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June 22, 2006

The Kingdom of Idiots

When Kevin Drum asked for thoughts on taking out the North Korean missile site before they could test their Taepondong-2 missile, I was honestly puzzled, although I played along. Who would seriously advocate an attack on North Korea while we are deeply embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan and people are talking about the threat of war with Iran? Silly me. This morning I see that Ashton Carter and William Perry (Secretary of Defense for President Clinton) have an opinion piece advocating a preemptive strike on North Korea's missile site to prevent them from testing a long-range ballistic missile. And in the back of my mind I hear George Costanza's voice: 'You wanna get nuts? Let's get nuts!'

Actually, a more apt quote would be Ambassdor Londo Mollari from the sci-fi series Babylon 5: "Only an idiot would fight a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." I think it's reasonable to suggest that provoking a fight with North Korea right now would put us well into the lead for the title of King of the Idiots.

Technically, North Korea is actually the one being provocative. They're preparing to launch this missile because they're not happy with what they've received from the six-party talks thus far. And so, much like a small child, they're going to act out to get attention. I'm not convinced that giving it to them is a wise idea, particularly when it's difficult to tell how they will react. If we take Mssrs Perry and Carter's advice and destroy the launch site, the North could do anything from object vociferously to launch an attack south. That's an awfully broad range of possibilities, and the worst case would be bad indeed. It's true that we could easily defeat the North Koreans, and that attacking would mean the end of the North Korean government. But victory in Korea would come at a catastrophic cost to the south. Seoul, South Korea's capital, is well within the range of artillery along the DMZ, and a full scale assault by the North would result in at least tens of thousands of deaths and would culminate with a massive humanitarian crisis. While that's an unlikely outcome, it's not outside the range of possibility, and it hardly seems worthwhile simply to stop the North from launching a missile.

Mssrs Carter and Perry argue that we cannot afford to allow the North Koreans to develop missiles capable of threatening the United States. While that sounds like a prudent course of action, when determining what we can afford we should also consider what it will cost us. As I noted above, the potential costs of eliminating this threat are higher than what we can currently afford.

I don't like the idea of a North Korea with nuclear missiles. But then, I'm not fond of the idea of China or Russia with nuclear missiles, either, but it's an imperfect world. Launching an attack on North Korea opens up too many potentially disastrous outcomes for it to be a viable plan. Much as I dislike the thought, living with a nuclear North Korea seems like the least bad outcome available to us at the moment.