Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
June
6, 2003
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
June
4, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal
Walks
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
John Chuckman
Blackmail as Policy
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
Steve
Perry
Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
Ben
Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
How Bush's War Violated International Laws
Tariq
Ali
Re-Colonizing Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
Web Log
May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
June
7, 2003
The North Korean Example
The Rebirth
of Nuclear Deterrence?
By BINOY KAMPMARK
Containment is a dirty word, the pornography of
post-9/11 diplomacy. After 9/11, as Faoud Ajami, professor at
Johns Hopkins University, told Jim Lehrer's Newshour, strategic
containment as a concept had collapsed with respect to such regimes
as Iraq. No more Saddams; no more opium trafficking tin-horn
states. This can be gathered from the National Security document
of September 2002, which asserts a sacred US right to use pre-emptive
force against those "rogue" states that threaten its
citizens and allies. What seems the most obvious response for
states against this neo-conservative assault on state sovereignty?
The message from the Iraq war, and present North Korean animosity
provide some answers: escalate the quest to find a nuclear deterrent,
or face invasion.
I
Deterrence, in the words of American
strategist Thomas Schelling, is merely "the skilful non-use
of force." The enemy, when faced with the prospect of catastrophic
damage, has second thoughts, and desists for fear of suffering
a disproportionately greater loss than one they might inflict.
One might have thought that the spectre of Robert McNamara'
strategic theorising in the 1960s had been buried, the lustre
of his theory of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) tarnished
by the advent of the "New World Order" that was meant
to signal the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. approach to North Korea and
the subsequent response of the Pyongyang show the renascence
of nuclear deterrence, most notably in the wake of the Iraq invasion.
The tragedy of the Iraq War, along with the looting and the
cynical degradation of the word 'liberty' is the value that Washington
has taught agents of proliferation technologies: how to protect
state sovereignty with every means possible. These lessons,
most notably for the DPRK, began early. As Gavan McCormack pointed
out in the New Left Review late last year, North Korea
has lived under the spectre of an American nuclear attack for
decades, from General Macarthur's recommendation for the dropping
of 30 to 50 atomic bombs, to Operation Hudson Harbour (1951)
when a B-52 run simulated a possible attack on the North. From
1957 to 1991, the US "kept a stockpile of nuclear weapons
close to the Demilitarized Zone, designed to intimidate the then
non-nuclear North." The messages from Pyongyang are of a
desperate regime, clinging to power that is imploding in the
wake of history. With each threat, Washington gives it legitimacy.
With each promise of regime change, the need for Pyongyang to
search for the ideal means for protecting itself grows more urgent.
The idea of the bomb as a means of protecting
sovereignty was first made in the early 1940s, when the Allies
expressed their concern that Nazi Germany, even without its brilliant
Jewish scientists, could come up with a bomb. Some scientists
working on the Manhattan Project were dismayed at the use of
the weapon: it had after all only been conceived by such eminent
figures as Einstein as a "deterrent" measure against
any German acquisition of the weapon. But the principle was
established, and advisors such as Bernard Brodie were noting
in 1946 the need to revolutionise America's security for the
forthcoming years. The US, after all, needed its own deterrent.
But the development of this weapon did
not strike some commentators as positive. According to George
Orwell, writing in the Tribune (October 19, 1945) the
atomic bomb did not democratise war it rendered it elite.
Orwell suggested that where "the ages in which the dominant
weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages
of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple,
the common people have a chance." At the level of states,
in the community of nations, this elite status was subsequently
challenged, and weaponry "democratised." The Soviet
Union did so with its first bomb in 1948. In time, the other
Security Council nations followed. But before this happened,
the world had to witness the nuclearised evangelism of Eisenhower's
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles who envisaged massive
retaliation against the red card-carrying atheists behind the
Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. The Soviet bomb, and the expanding
nuclear arsenal of the Security Council members, spelt the end
of this vision. In time, Defense Secretary McNamara would digest
the nuclear implications of the time and formulate MAD.
II
The illustration between how useful the
nuclear weapon has become, and how dangerous it is not to have
it, was provided in Washington's treatment of both Baghdad and
Pyongyang over the course of the last six months. With Baghdad,
diplomacy was always nugatory, mere dissimulation concealing
the overt desire for war. No act of Saddam proved convincing,
and no overture of peace by the pro-war forces proved serious.
In effect, the parties were behaving without reciprocal intention:
war lay in the subtext. In the North Korean case, the rhetoric
on the nuclear weapon has been belligerent and effective. Leon
V. Sigal's work Disarming Strangers (1998) suggested how
effective the DPRK's nuclear threat had been on the Clinton Administration:
the Agreed Framework (Oct 21 1994), increased economic aid, and
greater diplomatic recognition. But Washington, and North Korea,
were short changed, the former for believing that the North would
collapse before it could install the two energy plants; the latter
for not receiving what Clinton had promised. North Korea's nuclear
program also occurred against the backdrop of Washington's withdrawal
from the ABM treaty and its continued reluctance to limit its
own nuclear program.
Accusations of non-compliance duly followed,
with the Bush Administration charging Pyongyang in October last
year for violating the Agreed Framework by enriching uranium
has been the recipient of particular severe rhetoric. The Deputy
Director of the DPRK's Foreign Ministry Ri Pyong-gap stated in
early February that the "United States says that after Iraq,
we are next, but we have our own countermeasures." Pyong-gap
was perceptive enough to reverse the language of the pre-emptive
strike on Washington: "Pre-emptive strikes are not the exclusive
right of the U.S." (Guardian, Feb 6, 2003).
The approaches of the Bush Administration
are a study as to how effective the nuclear "joker",
to use McCormack's term, has been in the DPRK's pack of cards.
Iraq's mistake seems to have been a denial that it had WMD or
for that matter, any nuclear option. Pyongyang took the opposite
view. The comments of an unnamed U.S. official with a North Korean
portfolio in May to the Minneapolis Star Tribune the contrast
between Bush's position on Iraq. What was required was "coming
up with the right mixture of a willingness to negotiate with
a willingness to confront (May 11, 2003). President Bush has
expressed his desire for "multilateral talks"; and
Colin Powell has gone so far as to suggest that "a number
of diplomatic initiatives under way ... to see if we cannot get
a multilateral dialogue started." This has not to say that
war has been dismissed a solution. A Pentagon report suggesting
a strike on the Yongbyon reactor was leaked in April, suggesting
that the hawks might have been gaining the upper hand. But for
the most part, Washington is more concerned with seeking a peaceful
solution than a military one. Even a belligerent Donald Rumsfeld
agreed with South Korean Minister for National Defense Lee Jun
in early December 2002 "to work together for a peaceful
resolution of the problem" (34th Consultative Meeting Communiqué).
What a difference this has proven from the "non-event"
dialogue that characterised U.S. approaches to UN weapons inspections
with Iraq.
III
Smaller states are now seeking nuclear
weapons, to the chagrin of freedom lovers across the Coalition.
The "war on terror" rhetoric implies that states as
a rule (other than those who have it) should not acquire nuclear
or unconventional weapons. It is one of those fictitious rules
that is unspoken but acted upon: the West, spear-headed by the
United States, cannot permit smaller, undemocratic regimes to
have access to WMD or nuclear weapons. These regimes are of
course "terrorist", lacking understanding of key American
principles of constitutional governance. They will, in time,
pass one of these weapons to their "affiliates" on
the fringe. This is the world of the vigilante as seen through
the eyes of the National Security Council and the National
Review, the language of the "rogue state".
The effect of North Korea's nuclear card
is much in evidence in academic an policy circles. Commentators
are suggesting that North Korea be treated as a serious state,
with a legitimate right to sovereignty. North Korea analyst
Sharif Shuja, writing in Contemporary Review (April 2003)
has suggested that, "Dealing with the reality of the North
as it exists and waiting for North Korea to change gradually
could now be the only way to advance." Some members of the
Cato Institute have gone so far as to suggest that economic sanctions
and a pre-emptive strike would be both futile and dangerous.
Remarkably, given the hubristic imperialism flowering in the
Washington think-tanks, Cato's vice-chair Ted Galen Carpenter
has suggested in a Foreign Policy Brief (no. 73) that the U.S.
abandon its visions of power in the Far East. It would be far
better to let Russia, China, South Korea and Japan shoulder the
load of the sick man of Asia. Washington's insistence on "maintaining
a military presence in East Asia" was pure "folly"
(Jan 6, 2003). Carpenter then assures the triumph of the nuclear
deterrent by suggesting that North Korea's neighbours develop
"their own strategic deterrents", a pathway that "may
be the best of a set of bad options."
North Korean belligerence seems to have
paid-off. The effect of the Bush Administration's Iraq invasion
has resulted in a race for the nuclear deterrent. It is now
left to those powers revolving around celestial axes of evil
to move towards a nuclear option. We await, with trepidation,
the development of the world's first Persian bomb.
Binoy Kampmark
is Hampton Scholar at St. John's College, University of Queensland,
and has recently written on US deterrence in the April issue
of the Contemporary Review. He can be reached at: s002170@student.uq.edu.au
Today's
Features
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|