Asymmetrical Information

Just so we're all on the same page here, can you please define "woodshed"?

It was non-specific and meant to imply a generalized idea of punishment/correction, rather than any particular policy prescription. But only in the context of responding to those who apparently believe that the job of US foreign policy is to set the moral tone for the world.

Scheer also seems to argue: We can't attack Iraq because we seem unwilling to take that step with North Korea. There are at least two problems with this argument. First, yes, its true we seem to be moving to a war with Iraq, but we did not get here overnight. It has been more than 4 years since Iraq kicked out the UN weapons inspectors. During that time, a lot of diplomatic work was done by both the Clinton and Bush teams. So, to compare the two countries and assert we are treating similar situations differently is unfair. If, after 4 years of diplomatic effort, North Korea is still defying the world community and we are still keeping our saber in the closet, it might be time to compare the two situations.

Second, there is a major difference between the two countries -- one has nuclear weapons and the other is trying to acquire them. A legitimate reason for not wanting to go to war with North Korea is because it might lead to North Korea's use of these weapons. Such reasoning does NOT argue against going to war to prevent another despotic regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. If we had taken a firmer approach with North Korea they would not have nuclear weapons now.

David: your second reason is certainly not one we'd like to promote; it encourages countries to get nukes in the hope that once they have them, we can do nothing. Which, come to think of it, was exactly what happened with respect to India and Pakistan --- this suggests some very ugly things about our future.

Though I agree with your opinion, David, Jimmy 'peace in our time' Carter negotiated the Agreed L-amework in 1994. We've been appeasing the North Koreans almost as long as we've been allowing Iraq to fester.

Negotiating with a liar is like taking a check from a swindler.

How do you know what Kim Jong Il thinks?

There are lots of reasons for not taking on North Korea, and they happen to reside in Seoul. The reality of the situation is that, because of the location of South Korea's capital and largest urban center (not to mention largest industrial city), any actions involving North Korea are fraught with danger. The decision in '94 to negotiate with North Korea, whether you agreed w/ it or not, was at least partly motivated by the reality that a North Korean decision to use force (be it in response or as a preemptive move) would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

The idea that North Korea should or can be dealt w/ in the same manner as Iraq is like arguing that one should engage in hand-to-hand combat w/ a boxer and a linebacker in the same way.

Another factor to consider is that with North Korea, there is a major power (China) that has close enough political and economic ties with it that there is a reasonable expectation that it can be held back. Even if Kim Jong Il can't be expected to behave as a rational actor, China can, and it can put a lot of pressure to bear on North Korea to behave.

Jane, I agree with what you say, and I will, of course, defend to the death your right to say it. However, I am rather terrified that you said something about foreign policy in the first place. Haven't you barred yourself from discussing foreign affairs? I don't want you falling off the wagon on the second day of the New Year if you still want to keep that particular resolution.

Also, it would be quite difficult to invade North Korea and win. It's rugged, mountainous terrain, with many places to hide from airplanes and many natural tank barriers. The North Korean army proved itself a first-class force once - they might have deteriorated since then, but that's not been proven. When I was there 13 years ago, the South Koreans were the toughest troops I've ever seen, and they seem to be afraid of the North Koreans. Even if the NK army is just competent, digging them out of those hills is likely to cost far more American lives than we've spent since the last time we fought there.

In contrast, the Iraqi army is a comic-opera force with no place to hide. And they _know_ they're going to lose.

Kim Jong Il is serious when he says he will bring on a holocaust. His people have no value to him except as they satisfy his whims. He is not rational nor has he ever been.

I agree with David. If we don't take out Iraq first, it's a matter of months before Saddam will just be another Kim. Saddam is just as likely to proliferate these nukes as Kim, and he is in a neighborhood where he's more likely to get away with it and where there are people sworn to do us harm for ideological reasons.

China, Russia and Japan may be quiet about it, but they have no more desire to have such an uruly neighbor than they have to have millions of N. Korean refugees streaming across their borders.

N. Korea, for the moment, isn't our problem. Iraq is.

Deb: NK is also Russia's and China's problem because it is their creation. They should clean up their own mess. OTOH, the US bears quite a lot of the responsibility for Saddam's acquisition of so much power.

The main reason we cannot deal easily with NK stems from the total lack of decent roads. I was a logistics planner for I Corps [US] for 7 years and we despaired of supplying any significant force north of the DMZ.

These madmen have built almost no transportation infrastructure [or any agriculture either!] in 50 years of rule. Unlike Iraq, which resembles a brown billard table for over half its surface, NK looks like the model for the bleak hills of Mordor!

The South Koreans have not helped any by their insistence on building their main political and economic centers within NKPA artillery range!

Nuking their bomb factories and withstanding their assault will result in the end of that hellish regime - but the price in civilian lives is way too high.

There are a number of other reasons why Iraq must be dealt with, OIL! What I mean is that Iraq can generate the dollars needed for military programs, after all an embargo cannot last forever and our European friends have shown us exactly how to get around it. N Korea spends what little revenue it has on its military, but there is no expectation of any additional revenue anytime soon. As has been stated, we have China and Russia to pressure N Korea, who might Saddam listen to? While Kim Jong il may be a lunatic and Saddam may be a lunatic their situations have little else in common.

markm: North Korea wasn't an effective fighting force in any account of the Korean war I've read. China's willingness to use human wave attacks, coupled with the Truman's (perhaps wise) unwillingness to give MacArthur a free hand, helps to account for why the war ended with an armistice rather than a decisive victory. History aside, few people suggest that the North Korean military is a well-honed fighting force today, and in fact the growing disparity in conventional forces between the North and its "enemies" has no doubt encouraged the Kim's (father and son) to pursue WMD.

I for one am waiting for the President to make a speech that explains why the North Korean situation only strengthens the demand for war with Iraq. In the meantime, I will remain puzzled by Democrats like Biden and Lieberman suggesting that North Korea, not Iraq, is where we should be using force. If North Korea has nuclear weapons, and we have little reason to suspect otherwise, any use of force by the US will provoke a nuclear response from Kim's regime, unless of course we annihilate his nuclear arsenal in one stroke.

As for Bob Scheer, who inspired Jane's original comment waaaay up at the top of this page, who, aside from David Horowitz (who hates Sheer's guts), thinks that old commie says anything worth refuting? And the fact that he's saying it on Salon -- ah! Talbot and Sheer must comfort each other nightly in their political solipsism. Let's not pick a scab that's about to heal and disappear.

nk has two easy solutions... wait for a good wind and vaporise the problem (i'm evil and have no conscience.. this doesn't bother me) or else just tell sk that its there own damn fault, and since they don't want us around, we'll be leaving post haste (we can negotiate with nk to let them have a free hand as soon as we pull our supplies out to deal with their customers...)

us is always being bit in the ass by its timidity and the dems... macarthur should have been given a license to drive to beijing, just as patton should have been allowed to rearm the germans and go after some of those nice fur hats that the red army wears... always being let down by horrible presidents...

this needs to be solved permanently ion a way that sends a message, to enemies, allies, or both.. vaporising nk sends a big message to not mess with texas, abandoning sk tells people taht thier words have consequences and that if they want out help they should be nice... i'd really like to see france and germany declare outside the protection of the us and nato, and see what happens to them... but i'm just very evil

The entire debate with North Korea is kind of silly.

Unarguable premises:

1) You can't invade them, due to their huge army, and possible nuclear status.
2) You can't threaten them with sanctions and the like, as they don't have any connections to the outside world anyway.
3) You can't take out their nukes in a surgical strike, due to their huge army.
4) The only country with any influence over then is our regional mortal enemy, China.
5) All communist countries collapse from internal contradictions eventually.

Looking at this, the only foreign policy option is containment. Bribing them to keep quiet would work too (worked for 8 years), but doesn't appear to be an option for Bush.

Why on earth did Bush include them in the legendary Axis of Evil, anyway? What was he hoping to get as a result by that designation; sympathy from China?

Matthew: Chinese troops didn't intervene until we were almost in rifle shot of their border, but getting there took more than half of our full strength, when our army was much, much larger than it is now. At the beginning, when we had only a trip-wire sized force in SK (like now), NK by itself overran most of SK and had the surviving SK and US troops penned into not much more than a beachhead at the tip of the peninsula before we could send reinforcements. Their Glorious Leader made two strategic mistakes (leaving their flanks open to seaborne attacks, and picking a war with a nation 10 times the size in the first place), so that once we had assembled a WWII sized army we managed to take back much of that territory quickly, but there certainly wasn't anything wrong with the NK Army's fighting skills.

I'm not saying we couldn't take them - just that politically it's not likely that our leaders will ask for that much of a sacrifice from the American people until the NK's _really_ piss us off - say they nuke Anchorage, or sponsor terrorists who blow up the stands at the Super Bowl...

NK - I do believe China is leery of NK having nukes: maybe one for display purposes, but not more. We have been wary of NK being backed by China for a long time, but things have changed since the fifties. China still wants buffer/tripwire nations around it, yes, but not to the same extent as previously.

And the oil/food pipe has now been cut considerably, to the point where even Kim realises it may not be much fun ruling a pile of corpses. Note that he is beginning to back down. Instead of saying he is prepared to go it alone, he now says he will sign up to what he thinks we want as long as we first sign a non-agression pact. He'll have to back-pedal further than that, and even loss of face may not be enough to get him to lob a nike at Japan or South Korea.

> 3) You can't take out their nukes in a surgical strike, due to their huge army.

Huh? Why is that necessarily true?

Large armies don't make all surgical strikes impossible.

Taking out his nukes in a strike (assuming its possible) would be an incredibly dangerous game of chicken that I don't think any policymakers, and I do mean *any*, have the stomach for. It's a subset of the general first-strike problem (use 'em or lose 'em) for nuclear weapons.

Possible outcomes:

1) We miss, he launches.
2) He launches, either reacting fast enough or having prior knowledge of our attack.
3) We miss, he's really pissed off.
4) We destroy them, he's really pissed off.

The *best* cases, 3) & 4), both destabilize the situation so much that's it goddamn Russian Roulette. Even if you could guarentee that 4) would be the outcome, would you take the risk he'd respond by invading SK? I wouldn't, and I'm not sure if even Richard Perle would.

Strikes to take out the nuclear capability of an enemy (this holds without a large conventional enemy army, but that makes it worse) are an "imminent invasion or nuclear launch" option; by god, you better have absolutely no other options left. If you get that far, *everything* has failed, and you'd better get your relatives into a bunker.

This is the US analysis, of course. There'd be rioting in the streets of SK if we started seriously airing the option.

Oh, and Scheer is pretty incoherent, but that doesn't change the fact that we have no stick to use against NK; the most we can do is take away the carrot.

By analogy, what were the "sticks" we used on the USSR? There weren't any; it was all carrots. Well, unless you count baiting them into Afghanistan, but that doesn't seem very relevant.

As I suspected, the conclusion didn't depend on the "due to".

Interestingly enough, inaction can have negative consequences too.

The USSR didn't use nuke threats to get economic support. The NKs appear to be acting otherwise.

BTW - the "he launches" downside argument assumes that the NKs wouldn't launch otherwise.

Oh, and "he's pissed" isn't a negative. It's a don't care, at least from the US perspective.

FWIW - I'm on record stating that if the SKs don't want US protection, we shouldn't give it. I think that it's time to let SK handle NK by themselves, as they've been demanding. If that goes badly, they'll have 50 miserable years, but it really is their choice.

The US can protect its interests at other borders.

Couple of points.

NK does not need to respond with nukes, there are, at last count, about 11,000 artillery pieces just north of the 38th parallel and all of them aimed at, and capable of reaching Seoul. He doesn't need nukes to respond to a surgical strike, he has promised a bloodbath in SK if anyone attacks NK and a surgical strike is an attack. 11,000 rounds of incoming anything into Seoul would do that and they would get to reload plenty of times before anyone could take out enough to make a difference. Except that if that game starts the US will go nuclear itslef on the peninsular under the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force coupled with saving as many South koreans as possible.

Clinton used the front channel to talk about programs and the back channel to talk about a strike on Yongbyon; this is known as diplomacy, it is also a good way to deal with communities where saving face is a very high priority. The Texas strategy works in Texas, it does not play in any place west of Hawaii.

Jane also says "But only in the context of responding to those who apparently believe that the job of US foreign policy is to set the moral tone for the world." Sorry folks, the US is the biggest player in the game, it sets the moral tone by default. Whatever the US does is the way things are done in the world, there is no duck-out option.

and we are not rearing the dictators of the 3rd world

How about torturers and murderers?

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