One of the costs of committing so many troops to Iraq and Afghanistan is that we don’t have the resources to effectively deal with other potential emergencies, like this:
North Korea threatened a military response to South Korean participation in a U.S.-led program to seize weapons of mass destruction, and said it will no longer abide by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.
“The Korean People’s Army will not be bound to the Armistice Agreement any longer,” the official Korean Central News Agency said in a statement today. Any attempt to inspect North Korean vessels will be countered with “prompt and strong military strikes.” South Korea’s military said it will “deal sternly with any provocation” from the North.
Pulling out of the 1953 armistice is a fairly dramatic gesture, and it’s definitely threatening. The defense of South Korea is complicated by Seoul’s proximity to the border with North Korea.
When the U.S. military tries to explain the difficulty of using force to stop North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, the oddly poetic phrase it turns to is the “tyranny of proximity.”
The phrase, which has been in the lexicon of the U.S. forces in South Korea for years, stems from the imposing array of conventional artillery that the North Koreans have dug into the hills just north of the demilitarized zone, a mere 30 miles from this capital city of 12 million. The nightmare scenario is that if the United States opts for a more forceful approach to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the communist regime would retaliate not only against the 38,000 American troops stationed in South Korea, but also against South Korea itself…
…Estimates of the damage that could be inflicted by a North Korean attack range from bad to apocalyptic. Lee Yang Ho, defense minister during a similar nuclear crisis in 1994, said one computer simulation conducted during his term projected 1 million dead, including thousands of Americans.
“It is assumed that if the United States were to strike North Korea that the North Koreans would fight back,” Lee said. “All industry would be destroyed, gas stations, power plants. This is such a densely populated area that even if North Korean artillery were not very accurate, anyplace you would hit there would be huge numbers of casualties.”
U.S. military experts who have contemplated strikes on North Korea agree.
The current disagreement is caused by South Korea’s decision to join in international efforts to prevent North Korea from importing or exporting nuclear technology. Given North Korea’s desperate need for revenue of any type and their aggressive nuclear weapons program (they detonated a nuclear bomb last week), there is no country on Earth more likely to sell nuclear material to a terrorist organization (knowingly or unknowingly). Because Seoul cannot be protected from attack, we cannot take any military action against North Korea unless we are willing to see hundreds of thousands killed on our side alone.
If war broke out not from our choosing, but from some irrational act of the extremely paranoid and potentially unstable North Korean government, we would be woefully undermanned. And it is not unthinkable that any such conflict could go nuclear. The problem of North Korean behavior is not one of our making, but our unpreparedness is a direct result of the decision to wage the War on Terror as a war of invasion and occupation of foreign lands. We cannot wind down Iraq fast enough, and our surge in Afghanistan needs to be carefully evaluated with the threat of North Korea in mind.
This time, America cannot be the global soldier. This time our troops are exhausted, our equipment not worth moving into another theatre and the American people and their Congress are gunshy of being the Responders.
Perhaps this is the moment when our global partners will step up to the plate. More than anything, that is the curiosity point because the US can’t fix this.
Incentives for China and Russia to actually step in? Being the front guys means they can’t be coy with their positions any longer, it would require a commitment of policy that would surely invite the same kind of criticism the US has undergone for decades.
As a Korean War vet, I am deeply disturbed by North Korea’s trashing of the 1953 armistice. The De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) has been a constant source of tit-tat militaristic jostling between the US and North Korean troops. Up until recently, Pyongyang’s use of provocation in the DMZ has been a signal of its irritation over some international or diplomatic slight that it felt was offensive. But the Korean Peoples Army (KPA) has always found a way to cool things down by meetings with the U.S. Army Representatives at selected sites in the DMZ. This awkward but necessary protocol has been successful for 55 years, but now it has been scrapped.
American arm chair generals are wasting time wringing their hands and engaging in endless suppositions about the leadership of North Korea, and who is actually in charge. In the face of the North Korean rejection of the 1953 peace accords, the Obama Administration is sitting on a ticking time bomb. In the past local KPA commanders in the DMZ controlled just how far the KPA would go to breech the buffer boundary between North and South Korea in the DMZ. On many occasions small detachments of the KPA would actually engage in incursions into South Korean territory on some bogus pretext, and then faced by the appearance of the U.S. Military, they would slowly withdraw back into their own territory. This always was the outcome because of Pyongyang’s acceptance of the 1953 truce agreement. The danger is that any future incursion ordered by a local KPA hot head commander could lead to deeper and deeper penetration into South Korean territory, until they are fired upon by the Americans or the South Koreans, kicking off the start of open warfare.
There is not sufficient time left to petition the UN or to start a troop movement from Iraq, or any other long delay response. As of this moment, peace in Korea rests on the disposition of the local KPA commanders in the DMZ.If one these guys wakes up with a hair across his butt, we all could suddenly find ourselves in a world of trouble. Think about it!!
l grant that the great WOT, and it’s costs have aggravated the situation, and increased it’s volatility; but, if memory serves, our relationship with north korea at the end of the clinton administration(s) was considerably less hostile. l would also grant that it’s never been particularly friendly. but the nuclear issue, vis-à-vis the production of weapons grade plutonium, bomb making, etc. was reasonably contained, and there was international monitoring in place re: their shuttered reactors. there were cross border exchanges between families divided by the geography of the conflict, and relations were as normal as they had ever been.
BushCo™ took over and things quickly went to hell in the proverbial handbasket. the neocons refused to even talk to the north, leading to the expulsion of the inspectors, with the subsequent re-opening of the reactors and the resurgent antagonism toward all things western. the situation deteriorated from there, spurred on in large part by the bellicosity of the bush administration(s) and it’s protagonists..
just another disaster in the litany of intractable legacies that the neocons left in their wake.
feel free to correct me if l’m mistaken.
True, but would North Korea have still done the same things as the Clintons? I remember that they were but at a greatly reduced rate.
And yes, we need the UN’s help the UN did this the last time. Jesus, Korea (like Taiwan) is one of the things I would fight over.
Bush’s policies made matters worse but I would say that it was their fault, exactly. Finding a way to deal with the level of Crazy displayed by the North Koreans isn’t easy, and if you make mistakes, the blame still lies mainly with the Crazy people.
I was in Korea for 13 months, most of 1958, and we understood perfectly well that we were just there to delay any attack. This is not something new and connected to the war on terror. We also knew that Seoul was targeted by massive artillery. The whole situation is more than 50 years old.
North Korea is saying what it is always saying “PAY ATTENTION TO US, WE’RE IMPORTANT”.
They know perfectly well, that although they could do huge damage in an initial attack, thereafter, they would be crushed, and the Chinese would not come across the Yalu to rescue them this time.
Stupid miscalulation is always possible, but the status quo has held steady for a very long time.
Greatferm