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COMMENTARY
October 11, 2006
Out of their misery
When a madman, holding hostages, says his gun is loaded -- it is time for the police to shoot him. No need to establish whether he’s telling the truth. (Or, whatever the equivalent in international relations.)In our analogy the madman is North Korea. I would personalize it to Kim Jong-Il -- “Sun of the 21st Century, Guardian Deity of the Planet, Sun of Socialism, Eternal Sun, and Ever-Victorious General” -- except there is good reason to believe he’s only a semi-retarded dynastic figurehead (like Syria’s Bashir Assad), and the real madmen people his Politburo. The hostages they’re holding are South Korea and Japan; more ambiguously China and Russia; and the USA, Canada, and other countries to the limits of their missile range. There is a good question whether the gun is actually loaded. The seismic experts detected an underground explosion equivalent to only hundreds of tons of TNT, not the several thousand a nuclear explosion should have produced. It is possible the North Koreans tried and failed, that they will try again, with either a plutonium or uranium device -- we know they have raw materials for both. But they are not the technological wizards of the capitalist South, who could certainly produce a working Bomb if they wanted one. (And may soon feel the need.) After decades of utterly failed diplomacy, and utterly failed intelligence work, we don’t know much, except the lessons of history, which we’ve forgotten. It is quite likely North Korea would no longer be with us, had Bill Clinton’s U.S. administration not thrown it a vastly generous technological and humanitarian lifeline in return for its threats in 1994, or had the South Koreans, with U.S. encouragement, not propped it up on an even more extravagant scale -- fear being the inspiration for stupidity. From everything we can observe at a distance, two reasonably plain propositions emerge. The first is that the North Korean regime, and the country in its possession, is again on the point of economic, social, and general collapse. And the second, following from this, is that their defences are by no means ship-shape. True, they have more than a million soldiers, and nasty weaponry developed with Iranian, Pakistani, Russian, and especially Chinese help. But Saddam Hussein had a million-man army -- and despite what you’ve read in the gliberal media, nasty weapons, too -- and they were no use against anything except the million-man army of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. Given public (and dubious) opposition from China and Russia to the nuclear test Pyongyang now claims it has performed, given the weaknesses the test inevitably exposed, we must read the stunt as an act of malign cunning. Given the ease with which the North Korean leaders suckered ambassador Jimmy Carter, and the Clinton administration, in 1994, they know big threats can earn them big rewards. And with the Democrats poised to make large advances in the mid-term U.S. Congressional elections, they may be negotiating with idiots again, soon. From John Bolton’s remarks at the U.N., and several statements in Washington, we can see that the Bush administration, at least, has seen through this rather pathetic ruse. What we need, instead of a fresh aid package, is to cut off the regime from all Western contact and help, including all the pointless diplomatic chatter that encourages more stunts, and all the humanitarian aid that seldom gets through to its intended recipients anyway. Step up anti-missile defences, and as I’ve argued for years, invite Japan, South Korea, and all other regional allies to join NATO. This, moreover, is a precaution against the aggressive intentions of China -- the smooth fist behind North Korea’s spiky glove. I have not suggested we should invade. It would be nice, but it would also be impractical. The last Korean War ended not against Koreans but against the Chinese, when the Maoist regime decided it could not let North Korea fall. The present Red China would do the same: they fear the power of a reunited Korea. We must also consider the scale of possible damage that could be rained on Seoul, and as far afield as Tokyo, were the North Koreans able to fire what missiles they had. Invasion is not always the best method of regime change. Fortunately, in this case, choking looks workable. Let the Chinese subsidize the Pyongyang regime, if they want it to survive. Let those huge costs pile up on our more secure enemy in Beijing. And let them also enjoy the consequences, domestically in China, when the North Korea regime falls anyway (the way the Soviet Union enjoyed the fall of the Berlin Wall). Or, do what most Democrats, and diplomats, and Europeans say: give the North Koreans everything they want, and thus another chance to recover, and provide a more lethal threat in the future. For that is, after subtracting fake nuance, the foreign policy option shared across the Left of the Western political spectrum: to punish good, and reward evil. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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