Former Defense Secretary Warns of War with North Korea



Some of my blogging colleagues believe this is getting juiced up because the Bush Administration wants to distract people from the lies they told over Iraq. I don' t think so, because it is their FUBARed [1] policy that has lead us to seriously contemplating war with North Korea. We know they have nuclear ambitions, so what do we do? Rather than engage them, we tell them to fuck off.

Granted, the threat isn't what the Bush Administration would want us to believe, that they have an ICBM capable of hitting San Francisco. They might be able to aim it at San Francisco, but chances are it would just ruin the day of a bunch of fish 1,000 miles away. No missile defense system is needed here.

Instead, the threat is that they will produce a half dozen nuclear bombs, and then sell them to terrorists. This is where I disagree with Secretary Perry. He thinks that North Korea will test a bomb soon. I'm thinking that to test would constrain rather than liberate the North Korean government. After all, what do they want? Hard currency to buy food and oil is at the top of the list. I think they will sell 3 of the bombs to the highest bidder, and let the buyer test the bombs for them. A test would only make smuggling the bombs out of North Korea more challenging.

What to do with the other three bombs? Well, they do have short range missiles. And remember Seoul is only 50 miles south of the DMZ. A city of 10 million people is a pretty good target to hold hostage.

So, what are our options? The military ones are not good. We'd have to have good intelligence on where the bombs were to make a targeted strike. Not faith-based intelligence. And then, we'd have to pre-emptively crush the North Korean forces on the DMZ to keep them from shelling Seoul old-school. The chances we'd miss at least one of the weapons would be unacceptibly high, and then we'd lose Seoul.

Diplomacy seems to be the only option we have. And the Bush administration has precluded this.

"My theory is the reason we don't have a policy on this, and we aren't negotiating, is the president himself," Perry said. "I think he has come to the conclusion that (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him."

We have to do better than this. Trouble is, the people in charge don't want to.

Link to article on Yahoo! about Secretary Perry's interview
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[1] FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

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