Testing Obama: Don't overlook the unsettling Korean War scenario
Tuesday, January 6, 2009 Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON — As the United States focuses on the new Israeli war, and president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office, North Korea is revving up its rhetoric against South Korea and ailing leader Kim Jong-Il has visited military units in a worrying display of intimidation.
For the first time in 14 years, Kim chose to visit a military unit on New Year's Day, as noted by South Korea's Unification Ministry, rather than go to a factory or pay homage at the memorial bearing his father Kim Il-Sung's remains. The emphasis on the North's military-first policy was accompanied by a particularly ferocious attack on the South's conservative government as "the fascist rule of the sycophantic and treacherous conservative authorities".
While the U.S. and South Korea negotiate a timetable for withdrawal of the U.S. military headquarters in Seoul to a base south of the capital, the U.S. fixation on the Middle East has provided an opening for North Korea to exploit. The North's aim, as seen in Pyongyang's avoidance of anti-American rhetoric, is to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea and ultimately achieve its goal of destroying the alliance.
In that context, the Israeli invasion of Gaza carries grave implications for Korea that are easy to overlook in the frenzy of "breaking news" from the region and the worldwide response to the Israeli pummeling of Palestinians.
It would be absurd to try to compare conflict in the Middle East to the Korean War or the confrontation of forces that has prevailed on the Korean Peninsula since the signing of the armistice in July 1953. They are totally different, but they do have one common denominator — the military and diplomatic role of the United States.
Like it or not, the United States is completely committed to Israel to an extent that far exceeds American bonds with South Korea.
The planes, the tanks and virtually all the modern weaponry deployed by Israeli forces are either American-made or purchased with American funds. Israel is by far the largest recipient of American aid. The American passion for Israel reflects the belief in the right of Jews to their own homeland after the killing of more than 6 million in Nazi Germany's concentration camps as well as complicated U.S. interests in the Middle East and the power of American Jews, whose political and economic influence far outweighs their numbers.
Now the question is whether the United States, while supporting Israel to the hilt and waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will have the means or the stomach for a potentially far worse conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Would American leaders, and the American people, ever muster the same passion for the defense of South Korea as they do for Israel? For that matter, would the U.S. stand up in a second Korean War as it did in 1950 when a severely depleted American military establishment built up quickly enough to drive out the North Korean invaders and then, after the Chinese entered the war and drove the Americans and South Koreans from the North, finally drove the Chinese from the South.
The United States today has about 28,500 troops in South Korea, far more than the 500 or so advisers in the country when the Korean War broke out in June 1950, and South Korean forces are vastly better equipped now than they were in June 1950. The bottom line, though, is does the U.S. have the will for a Far Eastern war while involved in unpopular flare-ups from Israel to Pakistan?
In the outburst of publicity over the Middle East, few if any Americans are aware that war on the Korean Peninsula would be far costlier, and bloodier, than anything seen so far in the Middle East, including Iraq. A second Korean war, moreover, would carry the risk of a regional holocaust, with the Chinese and Russians rushing to the aid of North Korea and Japan, the one-time colonial occupier, joining the fray against historical foes. That scenario, far-fetched though it may seem, lingers in the minds of those with memories of the horrors that engulfed the peninsula from mid-1950 to mid-1953.
The United States, as it enters the Obama administration, is not capable of fighting on two broadly separated fronts without reverting to the draft of young men, and possibly women, which was abandoned after popular revulsion over the Vietnam war. If Americans are not nearly so hostile to their military establishment today as they were at the height of the Vietnam War, the reason is the absence of fear among young people of having to join the army whether they like it or not.
Americans, moreover, are far more concerned about problems on their own home front than anywhere else. No American units are going to accompany the Israelis in Gaza. Israeli forces, fully equipped with American weaponry, have no problem roaring over Palestinians, whose rockets attacks are like bee stings in comparison with the shelling, strafing and bombing of Israeli tanks. Hamas, which is responsible for instigating attacks against Israel, is basically a terrorist organization that does not have the support of the majority of Palestinians, including probably the 1.5 million living in Gaza.
The North Koreans would be a far more formidable foe. Quite aside from their nuclear warheads, which they may not know how to deploy, they have a great many artillery pieces and infantry weapons, a product that the North's decrepit industrial base still manages to manufacture.
The North also has biological and chemical weapons, a navy that includes submarines and lesser submersibles, and an air force whose old-model MiGs can still fly. On paper, South Korea is far stronger in all but one important aspect. North Korea has twice as many men under arms, well over 1 million compared to 600,000 in the South, and the North Korean troops by and large have served far longer, under more severe circumstances, than those in the South.
The real imponderable, though, is whether the U.S., in the crunch, would rush to defend the South with all the arms it needed, as well as an infusion of troops, if North Korea were to take advantage of America's relationship with Israel and the Middle East to stage a surprise attack. Would Obama as president respond as stubbornly as did Harry Truman, the American president when the Korean war broke out?
And how would the crucial American Jewish community feel about a war in which Jewish interests were not at stake as in Israel? The views of Jewish neo-conservatives and liberals on Israel may vary widely, but they all support the Jewish state's right to exist. What about if the Republic of Korea were imperiled? For Americans, modern Korea is just about as easy to forget, in time of crisis elsewhere, as the "forgotten" Korean war.
The best hope is that all such questions will remain abstract and theoretical, raised for discussion but never put to the test. Still, headlines, news alerts and bulletins on the war for Gaza force everyone to ask, Can it happen here — and what if it does?