From: John McAuliff <jmcauliff@ffrd.org>
Subject: Iraq and North Korea


Happy New Year, I think.

We are on a family holiday, but regrettably the world continues to turn us into a new year that looks far from peaceful. 

Following are two articles from the Guardian on Iraq and North Korea.  The Iraq war still seems to depend on how strongly others insist on a second Security Council vote and whether the US abides by that process and its result. 

The Guardian seems relaxed if patronizing about North Korea.  A hawkish writer named Bruce Anderson is more pessimistic.  I would be inclined to dismiss his position except that a leading American expert on North Korea has predicted a war within two months to colleagues at the Social Science Research Council..

Anderson warns in the Independent: "Kim Jong-il has said that, if attacked, he would consign South Korea to the flames, and he has the capabilities to do so,..[He] is bent on provoking America, and America has no alternative to respond. There seems no way of avoiding a terrible war on the Korean peninsula." 

Independent: War with North Korea is now the unavoidable choice facing America
http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/bruce_anderson/story.jsp?story=365203

Hope we all are ready.

John


Comment

US says Saudi Arabia will allow use of air bases against Iraq

Oliver Burkeman in New York and John Hooper in Berlin
Monday December 30, 2002
The Guardian

The Saudi government has agreed to allow American planes to use its bases in a war with Iraq, US military commanders have claimed - providing a crucial strategic boost for the Bush administration as it ordered the deployment of thousands more troops, two more aircraft carriers, and one of the navy's two hospital ships to the Gulf region.

In Baghdad at the weekend, Saddam Hussein's regime, in accordance with security council requirements, handed over a list of 500 Iraqi scientists formerly involved in weapons programmes to inspectors.

But the momentum for conflict appeared to build when one of the first scientists interviewed angrily denounced the inspectors at a press conference, urging his colleagues to cooperate only if Iraqi government minders were present.

Saudi Arabia's stance towards US forces on its territory has fluctuated in recent months, as it contends with domestic political tensions and struggles to maintain friendly relations with Washington.

US commanders, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Times that Riyadh had now given permission for American aircraft to fly support missions - including surveillance, refuelling trips and cargo transport - and to use the well-equipped operations centre at the Prince Sultan air base outside the capital.

US officials were divided as to whether Saudi Arabia would also eventually also allow strike aircraft to take off on bombing missions from its bases, or allow them to cross its airspace. It emerged yesterday that the nation has permitted American fighter planes to fly such missions in recent weeks to enforce the no-fly zone to the south of Baghdad.

Major Sandy Troeber, a defence department spokeswoman, said Pentagon officials "have been on the record as saying Saudi Arabia has been a strong ally, supporting the fight against international terrorism" but that other details would remain confidential.

Saudi Arabia, the key centre of command in the 1991 Gulf war, remains the ideal strategic site for coordinating operations. Its importance may act as an incentive to the Bush administration to stick to the UN route, after Prince Saud al-Faisal told CNN last week that his country's support "depends on the war. If it is a war that is through the United Nations, with consensus on it, we will have to decide on that based on the national interests of Saudi Arabia".

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, meanwhile signed a military order on Saturday that will at least double the 50,000 ground troops stationed close to Iraq.

Despite the military build-up, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, maintained that President Bush had not yet decided to wage war on Iraq. "He hopes for a peaceful solution but at the same time we are taking prudent action, positioning our forces so that they will be ready to do whatever might be required," he said on American television.

He said US agencies were now providing intelligence to UN inspectors in Iraq.

"We'll see what they're able to come up with," he said.

The hospital ship USNS Comfort could leave Baltimore, where it is stationed, as soon as today, heading for the British base on the Indian ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Weapons inspectors made further visits to suspect facilities in Iraq yesterday. But the prospects for successful interviews with the scientists on the regime's list - whose names the UN was not disclosing yesterday - seemed dim after the Iraqi metallurgist launched a public tirade against the inspectors.

At a press conference organised by Iraq's national monitoring directorate, Kadhim Mijbel, the second scientist to be interviewed so far, said: "How can an Iraqi man leave Iraq? How? I'm an Iraqi man. I advise my colleague scientists and researchers to take representatives with them from the [directorate] to protect their rights and to be witnesses."

In development that could prove significant for Washington's coalition-building efforts, Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, declined to rule out the possibility that Germany, which begins a two-year stint on the security council, would vote for war.

Kim is a baby rattling the sides of a cot

It is wrong to overreact to the supposed threat of North Korea

Peter Preston
Monday December 30, 2002
The Guardian

The trouble with North Korea - the echoing trouble over the years - is knowing when to laugh. And that is precisely the trouble now, as Pyongyang twists Washington's tail in malign parody of Iraqi standoff: historic melodrama replayed as farce.

Saddam doesn't have the bomb yet, but George thinks he needs 300 UN inspectors sitting outside every palace. Kim Jong-il may or may not have a few bombs, but he does have 8,000 spent fuel rods and a poky old nuclear reactor at Yongbyon with three UN inspectors sitting in the car park since 1994.

While Saddam submits, Kim snaps his fingers and snarls. The UN trio prepare to depart. The security council heaves with apprehension. Even Donald Rumsfeld doesn't fancy making a meal of this one.

The very first change of Pentagon doctrine under Bush, remember, was that America could no longer fight two major wars at the same time. So, as long as the hardware pours lugubriously into Kuwait and points south, North Korea is quite safe. It can howl for attention, dominate headlines, demand deals. It can have glorious, cost-free fun.

Too larky a diagnosis? Perhaps. There was nothing remotely comic about the Korean war. There is nothing comic about the sub-Stalinist remnant it left behind, locked in poverty and isolation. But hang on, nevertheless, to some semblance of balance.

Do you remember Kim il-Sung, the first "dear leader" and those excruciating full-page newspaper ads he used to unleash on a cowering west in the 1970s? I remember them all too well. I also remember the first confirmed sightings of his son, Kim Jong-il: not the remote beast the CIA told us about, but a young man taking holidays in Malta and picking up his first lessons in sophisticated statecraft from Dom Mintoff.

The Mintoff touch - flamboyant, mischievous, making great waves out of little water - hasn't left him. It's there again today. It demands to be noticed by the high and mighty of the world. It wants something in return. A baby rattling the sides of the cot.

And the questions thus asked, of course, are far from infantile. Why such a lather over Saddam when the alleged peril in Pyongyang is so much further advanced? Why hasn't Tony Blair flown back from Sharm to counsel restraint on the White House? Do we believe this threat - or don't we?

Intelligence has threat dossiers by the hundred. Thirty months ago, when the embryo Bush team was peddling Son of Star Wars to a dubious electorate, the talk was all about the menace from the North (and not a word about Baghdad or oil). Ordinary Americans were conditioned to fret about Kim's Korea (sometimes in its own right; sometimes as a kind of stalking symbol for Beijing).

What has changed? Everything in a sense: since 9/11. China is now a trusted American partner against terror and terrific investment opportunity. Russia is similarly trusted. Nobody needs to confect rogue states with nukes to get Star Wars 2 through Capitol Hill. Osama bin Laden has done that already. Saddam is back on top again: world enemy number one.

And the truth, the essential balance? The truth, as usual, is best found close-up. Iran and Jordan watch Iraq obsessively: the last thing they want is a Bush war. Seoul watches Pyongyang obsessively. If something is going badly astray over the 49th parallel, South Korea would know first and react first. Instead, it has just elected a new president promising more links with the North. The last thing Seoul wants is a global flap.

The truth is that nuclear weapons are dangerous and need to be diminished. Even a handful of them in the hands of some tiny state adds to the dangers. But, equally, there is always a balance. The most worrying nukes around belong to India and to Pakistan, where bin Laden has some of his best popularity ratings.

China isn't worried about North Korea. Russia is openly scornful. There is a well grounded assumption that too much attention merely inflates a problem into a crisis. Poverty, incapacity and failure contain Kim Jong-il; and he, in turn, seeks to contain a military apparatus bent only on hanging on to what privileges and powers it possesses.

One fine, distant day, with more trade and more aid, the barriers will come down. That is the best kind of regime change. One day the rules about non-proliferation will be automatically observed. There's no bonus in overreaction as the cot rattles.

But why (baby Kim asks slyly) get so het-up over Saddam and not over me? Aren't I a menace, too? Where's my almighty fuss? And the answer, of course, is that our leaders haven't got one. They can fume, but they can't laugh.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk