If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so?
In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question:
If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an Amazonian rainforest or merely an American wood containing spotted owls, would the Serbs have been allowed to blast it and burn it with their artillery fire?
The answers are too obvious, the questions merely rhetorical. And therein lies a very great irony. At long last a genuine spirit of transnational benevolence has arisen, fulfilling the highest hopes of the rare pioneering globalists of the 19th century and before. No longer does this disinterested benevolence abruptly stop at the boundaries of state, nation or culture. Instead it now encompasses all of life both animal and vegetal across the entire globe, with only one exception: Homo sapiens.
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Luttwak overstated how good animals have it, alas. But his point was well taken. And to America’s credit, it wasn’t long after Luttwak’s essay that the United States and NATO (but not the United Nations) finally did something to curb the slaughter in the former Yugoslavia.
But that’s probably little solace to the people of North Korea.
The West ultimately intervened in the Balkans for several reasons. The slaughter was in “Europe’s backyard,” and images of sunken eyes peering from emaciated souls kept in concentration camps on European soil couldn’t be ignored. The memory of World War II and the Holocaust crept into every debate. Moreover, the violence and cruelty emerged fairly suddenly, making it “news” instead of the status quo. No one could deceitfully claim — as President Clinton would in the case of the Rwandan genocide — that we didn’t know what was going on. And, perhaps most important, ending the aggression was relatively cheap and easy. The U.S. sent no ground troops and suffered “only” one American life lost in combat.
None of that applies to North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom’s regime has kept images of concentration camps and mass starvation limited. The gulag archipelago of political prisons doesn’t get much airtime, nor do the women forced into having abortions or, in some instances, compelled to deliver their babies only to watch them be suffocated because they contain “impure” Chinese blood. You see, the North Koreans contend they are the “master race” and have strict eugenic laws against what they see as race-mixing.
And yet, North Korea’s plight is not news. It’s been the status quo for two generations. Everyone knows that it is an anachronistic, totalitarian police state, but the spirit of “never again” finds little purchase in the Western conscience. Indeed, with the exception of some heroic human-rights organizations, such as the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the debate is defined almost entirely by what some call “realism.” If North Korea could be trusted to abandon its nuclear ambitions and mischief — an absolute impossibility — one gets the sense that vast swaths of the foreign-policy establishment would be happy to call it a day.
After all, America, we are told again and again, is overextended. And we all know that the concept of regime change — the only conceivable remedy for North Korea’s plight — is out of favor.
The simple truth: Deterrence works. The madmen running North Korea have made it clear that they will at least try to drown the peninsula in blood if their rule is threatened.
Stopping Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program is rightly a priority because of the threat it poses to the U.S. and our allies. But it should also be a priority because, if we don’t, the regime may stagger on for another half-century of barbarous cruelty.
Eventually this dynasty of misery will end and North Koreans, starved, stunted, and beaten, will crawl back into the light of civilization. My hunch is that it will not be easy to meet their gaze, nor history’s. No one will be able to claim they didn’t know what was happening, and very few of us will be able to say we did anything at all to help.
North Korea is believed to be an Evil that no one can do anything about because effecting the cure (regime change) would kill the patient (the North's people, en masse). This may be the truth but that makes it no less shamefull. At this point one can only hope (and pray if so inclined) for the internal collapse of the regime to occur, thereby providing an opening for outside relief. It isn't much but at this point, it's all there is.
"And, perhaps most important, ending the aggression was relatively cheap and easy. The U.S. sent no ground troops and suffered “only” one American life lost in combat."
Is untrue.
Operaton Joint Endeavor, which enforced the Dayton Accords, sent an entire Army Division of ground troops plus support into Bosnia.
We have to save those poor Iraqis! I mean, North Koreans!
It's awful that they have to live like this, but if you had proposed violent destabilization of their regime in order to set up a better one to this magazine's previous editor, he would've scoffed at you.
If it were possible, if we had the manpower, it would be a noble task worth undertaking. But batting aside "realism" is a very significant thing to be handled so flippantly. Especially when you do little to justify the national security need to do this.
What I don't get is, the use of foreign policy as a humanitarian tool is favored by neoconservatives, whereas the use of domestic policy to cure all ills is typically disfavored. But the concept is the same, it seems to me: Wherever there is unhappiness in the world, we must with great speed change into spandex and do something--anything.
The justification for acting in (or against) North Korea must relate to our national security, period. And, sure, if we rescue a few babies and puppies in the process, that's all fine and good.
Firstly, I don't think anyone would have suggested taking on a million-man army in order to save spotted owls or snail darters.
Secondly, Jonah has answered his own question, the madmen running North Korea very likely would drown the country in blood in an effort to maintain their grip on power.
Not your best work. I don't find it serious to make an argument that would shame us into action without consideration of the costs and likely outcomes of that action.
The fact is we have been involved in the Korean conflict since 1950. Once involved in it (and I doubt many people seriously advocate pulling out the troops we currently have in place preserving the status quo) we have a national security interest in it.
I also think Jonah laid out the national interest reasons for dealing with the North Korean regime: the threat to regional stability (including Japan), and the proliferation of nuclear weapons to regimes hostile to the United States.
We should have dealt with North Korea at several points in the past. Now that the regime is in transition, this might be a good time to press for true change.
Americans bled and died to make North Koreans free. Successfully. Then Mao sent the Chinese army to enslave them again. Stalin helped him. Which regrettably worked. America decided not to nuke half the world into the stone age over it. Rightly.
Everything since has been China's fault, and still is. But China faces no consequences whatsoever, from the US or from Japan or from anyone else. The lesson they have learned is that the slightest political separation will cover every imaginable sin. And so they sin industriously.
Pressure North Korea? Surely. But start with Beijing...
"If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands?"
It would have depended on the behavior of the Bosnian Muslims, wouldn't it? Much remains unknown about that episode -- and it's likely to stay that way.
Some humorist once asked: "If trees could scream, would we still cut them down?" His answer: "Maybe, if we had to listen to them screaming all the time." Food for thought.
"The simple truth: Deterrence works. The madmen running North Korea have made it clear that they will at least try to drown the peninsula in blood if their rule is threatened."
They have the means in place to make a very serious try indeed.
In the end, North Korea will fall, (though when is anyone's guess. Who would have thought they'd last this long?) and China will be the one to reap the Whirlwind. The border with South Korea is one of the toughest nuts in the world to crack, but the border with China is very porous. When the time comes, China must either do things that look very bad in the news AND move Korean politics closer to American interests, or things that are painful but move Korean opinion closer to their own.
I imagine they'll opt for the latter even though that will necessitate the absorption of millions of N. Korean refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Kim Regime's fall.
I guess I'm reading the column a bit differently. I'm not seeing a call to go re-fight the Korean War, though surely the plight of North Koreans makes an excellent case against halfhearted efforts at war. We followed suit in Vietnam. Leftist hippies got their wish, America bailed out, and the Vietnamese were fully enslaved by communism.
Yugoslavia was different because leftist Europe couldn't have the slaughter so close. As long as communists are murdering people far away, and more importantly far away from TV cameras, it's ok.
If the left gets their way Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer the same fate, abandoned to thugs and murderers. The democrats will have another example of American imperialism gone wrong, a problem largely of their making.
Liberty and freedom are not worth fighting a war over in their minds. Give them a good humanitarian crisis or environmental disaster they can use to direct more money away from taxpayers and they'll be perfectly happy, no matter how many humans die in the effort.
We are an amazingly powerful nation. You can be an amazingly powerful nation and try to ignore the world but when you do enemies like the Japanese of the 40s realize that they have to take you out to fulfill their agenda.
It would be better for us and the world if North Korea was defeated and the regime overthrown. It would be better for us and for the world if the torture and pain and simply evil of the Regime were better known and we began working to stop them.
This is not easy work and it is not work that leads directly to war but is work that we should do. Working directly against, standing against evil is always what we should do and we should do it even when it is hard and we can do many things besides simply going to a full war with people that we don't like.
Jonah is way off base for once. If Iraq is an example, how could we consider North Korea? I never thought Iraq would be applying for statehood, but the mess it currently is with Christian communities deserted, and our strongest allies being corrupt warlords in Kurdistan while Tehran has perhaps more sway in Baghdad than Washington is a major disappointment. And none of the neighboring nations appear exactly on the verge of a democratic revolution.
It's hard for me to get excited about saving dolphins anymore and far less so about the regime change game. We must continue the current policy we have...stop them at the DMZ, and encourage the Chinese to do something about their troublesome little mosquito of a neighbor, recognizing that mosquitoes carry fatal diseases. They made NK their problem in 1950.
Let the ChiComs look 'em in the eye.
The story of the North Koreans and the willingness to tolerate their enslavement by "civilized" nations is a major impetus that drives Zionism.
Paleoconservatives don't realize that their unwillingness to lance small problems (Hitler in 1935) only end up in our facing bigger problems in the end. NK needs to be lanced.
When the shooting starts, amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics. What I want to hear is how we move the population of Seoul far enough south to get them out of range of 11,000 dug-in artillery tubes firing Sarin gas. If we could do that, complete the campaign (or at least wipe out elements of the Nork army within 100 miles of the DMZ) and have the civilians back in their homes before winter, I'd say it was worth the effort.
I am with Jonah on this one. I was an intelligence officer for 7 years in this AO, studying North Korea pretty intently and I came to the conclusion that whatever menace the North Koreans represent is in our own heads. 11000 artillery tubes? Any materiel we captured from them was a couple levels above junk so there is little reason to expect their artillery tubes to be in any better condition. The fact that we have tolerated a hollow slave state with a military only proficient at killing civilians really does make a mockery of the solemn intonation of "never again."
The paleo case for stopping Hitler would have been sufficient at least as early as the invasion of other European nations by Germany.
Yes, there are paleos who suffer from a more isolationist perspective (i.e., requiring an attack on American soil first). But I think there is a lot of ground in between isolationism and the sort of interventionism we have practiced in Yugoslavia, Iraq and elsewhere. Strictly speaking, it's a question of self-interest versus humanitarianism.
Sure, the argument has been made, from Wilson to W. Bush, that the spread of democracy makes this a better world, on balance.
But I think the level of self-interest involved must be higher than simply making the world a marginally better/safer place, while it need not be so high as requiring an invasion on our soil.
I fully appreciate the strategic importance of North Korea for the safety of the U.S. and its allies. What I don't want to see is for us to go to war simply to "save" starving or abused North Koreans. War poses the threat of too much collateral damage and unforeseen consequences to justify it from a humanitarian perspective.
This article seems to try to induce the same kind of irrational guilt trip as the AGW scam. Jonah's readers can no more "save the North Koreans" than we can "save the planet."
We cannot liberate North Korea, as noble a goal as that would be.
First and foremost, China is right across the border. A war with China to liberate Korea would cost millions, or tens of millions, of lives, ours and theirs. China would certainly not stand idly by while we invaded, if that's what Jonah wants. Probably they wouldn't put up with lesser actions, either, which probably wouldn't work, anyway.
Secondly, Seoul, with ten million people, is just across the border from North Korea. How good do the North's thousands of missiles have to be?
Third, North Korea appears to be made largely of granite hills. This is different from the sands of Iraq.
If you want your readers to do the world good, Jonah, ask them to wash dishes tonight for their wives, or help the kids with the homework. There's probably nothing any of us can do right now for the North Koreans, but pray.
So what SHOULD we do, Jonah? The headline says, "The U.S. must undermine this barbarous regime." How exactly should we "undermine" them.
Nobody denies that the NK rulers are savage totalitarians. But the problem we face is similar to Iraq, where nobody denied that Saddam was a savage totalitarian. It would be fairly easy to depose the NK ruling party. But then what? Who replaces them? Who runs things while they figure it out? More importantly, what do China, SK, and Japan do when they're overrun with refugees because Americans decided Kim Jong Il should go? You can't pound your chest unless you answer these questions.
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