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COMMENTARY
January 11, 2003
Point of no return
One of the least understood things about mad people in my experience is that they behave 90 per cent sanely about 90 per cent of the time. If you haven't been around for the other 10 per cent however you may underestimate the potential of the problem. North Korea passed briefly into the magic zone yesterday with an act that truly could not be explained. There has been a kind of reason in the methodical escalation of threats to the United States. The consensus of North Korea-watchers would seem to be that we are witnessing a standard begging routine. At intervals of a week or so the Pyongyang regime will make some new declaration to get on people's nerves. Having admitted to having an illegal nuclear program they then played with various permutations of that which included a formal declaration that they had abrogated their 1994 non-proliferation treaty with the United States. This got no major rise from the Bush administration. Last week they first removed the seals and cameras at their mothballed Yongbyon nuclear facility then kicked the IAEA inspectors out. Still no rise. Yesterday in case they had lost our attention they formally declared their exit from the full Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- the big one with the co-signatures of Russia and China. For good measure their ambassador to the United Nations mentioned apparently out of sync that if anyone was thinking of proposing sanctions North Korea would interpret it as a declaration of war. According to the Korea experts who are about as consistently wrong as China and Russia-watchers we can all see what North Korea wants. They want the Americans to unilaterally surrender a lot more aid in the form of energy food technology and hard currency with no questions asked. We've seen it all before according to these experts. And what we can expect to see I would agree is a series of further methodical escalations. They could test fire a missile they had promised not to test. They could announce full nuclear production. They could cause a nasty incident in the DMZ. They could actually deploy something that looks very suspicious and make it visible to U.S. satellites. There is a wide variety of additional small steps if they want to keep moving in the direction of Armageddon. According to me however this is not going according to the experts' script. For by withdrawing yesterday from the NPT they did something they should have known would cause more anxiety in Moscow and Beijing than in Washington. The diplomatic reaction quickly confirmed this: Russians Chinese and Japanese were among the first to scream. We all had to wait for the State Department in Washington where the spokesman Joe Boucher came out with a slightly milder condemnation. Now any conceivable sane strategy (and it is in the nature of sane strategies to be conceivable) would not go this way. The comprehensible North Korean strategy is to rattle American nerves as much as possible while soothing others. This is what you do if you want to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its regional allies. Moreover by acting thus against the NPT they tend to put the response out of American hands. They give the Bush administration a chance to sit back and let some other nuclear powers do some heavy diplomatic lifting. While claiming to be demanding that the U.S. alone negotiate with them on their own terms they instead throw the whole issue into the lap of the U.N.. For what it's worth a source in Israeli intelligence told me that his colleagues cannot find any evidence to contradict their fairly detailed thesis that Iraq and North Korea are actually working in tandem in mutual self-interest. North Korea tries to take U.S. attention off Iraq while Iraq increases the urgency of a U.S. capitulation to North Korean demands. Even without this thesis -- quite plausible in itself -- we must begin to wonder if there is anything the U.S. can now do any concession it could make that might dampen the North Korean menace even temporarily. For no sooner does the State Department offer to speak directly without conditions to the regime in Pyongyang than they again up the ante. This is not what you do if you really want the unconditional negotiations you asked for. But an alternative thesis presents itself: What if North Korea is actually cracking up in "live time"? The daily contradictions between one department and another the failure to coordinate messages between Pyongyang and New York and everything we know about the nosedive of an already low-flying North Korean economy suggests a regime coming apart. Add to this the loss not only of U.S. oil and aid shipments but very possibly of weapons markets as one Middle Eastern regime after another thinks twice about further imports and Iran has come of age as an alternative supplier. If this is the case then North Korea might do anything at all -- and nothing the U.S. does one way or another will make any significant difference. Any kind of engagement or negotiation with them is likely to blow up in American faces and the only thing to do is stand back have reserve forces ready for the widest possible range of contingencies and pray. At this point there will be and can be no further distraction from Iraq. The Bush administration has given so many signals of this -- both from the Pentagon and the State side -- that even Canada's government has picked them up. Our defence minister John McCallum was in the news yesterday suddenly expressing his desire to send Canadians into Iraq even without United Nations backing. (We assume he will wait for U.S. backing however.) Richard Perle who performs the most extraordinary services for the U.S. President from his position with one foot in and one foot out of the Pentagon was in London making statements about the inspection force of Hans Blix to suggest open dismissal. He pointed to the track record they have now built up for visiting only sites that had been visited before and refusing all hints to enterprise. Another of his more suggestive remarks was that he -- or perhaps his President -- was not expecting a consensus in the Security Council. There must still be some kind of presentation to the U.N. formally making the U.S. argument but not another protracted round of minor-power horsetrading for the time will have come when nations declare which side they are on the debate being over. In the words of a leader in the Times of London We must recognise that the demand for conclusive evidence of weapons acquisition is an inadequate requirement in the world we are entering. It confuses deterrence with indictment, as if Saddam were guilty of violating an international gun control law. This is what is so difficult to communicate to people outside the U.S. itself: that we are not about to witness an exercise in legality but an exercise in self-defence. On the specific point alas there is one sure way to demonstrate Saddam has "WMD". It should be clear a few moments after the war begins. The hard fact is that it is not worth compromising intelligence sources to win an academic debate with the people who require a "smoking gun". Were such facts indeed presented and no matter how much smoke or how much gun they would still demand that the U.S. negotiate instead of going to war. I do believe President Bush himself grasps this though it is beyond the reach of many in his own State Department. Likewise with the argument for waiting: the people against war now are going to be no less against war next year or any year and as I say with or without smoking guns. The people who say Korea is more urgent and must be dealt with first, are hardly in favour of fighting there instead only of using the one crisis to distract from the other (thus playing into the enemy's hands). At some point ideally quite a few months ago the U.S. must bite the bullet; the longer they wait the more vicious it will be both the war and the fallout in international public opinion. Moreover war changes the terms of debate. There are almost always more "warmongers" for a war that has been won than for a war that is in prospect. (Almost everyone supports fighting Hitler today.) There are also numerous fair-weather allies who will not commit until the U.S. has taken matters beyond the point of any possible retreat and as I mentioned above they are already lining up for their rewards after the Iraq war is over. For this purpose Mr. McCallum in our Canadian Parliament is an adequate weathercock. The Turks now under their first "moderately Islamic" government recently elected are a special and an especially inconvenient case. The reason they are hedging from making more bases available to the U.S. military has nothing to do with fundamental opposition to regime change in Iraq. The problem there is what they want from the Americans in return: the right to act freely with their own troops in the northern Kurdish sector and the demand to reactivate Turkish oil claims in Iraq that go back almost to the Ottomans. The objections they've raised are characteristic of a very inexperienced government which needs time to adapt even to the "realpolitik" dimension of what is now happening around them. If necessary Turkey will be passed by. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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