WASHINGTON - As the United States focuses on the new Israeli war, and
president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office, North Korea is revving up
its rhetoric against South Korea and ailing leader Kim Jong-il has visited
military units in a worrying display of intimidation.
For the first time in 14 years, Kim chose to visit a military unit on New
Year's Day, as noted by South Korea's Unification Ministry, rather than go to a
factory or pay homage at the memorial bearing his father Kim Il-sung's remains.
The emphasis on the North's military-first policy was accompanied by a
particularly ferocious
attack on the South's conservative government as "the fascist rule of the
sycophantic and treacherous conservative authorities".
While the US and South Korea negotiate a timetable for withdrawal of the US
military headquarters in Seoul to a base south of the capital, the US fixation
on the Middle East has provided an opening for North Korea to exploit. The
North's aim, as seen in Pyongyang's avoidance of anti-American rhetoric, is to
drive a wedge between the US and South Korea and ultimately achieve its goal of
destroying the alliance.
In that context, the Israeli invasion of Gaza carries grave implications for
Korea that are easy to overlook in the frenzy of "breaking news" from the
region and the worldwide response to the Israeli pummeling of Palestinians.
It would be absurd to try to compare conflict in the Middle East to the Korean
War or the confrontation of forces that has prevailed on the Korean Peninsula
since the signing of the armistice in July 1953. They are totally different,
but they do have one common denominator - the military and diplomatic role of
the United States.
Like it or not, the United States is completely committed to Israel to an
extent that far exceeds American bonds with South Korea.
The planes, the tanks and virtually all the modern weaponry deployed by Israeli
forces are either American-made or purchased with American funds. Israel is by
far the largest recipient of American aid. The American passion for Israel
reflects the belief in the right of Jews to their own homeland after the
killing of more than 6 million in Nazi Germany's concentration camps as well as
complicated US interests in the Middle East and the power of American Jews,
whose political and economic influence far outweighs their numbers.
Now the question is whether the United States, while supporting Israel to the
hilt and waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will have the means or the
stomach for a potentially far worse conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Would American leaders, and the American people, ever muster the same passion
for the defense of South Korea as they do for Israel? For that matter, would
the US stand up in a second Korean War as it did in 1950 when a severely
depleted American military establishment built up quickly enough to drive out
the North Korean invaders and then, after the Chinese entered the war and drove
the Americans and South Koreans from the North, finally drove the Chinese from
the South.
The United States today has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, far more than
the 500 or so advisers in the country when the Korean War broke out in June
1950, and South Korean forces are vastly better equipped now than they were in
June 1950. The bottom line, though, is does the US have the will for a Far
Eastern war while involved in unpopular flare-ups from Israel to Pakistan?
In the outburst of publicity over the Middle East, few if any Americans are
aware that war on the Korean Peninsula would be far costlier, and bloodier,
than anything seen so far in the Middle East, including Iraq. A second Korean
war, moreover, would carry the risk of a regional holocaust, with the Chinese
and Russians rushing to the aid of North Korea and Japan, the one-time colonial
occupier, joining the fray against historical foes. That scenario, far-fetched
though it may seem, lingers in the minds of those with memories of the horrors
that engulfed the peninsula from mid-1950 to mid-1953.
The United States, as it enters the Obama administration, is not capable of
fighting on two broadly separated fronts without reverting to the draft of
young men, and possibly women, which was abandoned after popular revulsion over
the Vietnam war. If Americans are not nearly so hostile to their military
establishment today as they were at the height of the Vietnam War, the reason
is the absence of fear among young people of having to join the army whether
they like it or not.
Americans, moreover, are far more concerned about problems on their own home
front than anywhere else. No American units are going to accompany the Israelis
in Gaza. Israeli forces, fully equipped with American weaponry, have no problem
roaring over Palestinians, whose rockets attacks are like bee stings in
comparison with the shelling, strafing and bombing of Israeli tanks. Hamas,
which is responsible for instigating attacks against Israel, is basically a
terrorist organization that does not have the support of the majority of
Palestinians, including probably the 1.5 million living in Gaza.
The North Koreans would be a far more formidable foe. Quite aside from their
nuclear warheads, which they may not know how to deploy, they have a great many
artillery pieces and infantry weapons, a product that the North's decrepit
industrial base still manages to manufacture.
The North also has biological and chemical weapons, a navy that includes
submarines and lesser submersibles, and an air force whose old-model MiGs can
still fly. On paper, South Korea is far stronger in all but one important
aspect. North Korea has twice as many men under arms, well over 1 million
compared to 600,000 in the South, and the North Korean troops by and large have
served far longer, under more severe circumstances, than those in the South.
The real imponderable, though, is whether the US, in the crunch, would rush to
defend the South with all the arms it needed, as well as an infusion of troops,
if North Korea were to take advantage of America's relationship with Israel and
the Middle East to stage a surprise attack. Would Obama as president respond as
stubbornly as did Harry Truman, the American president when the Korean war
broke out?
And how would the crucial American Jewish community feel about a war in which
Jewish interests were not at stake as in Israel? The views of Jewish
neo-conservatives and liberals on Israel may vary widely, but they all support
the Jewish state's right to exist. What about if the Republic of Korea were
imperiled? For Americans, modern Korea is just about as easy to forget, in time
of crisis elsewhere, as the "forgotten" Korean war.
The best hope is that all such questions will remain abstract and theoretical,
raised for discussion but never put to the test. Still, headlines, news alerts
and bulletins on the war for Gaza force everyone to ask, Can it happen here -
and what if it does?
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
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