own people. Kim, by all accounts,
comes out ahead, routinely executing foes, keeping
300,000 prisoners in a network of gulags and
stifling a moribund economy built on privilege and
payoffs.
North Korea repeatedly cites the
threat of a preemptive strike as the rationale for
nuclear weapons - for turning the nation, as
declared in a New Year's message, into "an
impregnable fortress". North Korea's defense,
however, rests in its alliance with China, the
ambivalent host of the talks. Diversion of US
military resources to the Middle East guarantees
immunity from attack.
The real threat is
that of a strike by North Korea. A white paper
issued by South Korea's Ministry of National
Defense outlines the dangers even as South Korean
leaders and diplomats, including Song, try to play
down the risks.
The white paper cites
North Korea's nuclear test on October 9 as well as
other weapons of mass destruction among obvious
signs of "serious threats to our security". North
Korea in the past three years, according to the
paper, has obtained 30 kilograms of plutonium,
"enough to make up to five atomic bombs", even
though the device that it exploded underground in
October was "less powerful than a normal nuclear
weapon" and the test only "a partial success".
And that's not all. The white paper also
cites North Korea's "conventional military
strength" as well as "deployment of its
armaments", suggesting the North is increasing the
size of its military establishment and
repositioning troops along the Demilitarized Zone
between the two Koreas. All told, 200 artillery
pieces are within range of the South Korean
capital Seoul, covering a region between 50 and 70
kilometers south of the demilitarized zone.
US commanders like to say that South
Korea's 650,000 troops, laden with US weaponry and
technology for making everything from tanks to
fighter planes, could easily trounce North Korea's
1.1-million-man armed forces.
North Korean
troops may be first in line, ahead of civilians,
for food shipped in from China and South Korea,
but they're short on new equipment and spare parts
for stuff acquired years ago from the former
Soviet Union. Nor can North Korea count on China
to make up the difference as China plays its own
control games over a regime that refuses to
cooperate on command.
South Korea's
superiority in equipment, though, may not
compensate for problems of morale and corruption
in the South's armed forces. President Roh
Moo-hyun has not improved matters with a proposal
for reducing military service from more than two
years to 18 months - and letting off many young
people with alternative service.
US plans
for pulling back most of its troops, including the
historic US military headquarters in Seoul, to a
base at Pyongtaek, 65km to the south, have added
to the sense of insecurity about South Korea's
defenses.
The scheme, initiated by Donald
Rumsfeld when he was riding high as US secretary
of defense, relies on "flexibility", but no one
believes US troops, down to 29,500 on their way to
25,000, can respond as quickly as advertised. Lack
of confidence is no doubt one reason for
postponing the move to Pyongtaek, where diehard
farmers have demonstrated relentlessly against
loss of their land.
There is no doubt,
though, that North Korea far exceeds Iraq in terms
of both weapons of mass destruction and,
incredibly, violations of human rights.
While Iraq never had the nuclear weapons
that provided a pretext for invasion, North Korea
had produced at least two of them at its complex
at Yongbyon when the Geneva Framework Agreement
was signed in 1994.
North Korean
scientists and engineers began building still more
nukes, with plutonium at their core, after the
breakdown of the agreement eight years later as
the US charged North Korea with violating the deal
by developing nukes with highly enriched uranium.
And North Korea also has programs for biological
and chemical weapons that have gone well beyond
those deployed by Saddam against the Kurds.
Visits to Baghdad and Pyongyang in recent
years, moreover, reveal vast differences in the
level of restraints imposed upon the populace.
When I was in Baghdad in late 1990 and
early 1991, during the first Gulf War, shops and
restaurants were open and taxis carried you just
about anywhere with or without a government
escort. No one dared criticize Saddam, but the
place had an air of worldly normality reflecting a
long history as a mercantile and cultural center.
When I returned in June 2004, the rules
were changing. You could still dip into shops and
go to restaurants, but you stayed close to your
car and driver and didn't go strolling as before.
By the time I left several months later, after
daily bombings, and battles down Haifa Street from
my hotel, the city was engulfed in a fear that has
only deepened since then.
The terror of
Saddam's dictatorship, and then of foreign
invasion and civil war, was never as pervasive,
however, as that of the North Korean dictatorship.
On visits to Pyongyang, first in 1990, then in
1996 and, for the last time, in October 2005, I
saw only the sights prescribed by our North Korean
guides, who never let anyone out of their sight.
The wide streets were almost empty of traffic and
shop shelves often bare.
Those scenes
contrasted with the sight in Baghdad of sidewalks
stacked high with television sets, computers,
refrigerators and other goodies trucked in from
Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey - and, despite bombings
and ambushes, lines of cars stuck in rush-hour
jams. Saddam's photograph had to run on all front
pages while he was in power, but the Iraqi media
since then have been full of differing views - all
unimaginable in North Korea.
The terror in
the Iraqi countryside, in battles between US
troops and their Iraqi foes, in fighting between
Sunnis and Shi'ites, may rival the horrors of life
in North Korea as recounted by refugees, all of
whom tell tales of suffering in prison camps, of
public executions, of hunger and rampant disease.
Unlike Saddam, however, Kim Jong-il
appears secure as long as he holds back on using
his fearsome weaponry in a war where the risks,
and casualties, could well exceed anything we have
seen in the Middle East - or indeed any conflict
since the first Korean War, in which 4 million
people are believed to have died.
Journalist Donald Kirk has
covered wars in Iraq and Lebanon as well as the
confrontation of forces on the Korean Peninsula.
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