Samizdata

We have lately been hearing the question “Why Iraq when we know North Korea has the bomb?” The official answers we have been given so far have not been truly satisfactory. I will posit this is due to an (perhaps justified) unwillingness on the part of US officials to state the threat equation in its’ purest Machiavellian form.

North Korea is no where near the threat Iraq is. Even with nuclear weapons they are not in the same league. This may seem strange to the reader. They have nukes, they have missiles, they have half a million artillery pieces facing across the border, they have troops enough to flood across the border like a mile wide horde of cockroaches against a single can of Raid.

That is true. Next question. After they take over South Korea, what next? They are on a peninsula. Their neighbors are China, Russia and Japan. Japan is far across the water. So in the worst case, what do we lose? South Korea. That’s it.

What happens after they finish the rape, pillage and burn? After they’ve wrecked the South Korean infrastructure in pitched battles against the large and well equiped South Korean military? Is a nation that can’t feed itself going to rebuild the South Korean economy when it couldn’t build it’s own in the first place? What are they going to do with a large enemy population which has just been brutally awakened to the fact they can’t go out and shop in the trendy stores any more? That there is going to be no choice in the next election? That their future is the image of a boot heel stamping on their faces, forever?

Is North Korean going to go North and take on the Chinese Peoples Army? Are they going to build massive numbers of ships and attempt to cross the straits into the the teeth of a “Made in America” Divine Wind?? Will the three Korean soldiers who survive to wash up on the northern shores of Japan proceed to conquer it?

Not bloody likely.

You say, but they have nukes! They have missiles. This is true. But the missiles cannot yet reach the caribou herds in Alaska, and it is unlikely North Korea would retain the infrastructure for building them immediately following a very difficult victory. The entire Korean peninsula would be in ashes. By the time they rebuild with the help of fresh slave labour battalions from the South, America will have shipboard missile defense systems just outside their territorial waters ready to stop short range missiles aimed at Japan – and permanent facilities in the Aleutians to defend North America.

North Korea would find itself in a situation similar to where it started, only worse. It would take decades to fully digest the liberal South Korean society and bury the bones of it.

This is a “best case scenario” for North Korea. It is also highly unlikely and that is as apparent to the North Koreans as it is to me. A more likely result of such a miscalculation is a replay of the first Korean War… but without hordes of Chinese troops and experienced WWII Russian pilots storming across the Yalu to push back the American counter offensive.

Now compare the situation to Iraq. It is a large and strategically located asian nation. It is surrounded by far weaker neighbors. Only Iran seems capable of standing up to them. So he’d leave them for desert.

Look at a map with the jaundiced eye of an experienced Risk player. Jordan and Kuwait are obvious snacks. The Saudi’s are a pushover. The Emirates are nice people but are very small; Yemen wouldn’t last very long either. If left to his own Xerxian dreams, Saddam would very quickly reinstate most of the ancient Assyrian empire. He’d own the middle East from the Turkish border to the Indian Ocean.

Then he’d take on the nuclear powers. He’s got enough people and desert to take whatever Israel or Pakistan could mete out. He might leave Iran for Oday’s generation. Future conquests require going through Egypt, and once that is managed what is going to stop him in Northern Africa?

All the while, he’s got an economy far more effective than North Korea. There are shopping malls and consumer goods in Baghdad that would dazzle the eyes of a North Korean. He’s an old style conqueror, not an ideologue. He doesn’t have to control everything. He’ll use terror and random killings to keep the population sufficiently cowed, but beyond that they may work and create wealth.

This is why Iraq must be dealt with and North Korea may be left to moulder.

Note: Thanks to Mark G for pointing out a blooper on my part. I’ve corrected ‘Abyssinian’ to ‘Assyrian’.