U.S. must focus on N. Korea

By David Polhemus
Advertiser Editorial Writer

U.S. soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division are participating in a South Korea-U.S. joint exercise at the Han river in Seoul. The U.S. military already is moving to pull out almost all its troops from its high-profile positions near the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula, a U.S. Army officer said recently amid plans to slash the total number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea by one-third. Associated Press

• The Chinese are continuing to express skepticism about Washington's claim that North Korea has been trying to build nuclear bombs using uranium. A senior Chinese official urged the administration to stop using this allegation to hold up talks with the North Koreans.

• The administration, confirming the buzz we've been hearing for a year or more, announced it is removing one-third of U.S. troops based in South Korea.

If the Chinese are right that North Korea doesn't have an active uranium-enrichment program, they may have exposed a CIA intelligence failure every bit as spectacular as its faulty pre-war assessments of Iraqi capabilities.

As Advertiser editorials have repeatedly suggested, because of its outrage over the suspected uranium program (plus its repugnance at any dealings whatsoever with Pyongyang), the Bush administration abandoned a program that effectively bottled up North Korea's ability to make nuclear weapons from its stores of plutonium.

Now Pyongyang and the CIA seem to agree that North Korea has built perhaps a half-dozen bombs from the plutonium. If there was no active uranium program, the Bush administration has allowed North Korea to advance to the brink of nuclear-power status because of erroneous intelligence plus disastrous miscalculation.

It's well known that the administration has split over North Korea, with the State Department clinging to traditional formulas, while civilians in the Defense Department seem to have an altogether new take on the situation.

State inherited, through leaders like Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the attitude that good results could be accomplished through negotiation with wicked regimes, such as detente with the Soviet Union.

Defense officials like Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Dick Cheney opposed accommodations with Moscow during the Cold War, and later disapproved of the so-called Agreed Framework, a 1994 pact between Pyongyang and the Clinton administration that froze the north's plutonium program in exchange for the promised construction of two nuclear power plants in the north.

When Bush abrogated the U.S. end of the agreement, North Korea expelled international inspectors who ensured the plutonium rods at Yongbyon were kept literally under water, and the North Koreans began building weapons with this material.

As for the South, meanwhile, Rumsfeld also took issue with the traditional purpose of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea — to serve as a trip wire. Their positions near the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula ensures that they would be bloodied if not overrun by a North Korean invasion.

Rumsfeld argues that these troops are pinned down, making them useless except to oppose an attack that might never come. By basing them farther south or pulling them out of South Korea altogether, they become available for use elsewhere. Indeed, some 3,600 of them already are being reassigned to Iraq.

Rumsfeld also points out that the presence of U.S. troops annoys a lot of ungrateful South Koreans, and even that Seoul's recent tilt toward North Korea and China may make South Korea a less-dependable ally than it was.

While removing U.S. troops may make sense in logistical terms, it ignores a huge symbolic factor: This human trip wire guarantees, for South and North Koreans alike, that American response to hostile action by the north will be swift and terrible.

President Bush leads newly elected South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun back to the White House after they delivered remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House last month. South Korea and the United States agree that North Korea must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but their approaches differ. Roh favors more engagement with the North, but Bush has said he "loathes" North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, while his top advisers are divided on how — or whether — to proceed. Associated Press

It also presents a conundrum for Pyongyang, which has demanded a removal of U.S. forces from the peninsula, but which now, not unreasonably, suspects the troops are being pulled out of harm's way for a planned American action against North Korea. Indeed, this American threat, the North Koreans say, is the reason they need to develop a nuclear deterrent.

Rumsfeld says the American commitment is undiminished, that South Korean troop replacements at the DMZ and more advanced U.S. weaponry will compensate for the American withdrawal.

And he says what his predecessors have repeated for many years now: North Korea can't win a war on the peninsula; if it invades, it will quickly face obliteration.

That last line, however, glosses over a serious complication: The North Koreans have thousands of artillery pieces pointed at Seoul, only 30 miles south of the DMZ. And if North Korea has developed a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit atop its missiles, Tokyo as well as American bases in Japan also are at risk.

Thus the relevant question for American war planners shouldn't be who the ultimate winner of a war would be, but whether they have the stomach for the first part of such a war, which might involve millions of South Korean, Japanese and American casualties.

If the answer is no, as presumably it must be, then it's clear we face an extreme threat — far exceeding that attributed, however incorrectly, to the Saddam Hussein regime.

Thus it's mystifying that the Bush administration has put North Korea — particularly a North Korea arming itself with nuclear weapons — on the back burner, acting as if time is on our side.

Is the administration pulling troops from the peninsula because it has decided, despite its accusations about the North's nuclear weapons development, that it's not a real threat, or that it's a threat to somebody else beside us?

Is it planning something darker and more drastic, perhaps for after the election, or after Iraq settles down? The Bush doctrines of pre-emptive war and use of American nuclear weapons not as deterrents but as war-fighting tools make one wonder.

Or is it temporizing because it's uncertain how to proceed, hoping North Korea melts down before it lashes out? The Bush administration's National Security Strategy says, "Our enemies ... are seeking weapons of mass destruction. ... The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed." Evidently this applies to Iraq, but perhaps not North Korea.

It's always been hard to figure out what Pyongyang is up to. But now Washington has become inscrutable, too.