Posted on 01/09/2003 9:07:42 AM PST by Pokey78
New Hampshire
What’s up with North Korea? Your guess is as good as mine and probably rather better than Kim Jong-Il’s. Even if you figure out a rational reason for why he’s chosen this particular time to play nuclear brinkmanship, it’s unlikely, by its very rationality, to be his reason.
Nonetheless, it’s merely the latest gift to those in the West opposed to war with Iraq. Whether or not the ‘axis of evil’ holds regular board meetings, there does seem to be a remarkable amount of interdepartmental co-ordination. For a year now, whenever the Americans look set to take on Saddam, some fortuitous diversion has come along: last spring’s ferocious intensification of the Palestinian intifada, Crown Prince Abdullah’s entirely fictitious peace plan, and now North Korea’s nuclear capability. The idea, eagerly taken up by the West’s many Saddamites, is that Iraq is something you never get around to: oh, no, you gotta put Baghdad on the back burner till you solve the Palestinian question, North Korea’s nuclear stand-off, the East Midlands borough council reorganisation crisis, whatever.
Well, Baghdad’s been on the back burner for a year now. The war has lost all momentum and both America’s serious enemies and her knockabout disparagers have been emboldened. If Saddam had been toppled to the cheers of a grateful populace last spring, among other consequences Yasser would be out of office, the ayatollahs would be packing, the House of Saud would be feeling the squeeze of lower oil prices, Boy Assad would have changed course so fast he might actually merit that invite to tea with the Queen, and the European anti-war movement would not have swollen inexorably in inverse proportion to the amount of actual war. Whether Kim Jong-Il would still have decided to go in for a couple of rounds of No Dong braggadocio is harder to say. (No Dong’s the name of his missile, by the way.) But in doing so he’s given endless pleasure to the legions of anti-American Europeans and anti-Bush Democrats, all now solemnly huffing about the ‘inconsistencies’ of the President’s approach to the axis of evil: why is Bush so hot for war with Iraq, which hasn’t yet got weapons of mass destruction, but not with North Korea, which already has? It’s obvious that Pyongyang’s the bigger threat but that Bush can’t get over Saddam because he wants to avenge his father, seize the oil, blah blah blah.
Oh, come on. I know nothing’s happened for 12 months and we pundits are staggering around punchily landing ever feebler blows on each other, but this argument is pathetic. The time to stop Saddam is before he gets nukes. Once he’s got ’em, it’s over. Kim Jong-Il is no threat at all, at least not to the United States. He could conceivably have an advanced Dong capable of hitting San Diego, but, if it ever did, it would be the last thing he or anybody else in North Korea ever did. If Psycho Boy really feels the need to fire his Dong at someone, Tokyo or Vancouver would be far more interesting targets: how would a non-nuclear power respond? A strong resolution at the UN?
But the only damage he can do to America he’s mostly already done. In the eight years since Bill Clinton and Nobel Peanut Prize winner Jimmy Carter brokered their ‘breakthrough’ ‘agreement’ with North Korea, Pyongyang has been enormously ‘helpful’ to Iran’s and Pakistan’s nuclear programmes. Had Pakistan still been in the hands of Nawaz Sharif, last year’s nuke stand-off with India might have gone very differently. Iran is on its way to a No Dong capable of hitting Israel, and, as Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of those famous Iranian moderates, has said, the day the Muslim world gets a deliverable nuclear weapon the Israeli question will be settled for ever. And, of course, these are only the clients of Pyongyang that we know about. North Korea is an economic basket-case with nothing to sell but its Dong. It seems reasonable to assume that several well-funded freelances — the ‘non-state actors’, as they say — have also made their pilgrimage to Pyongyang.
It would be interesting to see Kim Jong-Il’s shipping invoices, but that’s about the only real stake America has in North Korea. Next time anyone goes on about the ‘inconsistencies’ of Bush’s approach to Baghdad and Pyongyang, pull out an atlas. Iraq is a big shot in a region of turbulent flop states; North Korea is a pitiful little freak show surrounded by world powers and economic success stories. Saddam is the new Saladin, an inspiration to millions of Arab males in Syria, Jordan, Saudi and the Palestinian Authority; nobody in South Korea, China, Russia or Japan wants to be like Kim Jong-Il or have anything to do with his parochial, irrelevant, unexportable ‘juche’ ideology. On Wall Street in the old greed-is-good days, they used to call hotshot traders BSDs — Big Swinging Dongs. That’s what Saddam is: the Big Swinging Dong of Araby. And, say what you like, it seems to impress George Galloway. By contrast, North Korea is literally the No Dong state. Take a look at a satellite picture of the peninsula by night: South Korea ablaze in electric light, the North in darkness. In Far East Asia, North Korea’s the hole in the doughnut.
Saddam wants weapons of mass destruction in order to cow his immediate neighbours and neuter some more distant ones, such as Europe — by ‘neuter’, I mean that the EU’s present theoretically reversible vasectomy vis-à-vis Iraq would be turned into full-scale castration. In so far as he’s burning to nuke anyone, it’s Israel; and he’ll give that one some thought before pressing the button. He might support some rogue terrorists with plans to hit the US, if he thought he could get away with it.
Kim Jong-Il’s psycho state, on the other hand, is a pipsqueak in the shadow of two big-time nuclear players, China and Russia. It has no hope of regional dominance. Its conventional forces — an army reliant on aging weaponry with few spare parts — couldn’t seriously threaten the south with invasion and occupation. All Pyongyang could do is drop the big one on Seoul — if it decided it wanted to go out like those New Hampshire crazies in the last months of winter who get the cabin fever so bad they can’t take being shut up with the missus any longer and blow her away and then themselves.
Assuming that even Kim Jong-Il isn’t that nuts, what we have is a Cold War backwater trying to reinvent itself. Its neighbours — South Korea, Japan and China — have grown rich by making export products designed to appeal to Western consumerism. Kim figures North Korea can grow rich by making export products designed to appeal to Islamic terrorists and rogue states. How lucrative this speciality mail-order market is remains to be seen, but its long-term growth potential must be in doubt. For the most part, Kim would be selling his cut-price Dongs to groups who are anxious to use them. The moment they do, and the provenance is traced, North Korea’s role as quartermaster to the world’s wackos will be over. In the Middle East, nukes would elevate Saddam to invulnerability. In North Korea, they’re the death spasm of a state with no raison d’être. Saddam has viable ambitions. Kim doesn’t.
That’s why the EU schadenfreude set may be wrong to assume that the present public face of the Bush administration — its ‘nonchalance’, as my fellow Canadian David Warren puts it — is an unconvincing pose beneath which everyone’s in a state of blind panic. I don’t think so. North Korea is a temporary problem that may offer some long-term benefits to the US. Hardly anyone in Washington is enthusiastic about the present massive troop commitment to South Korea, a 50-year-old ceasefire preserved in aspic, a M*A*S*H rerun that never ends. Plenty of ingrates in the South want the Yanks out. The Chinese and Russians are pally with Seoul these days, and, judging from his offer to ‘mediate’ between the US and the North, the South’s new unfriendly President Roh doesn’t seem to understand that Uncle Sam’s there to defend him and for no other reason. For some years now, the Americans have been stuck in the middle getting screwed by Koreans North and South. Given the antipathy of their Southern hosts, those 37,000 US troops serve no useful purpose except as potential nuclear hostages in the event that the North decides to go for the big one.
Once you start looking at the broader picture, the obvious question is: why should the US be the point man on Korea anyway? Given that there’s a sporting chance that some of those long-range Dongs will be used in certain troublesome Russian republics, Moscow has as great an interest as Washington in putting the squeeze on Pyongyang. True, China, which recently shipped 20 tons of tributyl phosphate to North Korea for extracting plutonium from their stockpile of spent reactor fuel, seems noticeably reluctant to apply any pressure to its neighbour. But, if they’re that relaxed about nuclear proliferation in their backyard, then, as the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer suggests, Washington should toss ’em a wild card: how about a nuclear Japan?
In other words, the US should use this crisis to its advantage. It needs fewer infantrymen hunkered down among the landmines in the DMZ and more ships tracking suspicious cargo heading west. But, in a more general sense, it also needs to disentangle itself from non-essential issues and leave them on some other folks’ plates. Unfortunately, Washington now has a timing problem: it would look like a capitulation to pull troops out of the constrained timewarp of the DMZ, unless such a withdrawal were agreed, say, a week after Saddam was blown to pieces in his bunker. Inaction in Korea is only a problem because of a year of inaction everywhere else.
A couple of weeks back in this space, I made a passing reference to ‘rope-a-dope’ — the much promoted theory under which the administration’s apparent lethargy this last year is all part of some cunning bluff. Even if it were true, a man like Kim Jong-Il reminds us of the perils of this approach: crazy as he is, it’s unlikely he’d be crying ‘Look at me! Over here, you moronic cowboy!’ if Bush had already killed Saddam and set in motion the remaking of the Middle East. The 13 months since the liberation of Afghanistan allowed Kim to figure that the US isn’t serious. When Saddam looks out the window and sees Hans Blix motoring around in his UN minibus, he concludes likewise. So do Hamas and Hezbollah. And those ill-disciplined Pakistani border guards who fired on US troops the other day. And the al-Qa’eda sleepers in Amsterdam and London and Montreal. And all the other likely customers of Kim’s going-for-a-Dong discount warehouse.
Every month that passes without the Americans using force against Iraq increases North Korea’s potential client list. That’s the linkage, and the deterioration in perception this last year is at least as damaging as any actual capability in Pyongyang’s arsenal. If Saddam’s still in power by May, the world’s in big trouble.
I'll tell you exactly how they'd respond: Watch the opening scene of The Godfather, and imagine Dubya as Don Corleone and Chretien as Bonasera.
Welcome. I think we are now almost at the post-mortem phase of diagnosing the Bush foreign policy debacle. Even the BushBots have gotten rather quiet lately regarding GWB's clear and blatant weakness on North Korea.
The David Frum book makes no bones about identifying the culprit here. The policy source for the continued Clinton/Gore-ineptitude and spineless American policy of 'Speaking Loudly and Carry a Big Carrot...and pretend we have a stick' -- Colin Powell
See also:Thanks for the post and ping, Pokey! This bears repeating !!
By contrast, North Korea is literally the No Dong state. Take a look at a satellite picture of the peninsula by night: South Korea ablaze in electric light, the North in darkness.
In Far East Asia, North Korea’s the hole in the doughnut.
- The Earth at night in lights or a map of civilization
Your Opinion/Questions Miscellaneous Keywords: EARTH, NIGHT, LIGHTS
Source: NASA
Published: unknown Author: Satellite photos
Posted on 12/11/2000 06:16:36 PST by Jabba the TuttThis post is a big composite picture taken by satellites of the entire cloudless Earth at night. You can see what is in effect a map of civilization outlined by electric lights. Interesting if you like this kind of thing, a sure miss if you don't. Depending on your connection, it could take a way to download. You've been warned...CLICK HERE for more-- snip --To: Jabba the Tutt
Several things come to mind looking at this picture. The first is how bloody far I have to drive out into the So. Cal. desert to use my telescope. There's a tiny, little patch of ground where I can escape LA's lights without starting to see Las Vegas. The second thing I think of is just how out of luck you people are back east. At least I don't have to drive to Canada to find dark skies.
It's also interesting to notice the difference between the Workers' paradise of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the decadent, capitalist oppressors how occupy the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Oh sure, they have to eat twigs and grass to survive, but they have nice, dark skies overhead. And to think that we could miss out on a President that could make America that kind of paradise! If only Al's pregnant chads had gone to term.
I bookmarked that map/article...
One option would be to succumb to the blackmail, blame the whole thing on freelance terrorists, and give Saddam a pass -- let the whole 9/11 thing go with a nod and a wink, in other words. This was Clinton's response the first time Hussein tried to topple the WTC, back in '93. Obviously, it wasn't a very successful strategy, except for Clinton.
Another option would be to go public on Saddam's authorship of 9/11 and his anthrax threat, and use that to turn the whole world solidly against Saddam. I thought Bush was going to do this on the 9/11 anniversary. There were lots of hints that he would do it in the run-up to the anniversary, if you were watching closely. In the event, it looks more like this was brinkmanship, probably intended to back up the overtures to Saddam to take exile which were already going on. If that's the case, it obviously didn't work. The upside of exposing Saddam is that it would initial stiffen the backbone of our allies and the UN. The downside is that we would still be powerless to retaliate, the economy would go into the tank due to the perpetual threat of a devastating war hanging over our heads, and we would have used up a key bargaining chip in the effort to squeeze Saddam Hussein -- he can only be exposed once.
The last option I can see is the one we are pursuing now. Stall for time. Keep the issues of Iraqi authorship of 9/11 and the anthrax threats unresolved and ambiguous in the public mind. Build a coalition against Saddam. Build our civil defenses so that the bioweapons threat can be at least somewhat blunted. Isolate Saddam. Ramp up the pressure gradually, step by step, over the course of months and years, until his position becomes untenable. Exploit the best card we have -- that we can always expose him, any time we want -- to keep the heat on. Probably the next phase of this is that we will force the issue of pulling out those scientists. We can kill a lot of time doing this, force Saddam to lie and cheat in the eyes of the world even more, and perhaps gain valuable intelligence on what he has up his sleeve for Armageddon. Meanwhile, with the public in the dark about 9/11, Bush looks like the tough guy, and not the helpless victim. The whole strategy leverages Bush's natural enemies -- the UN, the media, the peaceniks, the euro-weenies, etc. -- because they help him stall while making him look alternately like a pragmatist and a tough guy. This is classic Bush political jujitsu, is it not?
Watching Bush conduct war is like watching the Superbowl with the players pirouetting around the field in ballet tutu's. We prance around around the world stage wasting time while our enemies, including our homegrown ones, grow every day bolder. To paraphrase Michael Savage, "If we had conducted WWII like this "Some of us would have wound up as a lampshade or a bar of soap".For an ALTERNATIVE (and more optimistic) view of President Bush's "rope-a-dope" strategery - vis-a-vis the RATs and Saddam, see:
Perhaps Dubya is working similar magic with the North Koreans?Entrapment by Bush: He plays Democrats for fools, and they always rise to his bait
American Prowler ^ | 01/10/03 | David Hogberg
Posted on 01/09/2003 9:47 PM PST by Pokey78
As I was waiting for my flight back to Iowa last Friday I scanned an article in USA Today about the Bush economic stimulus package. It reported that the Presidents' advisers stated the "proposal will likely exclude top-tier taxpayers in an effort to fend off Democratic criticism that his tax programs pander to the rich." As the plane headed for flyover country, I jotted some notes for a possible column on how Bush was engaging in both bad politics and bad policy.
Then on Sunday the Bush Administration released the full details of the plan: $674 billion in tax relief that included eliminating the tax on dividends and reducing income-tax rates for all income-tax payers. So much for excluding the rich. Fortunately, I hadn't written the column as the NFL Playoffs intervened. (Hey, gotta have priorities.) But I was left scratching my head as to why the Bush Administration would hint at placating the Democrats in the first place.
As I thought more about it, it became increasingly apparent that it was part of a strategy that the Bush Administration has employed for some time to put the Democrats in a box. It might be called "entrapment with a twist." It works as follows:
Act Helpless. In this step the Bushies leak stories to the press making the Administration look weak. The Administration may appear as though it lacks focus. Other times it may act as though it's afraid of the opposition. The point is to let the Democrats smell blood in the water. In the case of the economic stimulus package, the Bush Administration acted wary of Democrats' class-warfare rhetoric, and so hinted it might drop tax cuts for top income earners.
Wait for Democrats to Pounce. The appearance of weakness naturally induces the Democrats to attack. And as the Bush Administration surely knows, it will be an attack that pleases the Democrats' base. Over the weekend, prominent Donks turned up the class-warfare rhetoric. The Bush tax cuts would help "the wealthiest Americans" fumed then-impending Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. In an ironic choice of words, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that the Bush plan was a "Trojan Horse to wheel in some tax breaks for the high end that they're so fond of." Trojan Horse indeed.
Spring the Trap. Once the Democrats have committed themselves to a line of attack, the Bush Administration ensnares them by pursuing a policy which forces the Democrats to either anger their base or alienate moderates. In his economic stimulus package, Bush not only has the supply-side tax cuts that please conservatives, he also has items that appeal to moderates, like income-tax cuts for the middle and lower class and "Re-Employment Accounts." Congressional Democrats now face a very unpleasant choice. They can vote against the President's plan thereby voting against the items that please moderate voters. Or they can risk dispiriting their base by voting for a plan that includes tax cuts for the "wealthy." Heads Bush wins, tails Democrats lose.
The "Twist." The twist to this strategy is that the Bush Administration also intends for its appearance of weakness to provoke criticism from the political right as well. For example, last week at the Daily Standard, Fred Barnes griped "Somebody tell the Bush White House that Republicans now control the Senate….Somehow the idea got planted at the White House that a watered-down tax cut, less susceptible to Democratic attacks, would be better politically for the president." It seems to me that this has two important psychological effects. First, seeing the president attacked from the right emboldens the Democrats, making them all the more likely to pounce. Second, when the president actually releases a plan that has plenty of conservative ideas, the right heaves a great sigh of relief, and becomes energized and eager to do battle for Bush. Not surprisingly, in Tuesday's National Review Online Larry Kudlow gushed, "President Bush has surprised everyone with his decision to propose a big-bang economic growth package."
The Bush Administration has used this strategy at least since last year, when it rolled the Democrats on the War Against Iraq...CLICK HERE for more
MR. RUSSERT: On September 11th, former President Clinton appeared on "The David Letterman Show" and offered some words of advice. Let me show you what they were about the war:(Videotape, September 11, 2002):...MR. RUSSERT: One concern that was raised is if we begin to build up for a military operation, would Saddam Hussein try his own pre-emptive strike. Again, here's President Clinton:
FORMER PRES. BILL CLINTON: You're looking at a couple of weeks of bombing, and then I'd be astonished if this campaign took more than a week, astonished.(Videotape, September 11, 2002):MR. RUSSERT: Would we, in effect, put Saddam in a position where he would use his chemical and biological weapons before we had a chance to be ready?MR. CLINTON: But if he's got these stocks of chemical and biological weapons and if he knows he's toast, don't you think he'll use what he can and give away what he can't to people who will be using them on us for years to come, so he can have the last laugh?
(End videotape)SEC'Y POWELL: These are all hypotheticals which are charming to talk about in late-night talk shows, but I think that a serious show like this morning, we should not just wildly speculate about what he might or might not do. We know what capability he has and you can be sure that all of that has been factored into whatever planning we are doing now.
My entire career has been spent in writing and public communications, spanning the gamut from public relations, to journalism, to participation on various political campaigns (as a volunteer). So I naturally tune into the PR aspects of public issues. PR-wise, the president does not have an indefinite amount of time to stall. The longer weenies like Blix are calling the shots (or appear to be), the more support for action in Iraq will erode.
In the meantime, some behind-the-scenes actor has obviously encouraged North Korea to cause trouble now. That further limits the President's options and PR horizon vis a vis Iraq. An ugly, ugly, ugly situation all around.
Good analysis and an interesting read.
Another name for it is 'Texas politics.'
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