According to an opinion piece by Henry M. Seggerman in The Korea Times back in December of 2010, "North
Korea has 11,000 heavy artillery pieces pointed at Seoul and could kill
one million Seoul residents in a few hours. North Korea can continue
with provocations without any fear of heavy South Korean
retaliation." This is a bit hyped. Although estimates go up to 13,000
artillery pieces, the formulation I recall for effective fire was "5,000
artillery tubes," and, as Popular Mechanics — of all publications! — points out, North Korea is incapable of rendering Seoul "flattened," nor would Seoul be consumed in, in one translation, "a sea of flames" in a North Korean attack.
However, Seoul is only 35 miles from the border with North Korea; North
Korea has mobile artillery and rockets; North Korea does have an air
force and a large army; and North Korea has had time to infiltrate the
Demilitarized Zone with the South with, well, God knows what weapons.
After noting serious problems for the North Koreans with their military,
a subdued report by The International Institute for Strategic Studies states that"In
any conflict, North Korean artillery, firing from fortified positions
near the DMZ, could initially deliver a heavy bombardment on the South
Korean capital. Allied counter-battery fire and air strikes would
eventually reduce North Korea’s artillery capability, but not before
significant damage and high casualties had been inflicted on Seoul.
Similarly, the North Korean air force could launch surprise attacks
against military and civilian targets throughout South Korea before
allied air superiority was established. The potential delivery of
chemical or biological weapons by artillery, short-range missiles and
aerial bombs is an additional threat – especially to unprotected
civilians."
At any given time, the US has some 30,000 troops in
South Korea as what even respectable sorts used to call "trip-wires,"
and my friends and I more cynically called "hostages": A North Korean
attack would bring in the US, and we do have the firepower to reduce
North Korea to a wasteland.
But not without a lot of fallout — starting with nuclear fallout — on
South Korea, and problems with the Chinese, North Korea's neighbors, and
the main US creditor.
Short-form: There really are no military options on the Korean Peninsula. Not sane ones, not for the US of A.
The non-military option I suggest is to give the North Koreans what,
for the last couple decades or so, they've said they've wanted: direct
negotiations with the United States and a peace treaty ending the Korean
War (or "Police Action" for the pedants who note that the US Congress
never declared war).
But, you might well say, the North Koreans have developed and are deploying nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Okay, I respond, that is a dangerous thing for them to do but understandable.
Consider this. China invaded Tibet and remains in Tibet, and the United
States and "the International Community" viewed that aggression with
alarm and sent strong notes of protest … and that was that. Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait, and got hit with the Gulf War (Iraq War 1.0) and
what we call "The Iraq War" (Gulf 2.0 and following), upon the tenth
anniversary of which I am writing this essay. What were the differences
between Iraq and China prompting different responses to aggression?
(1) There are reasons to believe that Kuwait actually is a country with
historical existence. Still, its most immediate existence comes from
the drawing of lines on imperial maps. Many of those lines don’t make
sense in terms of tribal geography, ethnic and linguistic groups'
territories, and other matters of practical concern (like a port for
Iraq) — and in a rational world such political lines would've been drawn
differently to start with and, again, in a rational world, be peaceably
readjusted today. But trying to redraw lines in our world leads to
trouble, and it is an important rule among the countries that emerged
from the old European empires, "Successor states to the European empires
shall not attempt to change their borders by force." Saddam broke that
rule.
(2) There are a whole lot more Chinese than Iraqis.
(3) Iraq and Kuwait have a lot of oil, with them and their oil near
Europe and not all that far from the USA; China has coal and is close to
the US only by container ship.
(4) China has nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
George H. W. Bush pushed the Iraqis out of Kuwait; George W. Bush
defeated Iraq in war and overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein. And
George W. Bush included in "an Axis of Evil" Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea.
Iran and, relevantly here, North Korea, can't change much about their
differences with China — they're not going to change geography or
geology —with one exception: they can get atomic bombs.
And North Korea is getting a deliverable bomb, and, however loony much
of the North Korean leadership might be, that is a rational decision.
Fortunately, the North Koreans don't have much capacity to deliver
nuclear bombs, plural, and we have over-kill. North Korea can cause a
whole lot of damage in its region now, with conventional weapons, and
may be able eventually to nuke a USA city or two, which would probably
end republican government in the USA but otherwise not represent "an
existential threat": as World War II and its aftermath demonstrated
convincingly, countries can lose a number of cities and survive.
However, as World War II demonstrated even more convincingly,
destroying cities is very unpleasant for the former inhabitants thereof,
and, if les so, for their surviving families, friends, and many fellow
citizens.
So we have a stand-off with North Korea, and a very dangerous one, and
not one that won't be resolved just with sanctions: the minute North
Korean elite will not be hurt much by the sanctions, and they don't have
to worry about being turned out of power by their suffering subjects in
a 2014 (or 2016) election.
So let's do what we have to do: cut a deal.
The North Koreans want a peace treaty; let's negotiate one and as much
as possible get the hell out of Korean politics. South Korea is a major
economic power, and China is a major power every which way. Let us be an
honest broker and good Pacific-rim neighbor — but let the Koreans deal
with Korean problems, with quiet help from the Chinese.
And we can continue quiet efforts to encourage the Chinese to be a bit more decent to the people of Tibet.
Showing posts with label tibet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tibet. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Friday, March 20, 2015
Divide, Distract, and Rule (7 March 2014 [20 March 2015])
The
current crisis when I first wrote this blog in in early March 2014 was Russian troops pretty well taking over
Crimea and threats and posturing over the fate of Ukraine. A year and a bit later, the crisis continues.
This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.
The first bigger context is nuclear.
The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."
Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).
To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.
On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.
The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.
The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.
This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.
There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.
We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.
So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.
We do tend to get distracted.
I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.
Things haven't changed much.
There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.
The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.
But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)
The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.
So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.
Focus, people, focus:
* Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
* Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17th century.
* Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.
Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.
This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.
The first bigger context is nuclear.
The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."
Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).
To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.
On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.
The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.
The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.
This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.
There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.
We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.
So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.
We do tend to get distracted.
I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.
Things haven't changed much.
There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.
The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.
But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)
The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.
So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.
Focus, people, focus:
* Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
* Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17th century.
* Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.
Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.
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