Pummel zone
Any action against North Korea by a trigger-happy America would come at a terrible cost for the region.
Any action against North Korea by a triggerhappy America would come at a terrible cost for the region.
The US missile strike on a Syrian air base doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the Assad regime, but it certainly got the attention of the neoconservative resistance in Washington DC. Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, aspired to be the 2016 Republican presidential candidate. When it became obvious he didn’t have an earthly, he threw his support behind anyone who wasn’t Donald Trump, whom he described as “a jackass” and, more specifically, “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot who doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear uniforms are fighting for”.
After Trump was nominated, Graham indicated he would not be voting for his party’s candidate: “I think Trump is going to places where very few people have been, and I’m not going with him. ”
That was then: Trump was running as a Fortress America isolationist who described the Iraq War as “a tremendous disservice to humanity”, while Graham and fellow Republican senator John McCain were the leaders of the interventionist tendency in Congress. Trump called them “war mongers;” it’s fair to say there aren’t many trouble spots, actual or potential, they haven’t wanted to bomb, if not invade.
What a difference 59 Tomahawk missiles make. Graham now says he is “all in” with the Trump presidency, a turn of phrase that recalls Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt’s fawning promise to US President Lyndon Baines Johnson that the Aussies would go “all the way with LBJ” in Vietnam.
“I am like the happiest dude in America right now,” burbled Graham, adopting teen
age airhead-speak to convey the sheer, giddy extent of his excitement. “In 80 days, he’s done more to correct the world, President Trump, than Obama did in eight years.”
Note the phrase “correct the world” and be afraid. The US’s attempts to correct the world by military force follow a pattern: The conflict doesn’t take place in America. The people who will supposedly benefit from the correction don’t fare well.
Although the correction is presented as a straightforward exercise, it doesn’t unfold as advertised.
The post-correction situation doesn’t seem very different from what would have applied if the US had resisted the urge to try to make things better.
To Graham’s credit, he acknowledges the first point; to his enormous discredit, it doesn’t bother him in the least. He’s in favour of striking North Korea to stop it developing a capability to reach the US with a missile, even if that comes at a huge cost for the region: “It would be terrible, but the war would be over [in South Korea]; it wouldn’t be here.”
Imagine being one of the 25 million residents of greater Seoul and reading those words. We can’t be sure how North Korea, a sealed-off, militarised, totalitarian state ruled by a man-child of demonstrated ruthlessness and questionable sanity, would react to a US military strike, but the expert consensus is that the reaction would be violent and Seoul would be the primary target.
“I am like the happiest dude in America … In 80 days, President Trump’s done more to correct the world than Obama did in eight years.”
“VIRTUALLY IMPENETRABLE”
North Korea has about 15,000 cannons and rocket launchers dug in behind blast
doors on mountainsides 50km from Seoul. According to retired US Major General Robert Scales, a former battalion commander in South Korea, “These perfectly positioned offensive artillery firing positions are virtually impenetrable, extremely difficult to take out by counter-fire. The terrain greatly favours the North: this arc of south-facing granite mountainsides just over the [ demilitarised zone] in a position to pummel Seoul for weeks on end.”
War planners paint a nightmarish picture of collapsing skyscrapers, blizzards of glass shards, fleeing motorists becoming sitting ducks in massive gridlock caused by artillery damage to infrastructure. The Nautilus Institute, a California-based think tank focusing on the Asia-Pacific, estimates 64,000 Seoul residents would die on day one of the bombardment. Even darker scenarios involve the North dipping into its chemical and biological weapons stockpile, supposedly one of the biggest in the world.
US Vice President Mike Pence recently made neocon hearts flutter by visiting the demilitarised zone, giving the North Korean positions a narrow-eyed, “go ahead, make my day” stare and announcing that “American strategic patience is over”. He subsequently told US servicemen and women in Tokyo, “The sword stands ready.”
The experts are far less sanguine. “Every US administration, as they have looked at this problem, has said that all options are available,” says Carl Baker, a retired US Air
Graham would say the US does have a military option, although one that poses a terrible risk to South Korea. As far as he’s concerned, that’s a risk worth taking.
Force officer now with the Pacific Forum of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “But that’s not really true. We really don’t have a military option.”
Graham would put it differently: he’d say the US does have a military option, although one that poses a terrible risk to South Korea. As far as he’s concerned, that’s a risk worth taking. Apart from being callous, Graham’s distinction between war here and war there ignores the 28,000 US military personnel stationed in South Korea and the estimated 150,000-strong US expatriate community. It also overlooks the potentially disastrous effect on the global economy, given Seoul’s status as an international business and financial centre and the region’s economic significance.
The current stand-off is not about a rogue nation having nuclear weapons: that horse has bolted. It’s about preventing North Korea developing a missile that could transport a nuclear warhead to the US West Coast. In other words, America is not prepared to countenance a situation that its North Asian allies have had to learn to live with.
It calls for international co-operation and patient diplomacy, the combination that in 1999 came “tantalisingly close”, according to former US Defence Secretary William Perry, to persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions in return for normalised relations with the West. Incoming president George W Bush abandoned that approach and North Korea went on to develop nuclear weapons.
There’s a grim irony in Graham, the avowed internationalist, adopting a particularly heartless version of the America First doctrine he previously scorned. We can only hope Trump undergoes a similarly Damascene conversion but in reverse, and the self-styled “great negotiator” seeks to make a deal rather than gamble with other people’s lives.