End The
Korean War
By Eric Margolis
July 08,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- “I have some pretty severe things we’re
thinking about,” Trump said of North Korea at a
news conference in Warsaw. “Doesn’t mean we’re
going to do them.”
What
President Trump really meant is that he has
painted the US into a corner with all his
threats of war and really does not know what to
do next. North Korea called his ‘or else’ bluff.
Good. No action on North Korea is better than
any conceivable military operation.
Last
week the North Korea test fired a new,
longer-ranged strategic missile, Hwasong-14,
that US experts claimed was capable of hitting
Alaska and perhaps even San Francisco. North
Korea is now believed to have mastered a
lightweight nuclear warhead that can be carried
by the Hwasong and shorter-ranged Taepodong and
Nodong missiles.
North
Korea can’t today seriously threaten North
America with missile strikes, but it probably
will by 2019. Meanwhile, North Korean nuclear
and conventionally-armed missiles (and this
could include poison gas and biological
warheads) today threaten the 80,000 plus US
military personnel based in Japan, South Korea
and Guam. They would be immediate targets should
the US and South Korea attack the north.
Add
tens of millions of South Korean and Japanese
civilians who are at risk of North Korean
retaliation. Half of South Korea’s capitol,
Seoul, is within range of North Korean heavy
artillery and rocket batteries dug into the
so-called Demilitarized Zone.
It
would take only three nuclear weapons to shatter
Japan and just two to cripple South Korea, not
to mention polluting the globe with radioactive
dust and contaminating North Asia’s water
sources. Nuclear explosions would spread
radioactive contamination over northern China
and Pacific Russia.
Why are
we even talking about nuclear war in North Asia?
Because
North Korea has scraped and skimped for decades
to build nuclear weapons for the sole reason of
deterring a major US attack, including the use
by the US of tactical nuclear weapons. Pakistan
‘ate grass’ for decades to afford nuclear
weapons to offset the threat from far more
powerful India. Israel uses the same argument to
justify its large nuclear arsenal.
After
Washington overthrew the rulers of Iraq and
Libya, it became painfully apparent that small
nations without nuclear weapons were vulnerable
to US ‘regime change’ operations. The North
Koreans, who are very eccentric but not stupid,
rushed to accelerate their nuclear weapons and
delivery systems.
Almost
equally important, North Korea boasts one of the
word’s biggest armies – 1,020,000 men, 88,000
crack special forces, and an trained militia of
over 5 million. The North’s weapons are
obsolescent; its small air forces and navy will
be vaporized by US power but its troops are
deeply dug into the mountainous terrain and
would be fighting from prepared positions. War
against North Korea would be a slow and bloody
slog– even a repeat of the bloody, stalemated
1950-53 Korean War in which 39,000 Americans and
at least 2.5 million Koreans died. I’ve been in
the deep North Korean-dug tunnels under the
Demilitarized Zone. A full division can be moved
through in only 60 minutes.
Ever
since being soundly beaten in Vietnam and fought
to a draw in Afghanistan, the US military has
preferred to attack small countries like Panama,
Grenada, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The
Pentagon is not eager to tangle with the tough
North Koreans. Estimates of the cost of a US
invasion of North Korea have run as high as
250,000 US casualties and tens of billions of
dollars.
Seemingly heedless of these hard facts,
President Trump – who himself avoided national
military service in the 1960’s – keeps beating
the war drums over North Korea and needling its
thin-skinned regime with naval exercises,
over-flights, and intensifying bombast. North
Korea’s Kim Jong-un has played right along,
clearly relishing his game of chicken with
tough-talking Donald Trump.
Trump
seemed certain he could somehow cajole China
into disarming North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
But the administration’s amateur foreign
policymakers failed to understand that the only
“deal” that could get China to disarm the North
was by agreeing to remove all US military bases
from the region – South Korea, Japan and Guam –
and also moving the US Seventh Fleet far from
China’s coasts.
Growing
US hysteria over North Korea, a nation of only
25 million, recalls the propaganda storm
launched by Washington to justify its invasion
of equally small Iraq. The dim-witted US
ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has become
point-woman for hurling warlike threats at North
Korea even though this neocon poster-girl’s
foreign affairs experience appears to have been
limited to the International House of Pancakes
in her native South Carolina.
Everyone seems to have forgotten, or ignores,
that North Korea, South Korea and the United
States remain in a state of war. The 1950-52
Korean War ended with a cease-fire, not a peace.
The US has been trying to overthrow and
undermine North Korea’s Stalinist regimes ever
since, using military threats, subversion and
economic warfare. Talk of US-South Korean plans
to “decapitate’ North Korea’s leadership with
missile strikes and commando raids keeps giving
Pyongyang the jitters.
South
Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, demanded
that his nation be consulted before any military
action. But Moon’s pleas have been largely
ignored by Trump. Most South Koreans shrug off
the North’s threats and seek to avoid war at all
costs. Of course. They would be the primary
victims.
The US
has spent over $200 billion on ballistic
anti-missile systems in recent years designed to
stop North Korean missiles.
Unfortunately, these ABM systems don’t work very
well. More tens of billions will have to be
spent before these anti-missile systems become
reliable.
Would
it not be easier and less expensive for grand
deal-maker Trump to recognize North Korea, set
up diplomatic relations, stop trying to
overthrow the Kim regime, and finally end the
Korean War?
Eric
S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally
syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared
in the New York Times, the International Herald
Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London,
the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation –
Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia
and other news sites in Asia.
https://ericmargolis.com
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2017
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.