SMASH THE REDS!

A post I was writing about North Korea has new relevance after the debates.

It seems that Nato was thinking of “hitting” North Korea, or at any rate, of being able to. He points out that:

Nathanael has very concisely made my point for me. Right now with the imbroglio in Iraq, it is very hard for us to present a credible threat to North Korea - our ground forces are publicly overcommitted to the point where we're attriting our peninsular presence.

Granted, the Navy and Air Force are the forces likely to be able to damage North Korea's nuclear facilities, but the subsequent response by Kim Jong Il and his gigantic army is strategically curtailed by significant presence of US ground forces - essentially if he engages our troops in a major way, it commits the US to flattening him…

And now the North Koreans have made a bunch more nukes. When it was one or two, we would likely have been able to deal with them through airstrikes. Now we're screwed.

I don’t get it.

Nato seems to think airstrikes against North Korea’s nuclear facilities, like the Israeli strikes on Iraq that took out Saddam’s nuclear capability in 1981, would have been a good idea. Maybe so. But what does that have to do with Iraq?

Iraq tied up ground troops. But taking out North Korea’s nuclear capacity would involve airstrikes by “the Navy and Air Force,” as Nato admits. I’d envision a small, fast air operation; hit hard, hit fast, get out, give the world a fait accompli. So what do need ground troops for?

Nato suggests that Kim Jong Il would “respond” with his “gigantic army.” Why? If we did take out his nukes, North Korea would be in no better position to invade South Korea than at any time in the past fifty years. And why punish South Korea, or even Japan, for what the US did?

If Kim Jong Il did attack South Korea, without nukes, he has a million soldiers. I don’t know how many South Korea has. Our troops would be a drop in the bucket. But the North couldn’t possibly win, because morally, the case would be as black-and-white as during the Nazi era. The whole world would be on the South’s side. It would be the end of Kim Jong Il’s regime. Is he that crazy? Who knows, maybe so. But there’s not much we can do about it.

There’s another reason we didn’t hit North Korea, I think. We would “likely” have been able to deal with one or two nukes through airstrikes, says Nato. But is “likely” good enough? That word suggests that there is another possibility, namely, we would fail, and Kim Jong Il would nuke Seoul, or Tokyo. Bush didn’t want to stomach that risk. I wouldn’t have either. Nato may scold me for being a softie if he wants.

If it weren’t for nuclear weapons, the war in Iraq could greatly improve our negotiating position vis-à-vis North Korea, not now, but three or four years down the line when things have stabilized (hopefully) and a new crop of soldiers is learning the lessons of our first, mixed experience of regime change. We could tell Kim Jong Il: “you’d better do what we say, because not only are we willing and able to regime change North Korea, but we know we could implement it so as to improve the lives of your people and thus it would be a humanitarian act. Convince us not to, if you can.”

Unfortunately, nuclear weapons confer immunity on a regime. And because of that, the precedent of regime change increases the incentive for wicked regimes to go nuclear.