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What Pyongyang Knows
BUZZFLASH
READER COMMENTARY
by John Hickman
Watching Pyongyang torment Washington during the current nuclear "non-crisis" is simultaneously appalling and fascinating. Sensing a distracted Washington and division between Washington and Seoul, the North Korean regime casually slipped free of the nuclear weapons proliferation controls negotiated in the 1994 Agreed Framework and has begun the process of extracting additional economic aid, security guarantees, and perhaps even diplomatic recognition from adversaries anxious to reach any compromise approximating the status quo ante. But then you can hardly blame Peerless Leader (a.k.a. Supreme Leader) Kim Jong Il and the comrades for their bad behavior. After all, they have been handed the kind of opportunity to engage in coercive bargaining that Stalinist bullies crave.
Pyongyang has three major advantages in this confrontation. First, it knows there is a deep and exploitable rift between its adversaries. Seoul wants to speak sweetly while Washington wants to talk tough.
Newly elected South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun is intent on continuing his predecessor’s "Sunshine Policy" of giving economic aid to North Korea with the obvious purpose being to give the comrades reasons to prefer peace to war. The less obvious purpose of the Sunshine Policy is to prevent or delay reunification of the south and north. Seoul is horrified by the high price that would have to be paid if the brittle regime in the north collapsed. The burden of absorbing 22 million impoverished and brutalized North Koreans would dwarf what it cost the West Germans to absorb the East Germans.
Bush’s decision to lump North Korea together with Iraq and Iran in his 2002 "Axis of Evil" State of the Union address didn’t alert Pyongyang to the rift between Washington and Seoul. That has been apparent for years. But it did hand Pyongyang a major propaganda victory. For many South Koreans, fear that an aggressive Bush administration might actually want war on the Korean peninsula coupled with resentment of the current Status of Forces Agreement displaced a more realistic fear of the North Korean threat.
The distance between Seoul and Washington is now so great they can’t get their stories straight. On Jan. 18th, Roh Moo-hyun stated publicly that the U.S. had considered military action against North Korea during the last South Korean presidential election. The White House quietly denied the embarrassing story hoping that it would disappear.
Pyongyang’s second major advantage is that U.S. military forces are stretched thin by the large deployments for the scheduled next war against Iraq, deployments for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and smaller deployments in Djibouti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. No doubt the North Koreans could detect the anxiety at the Pentagon when on Dec. 23rd, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied having any reason to believe that "North Korea feels emboldened" because of the impending war against Iraq and went on to assert that the U.S. military was perfectly capable of fighting two major wars while also fighting terrorism elsewhere. Splendid posturing by our Secretary of Defense to be sure, but the U.S. military would be hard put to fight two regional wars (two and half if you count Afghanistan) simultaneously.
Consider the conventional military might of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). Dug into fortifications within 100 miles of the DMZ is the bulk of a disciplined army of one million equipped with 4800 tanks and over 11,000 pieces of field artillery, many of which are self-propelled. North Korean commando units numbering 100,000 are trained to emerge and strike south from undiscovered tunnels under the DMZ. South Korea’s capital and largest city, Seoul, is only 40 miles south of the DMZ and hopelessly vulnerable to bombardment by artillery and multiple launch rocket systems. To these formidable conventional threats add an estimated 500 Scud missiles capable of striking anywhere in South Korea and 100 intermediate range No Dong missiles capable of striking Japan. The possibility that they might deliver chemical as well as conventional warheads increases the threat. Against these threats, the South Korean army has 560,000 equipped with 2000 tanks and 4800 pieces of field artillery. They are joined by 37,000 U.S. troops.
Pyongyang’s third major advantage is that Washington would rather fight Iraq than North Korea. The old adage that generals always prepare for the last war -- the implication being that they are often surprised by unanticipated enemies, strategies, or weapons -- applies in this case. The U.S. military is clearly ready to win Gulf War II, but not necessarily Korean War II.
You can hardly blame the Pentagon and White House for wanting to reprise the last three wars. Air campaigns used precision-guided munitions achieved rapid military victories with minimal U.S. military casualties in Gulf War I, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. These are precisely the kinds of post-Vietnam military conflicts that the U.S. military was redesigned to win.
Winning Korean War II would probably require the deployment of many as half a million additional U.S. troops, months of difficult ground combat, and high casualties. The North Koreans know that tough talking conservative American politicians shiver at the thought of television news coverage of large numbers of American youth coming home in body bags.
Pyongyang has timed this crisis perfectly. Washington and Seoul are very likely to end up paying off Pyongyang with substantial economic aid to insure that there is no chance the PKA isn’t ordered to strike south in a blitzkrieg. Moreover, the danegeld might be insufficient to prevent North Korea from eventually deploying ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. In turn, that threat may well prompt the South Koreans and the Japanese to build their own nuclear deterrents. From a region of carefully managed, nicely compartmentalized conflicts, Northeast Asia might end up being one of the planet's tensest regions. Pyongyang's chances of surviving as a regime are probably better in that kind of environment.
China, the other major player in this grim game, has been notably passive during the current nuclear crisis. Although Washington has been making plaintive sounds in Beijing’s direction, there have been few positive results. Beijing appears unable to influence its client. Observers should not be surprised by that failure. Any relative diminution of U.S. power is good news from the Chinese perspective.
What Beijing knows is that of the possible outcomes of the current nuclear crisis, most represent a relative decline of U.S. power vis-à-vis China. The U.S. is rendered less powerful if the North Korean regime survives by trading nuclear non-proliferation for economic aid or by trading a decision not to initiate conventional war for economic aid. Whether it wins or loses a conventional war on the Korean peninsula, a bloodied U.S. would suffer an even greater loss of relative power. The necessary conclusion is that China has every reason to encourage the U.S. to wage Gulf War II while winking at Pyongyang’s preparations.
BUZZFLASH
READER COMMENTARY
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