Not Much to Celebrate on the Korean DMZ

[thedrifter]

07-24-2003

From the Editor:

Not Much to Celebrate on the Korean DMZ

By Ed Offley



More than 1,500 veterans from 21 nations who fought under the United Nations banner during the Korean War will gather at the truce village of Panmunjom on Sunday, July 27, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the armistice that formally ended the three-year conflict. The 22nd nation that fought in that bloody war ? North Korea ? will not formally attend, although its border guards will have a ringside seat.



It?s hard to recall any anniversary in the past century that is so fraught with irony, foreboding and gloom as the one about to occur on the Korean DMZ.



Even the event itself being remembered ? armistice ? confirms the lack of resolution. Armistice, after all, is simply an agreed-upon suspension of armed hostilities. The grim military standoff between the two Koreas, with 37,000 U.S. troops deployed in South Korea, has continued for five decades.



Granted, five decades of security and economic development have transformed South Korea into an Asian powerhouse, and enabled democracy to emerge in a political system that long drew critics? ire for its reactionary nature. Now all of that is threatened by the simmering nuclear crisis.



The situation today is actually worse than a stalemate. We are likely drifting toward a catastrophe in Korea two decades in the making.



North Korea since last October has blatantly and repeatedly announced its determination to develop nuclear weapons. It has kicked international nuclear inspectors out of the country and has withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The regime has said it is proceeding with a uranium-enrichment program for warhead material. Pyongyang is believed to have withdrawn 8,000 reactor spent fuel rods from the Yongbyon facility to reprocess them into bomb-grade plutonium. It is known to possess formidable stocks of chemical weapons. The regime continues to work on developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and already can strike U.S. military bases throughout the region, including Okinawa and mainland Japan.



More than 84,000 U.S. military service personnel and their family members stationed in northeast Asia live and work under the North Korean nuclear and missile threat.



Despite North Korea?s staggering poverty and lingering famine, it continues to station a million-man Army along the DMZ, armed with rockets and tube artillery that can range the South Korean capitol of Seoul.



Interviewed by retired Army Col. John M. Collins for an assessment of the North Korean threat published in Army magazine this month, one former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff observed:



?This world has a number of problems which are not amenable to immediate, or even short term, solutions. Among them, I count North Korea. If North Korea starts a war, North Korea loses ? big. If anybody else starts a war on the Korean peninsula, the [South Koreans], and just about everyone else involved also loses ? or, at least, has little to gain.?



The U.S. military and intelligence community and their counterparts keep North Korea under constant observation. Satellites and reconnaissance aircraft photograph, harvest electronic signals intelligence and scan the electromagnetic spectrum for signs of military aggression. Special ?sniffer? aircraft last week reportedly detected traces of the element Krypton-85 gas, a byproduct of nuclear reprocessing.



But as we learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in the 9/11 terror attacks nearly two years ago, intelligence-gathering alone is a starkly imperfect process, particularly against a foe who knows he is being watched. Since 1980, South Korea has detected four major tunnels carved under the bedrock underneath the DMZ that would enable enemy commandos to launch surprise attacks along the front line of defense ? but believes there are another 16 that have not yet been found.



A year after 9/11, the U.S. government drafted a new National Security Strategy, which proposes pre-emptive actions to neutralize enemies before they field weapons of mass destruction for combative or coercive purposes. It states in part, ?The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction ? and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves.?



As Collins and other analysts recount with depressing detail, North Korea meets all of the criteria for justified pre-emptive action.



* North Korea is a terrorist state. Since 1968 its commandos and agents have unsuccessfully attempted the assassination of the South Korean president three times (murdering the wife of Park Chung Hee in one incident and murdering six cabinet ministers in another); in 1987, agents planted a bomb aboard a South Korean airliner, killing 115 passengers and crew aboard. It has frequently sent commandos into South Korea with the intent of killing military personnel and civilians.



* North Korea is a missile technology proliferator. It has traded missile technology for nuclear weapons development assistance with Pakistan, and was caught last December shipping Scud missiles to Yemen.



* North Korea has succeeded in a limited production of nuclear weapons. The consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies is that it has already converted enough plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods for at least five or six bombs.



What has prevented the Bush administration from launching an ?Operation North Korea Freedom? is nothing more than the military ?ground truth? along the Korean DMZ. Most analysts agree that North Korea would inevitably be defeated, but not before it would destroy much of South Korea. Its potential to launch chemical or even nuclear weapons raises the spectacle of an even greater catastrophe.



For many years, that itself was grim enough to deter most people from advocating anything more aggressive against North Korea.



Now we face a likely result of inaction: a nuclear-armed North Korea, capable of launching those weapons against American targets in Asia, exporting nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, and posing a threat that dwarfs even the nightmare of a Korean War II on the peninsula. We may ? and I pray that we do not ? soon find that a pre-emptive war against North Korea is the second-worst of two dreadful alternatives.



Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/c....2853213121733


Sempers,

Roger