Topic: Environment
North Korea – Yes, You Have Our Attention
Author: Richard Stoyeck
North Korea has tested a low yield nuclear device with 4% of
the destructive power of the bomb that the United States
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II.
Some believe that the device was much larger but may have
failed for technical reasons.
We don’t know the truth, because the United States has not
devoted the resources to know what is really going on. If you
are surprised, don’t be. Intelligence collection is a tricky
business.
When Richard Nixon was President, you may remember that one of
our ships, the USS Pueblo was brazenly attacked and hijacked in
international waters in 1968, off the coast of North Korea. The
82 member crew was taken prisoner and tortured over an 11 month
period before their release was negotiated.
There is such a thing as institutional memory. The senior
members of the military remember the Pueblo incident well, and
it still influences our behavior towards North Korea. As an
aside, President Nixon gave the order to attack North Korea in
retribution for the Pueblo incident. At the time the President
believed a show of force was absolutely necessary to dissuade
the Koreans from further provocative acts. Nixon’s Secretary of
Defense at the time did not carry out the Presidential
directive. To the end of his life, Nixon felt the biggest
foreign policy error of his administration was the failure to
carry out a retaliatory raid against North Korea for the Pueblo
capture. The Pueblo incident has emboldened the North Koreans
ever since.
Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations were aware of the
Pueblo incident and its aftermath, when attempting to configure
a new US policy towards North Korea’s nuclear program. We have
37,000 American soldiers stationed in South Korea protecting
our alliance and interests with South Korea. There is a phased
troop withdrawal from the South Korea Peninsula taking place.
You have to wonder why we are willing to withdraw troops from
South Korea during a time when they wish to pursue a nuclear
development process. The answer is that this area of the world
is loaded with dynamite, and if it blows up, you don’t want to
have 37,000 American troops sitting in the middle of it. North
Korea has one of the largest stockpiles of artillery weapons of
any army in the world. They are capable of striking Seoul, South
Korea’s capital from across the border.
It was recently reported that Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian
Ambassador to the United States had a private conversation with
President Bush. In the conversation the Prince told the
President that the United States should withdraw US troops from
South Korea. Bandar felt it was too dangerous to leave our
soldiers in the middle of a possible confrontation where our
OPTIONS would be limited. As Bandar put it, without troops on
the border, if there’s problem, it’s a REGIONAL PROBLEM. With
troops, you could have thousands of American lives at risk, and
it becomes a major WAR instantly.
So what do we do about the North Koreans announcing the ACTUAL
testing of a nuclear weapon? We have to realize that words have
power. We have to be careful what we say. President Bush
announced the “axis of evil” speech several years ago. He named
North Korea and Iraq as two of the three countries. It would
seem that he started his anti-terrorism campaign in the wrong
end of the world.
Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), while
North Korea has gone live with them. Now we are in a bind. Our
defense policy has been altered whereby we can only fight one
war in one country at a time, while fighting a holding action
in a second country. Prior to the Bush Administration holding
power, we were postured to fight two simultaneous wars on two
fronts.
The bad guys know our new policy and will take advantage of us
being pinned down in Iraq to expand their own power bases.
Since we have a fear of losing pilots or better yet, having a
pilot shot down, we are not doing the reconnaissance flights
that we would normally do over North Korea.
The best thing to do right now is to realize that if North
Korea is a problem for the United States, it is a much bigger
problem for Japan, China, Philippines, and South Korea. This is
a regional problem in spite of our alliances, and treaty
involvements. Its one thing to build and detonate a nuclear
weapon, it’s quite another to have a long range missile
delivery system. North Korea could fairly easily develop a
delivery system capable of hitting the countries in its
immediate vicinity.
Hitting the United States from a 9,000 mile plus distance is
another story, not so easy really. Since the countries
bordering North Korea have the most to lose, they should be the
ones bearing the brunt of the responsibility for multi-lateral
talks among the powers involved.
The real deal is that North Korea is a dictatorship that
routinely starves its own people for the benefit of the small
leadership that has basically enslaved the country. This
leadership wants to play the cards that it can. What it now has
is nuclear weapons. They will use this card to maximize whatever
concessions they can from the United States and the immediate
surrounding neighbors.
Are we going to cave, and make concessions to the North
Koreans? Of course we are, because that’s what superpowers do.
It’s not about appeasement, it’s about business, and what makes
good business sense. Churchill said that “People have friends,
nations have interests”.
It is in our interest to not divert ourselves from the issue of
extricating ourselves from a tortuous situation in Iraq. It is
costing us treasure, and beginning to eat at the social fabric
our country as Viet Nam did a generation ago. We must put a
good face on Iraq and get out. The President may not be aware
of it, but he is on a short leash in Iraq. The American people
are very intolerant of wars without objectives that last too
long, and that’s precisely where George Bush finds himself. It
is highly questionable that his party will survive the mid-term
elections intact. The country will embrace CHANGE, even from a
Democratic party that is devoid of ideas.
About The Author: Richard Stoyeck’s background includes being a
limited partner at Bear Stearns, Senior VP at Lehman Brothers,
Kuhn Loeb, Arthur Andersen, and KPMG. Educated at Pace
University, NYU, and Harvard University, today he runs
Rockefeller Capital Partners and http://stocksatbottom.com/
http://www.stocksatbottom.com/
