Showdown in little pariah

By Cyrus G. Robati

(June 02, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Americans have had some 10,000 nuclear warheads and 28,500 troops permanently placed in the Korean Peninsula and fired a string of warning shots that the North Korean recent nuclear test and their cluster of crude nuclear devices are a serious threat to the entire world.

Not to be out-threatened, North Koreans have warned back that if attacked, they will turn the South Korean capital, Seoul, into “a sea of fire” and bombard Japan. Dire threats and angry hot air always characterise the jagged relations between isolated, Stalinist North Korea and America, Japan and South Korea. Their recriminations have become a sort of ritualised kabuki theatre in which snarls and grimaces replace actual violence.

After much angry posturing, Washington, Tokyo and Seoul usually pay off Pyongyang's “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, to stop shooting trouble. But after Pyongyang's second small nuclear test this week, there is a clear-and-present danger this usually harmless kabuki could turn deadly.

Pyongyang's few nukes are hardly a danger - yet -- anyway. Pyongyang has 800 inaccurate medium-range missiles aimed at Seoul and Tokyo, but they lack nuclear warheads. The North is not believed to have yet mastered miniaturising or hardening nuclear warheads for delivery by missile.

Pyongyang's blood-curdling threats notwithstanding, its infant nuclear force is primarily defensive. The North Koreans even have had to literally eat grass to pay for their nukes and they would be unlikely to fuel a nuclear war that would result in its immediate annihilation by American nuclear retaliation and vaporisation of the Kim dynasty.

But after this week's nuclear test, a new danger has surfaced. The Americans have renewed threats to stop and search North Korean freighters on the high seas that might be carrying “weapons of mass destruction”, missiles or military components to the Middle East. South Koreans and Japanese will follow suit, but only in their coastal waters. The North Koreans have warned that such a high seas arrest will be an act of war.

The plot now nears its climax. Israelis worry that the North Koreans, desperate for hard cash, will sell more missiles, technology and spare parts to the Arabs or Iranians, and in the future, nuclear warheads. So Israel's American lobby has put intense pressure on the Barrack Obama administration to stop any flow of North Korean weapons to the Mideast. The White House responded by threats of a maritime blockade of the North Koreans.

The North Koreans say they will retaliate militarily for any high seas seizures, either in its disputed West Sea (Sea of Japan) against South Korean naval forces, or by attacking American ships and spy aircraft that shadow their coast. If this happens, the Americans would likely respond by missile strikes and air attacks. The North Koreans would then riposte with rain of heavy artillery and long-range rocket batteries along the DMZ against South Korea's capital, a mere 25 miles distant. Attacks on American bases in South Korea by North Koreans' string of Scuds could follow.

The Obama administration is playing with fire by threatening an act of war against its Kim counterpart which has so many American troops in its gun sights. Some Koreans, both North and South, even see Mr Kim as the authentic Korean leader for defying the mighty Americans and refusing to give in to their threats - a sort of Korean Saddam Hussein.

Like his late father, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il has repeatedly vowed to reunite the Korean Peninsula before he dies. Time is running out for the ailing Kim. His pledge should scarcely be taken lightly. The Dear Leader faces internal challenges over plans to name one of his three sons the next dynastic leader. But he also knows the Americans are most unlikely to invade North Korea, which has a very tough, 1.1 million-man army that so far appears loyal to the regime.

If the North Asian nuclear crisis intensifies, Japan and South Korea may be forced to deploy nuclear weapons which both can do in only months. The Obama administration, already his hands full with two wars and a volcanic upheaval in Pakistan, should proceed with caution. Washington's world power has already reached its limits.

In June Mr Obama is to meet his 65-year-old South Korean counterpart, Lee Myung-bak, at the White House. This is where the administration, which has tried to back-burner the Korean problem, needs to get a grip and realise that trying to do more blustery Bush stuff ― more isolation and threat ― never worked over the past eight years, will hardly work now and with this particular “rebel regime” will never work ever.

Diplomatic recognition hardly means a nation's seal of approval. Washington conducts daily civilised diplomatic relations even with regimes that are anti-democratic, anti-woman and coddling of extremists: Saudi Arabia, for example. The best diplomacy against “the rebel regimes”, such as Iran and North Korea, is to wear them down with time: letting them economically collapse from within and letting the public discontent develop - since it did work well with the Soviet Union and its satellites, anyway.

But even this theatrical trade of threats is hardly anything new in this part of the region. The North Koreans have held downtown Seoul at risk for generations with one of the highest concentrations of deployed artillery, artillery rockets and short-range ballistic missiles on the planet. From the outside, Pyongyang is perceived as unpredictable enough that any potential pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities is too risky not because of some newfound nuclear capability, but because of Pyongyang's capability to strike Seoul via conventional means.

A nuclear North Korea, the world has now seen, is insufficient alone to risk renewed war on the peninsula. Iran is similarly defended. It can threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, to launch a barrage of medium-range ballistic missiles at Israel, and to use its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere to respond with a new campaign of artillery rocket fire, guerrilla warfare and terror. But the biggest deterrent to a strike on Iran is Tehran's ability to seriously interfere in ongoing American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- efforts already tenuous enough without direct Iranian opposition.

In other words, some other deterrent -- be it conventional or unconventional -- against attack is a prerequisite for a nuclear programme, since powerful potential adversaries can otherwise move to halt such efforts. The two notorious “rebel regimes”, North Korea and Iran, have such deterrents. Most other countries widely considered major proliferation dangers -- Iraq before 2003, Syria or Venezuela, for example -- do not. And that fundamental deterrent remains in place after the country acquires nuclear weapons.

In short, no one was going to invade North Korea -- or even launch limited military strikes against it -- before its first nuclear test in 2006. And no one will do so now, nor will they do so after its next test. So North Korea - with or without nuclear weapons - remains secure from invasion. With or without nuclear weapons, North Korea remains a pariah state, isolated from the international community. And with or without them, the world will go on.

-Sri Lanka Guardian