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December
13, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Scud
Surrender
The
“W” factor.
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sn't it amazing how quickly the Scud story came and went? And yet it's
a big story, not for what it tells us about the world — I mean, it's
no surprise that North Korea's smuggling dangerous weapons to bad guys
in the Persian Gulf — but for what it tells us about this administration.
A
bunch of wimps, if we dare reintroduce the "W" word so rightly
detested by the latest generation of Bushes.
Think about what
went into the operation. Things like this don't happen overnight. (Yes,
the Achille Lauro gambit was ginned up in a few hours, but that's airplanes,
not ships. Ships move more slowly.) My understanding is that it took weeks
to plan and coordinate with the Spaniards. Then the operation is launched,
everything goes according to plan (or even better than planned), and we've
got them, we've shown the ghastly North Koreans who's boss, we've exposed
yet another pipeline to the terrorists — and then the Yemenis (the
Yemenis!) have a failure of nerve (they must have taken a lot of heat
and listened to a lot of threats), and they caved, and we caved right
along with them.
A triumph of lack
of will. And it bespeaks the most-terrifying thing of all: They don't
think we're serious. If the Yemenis thought we were serious — that
is, serious enough to protect them against the jihadist mafia — they'd
have stuck with the game plan. And if we were serious, we'd have told
them to shut up or we'd throw them against the nearest wall and impose
our will on the place, and we'd have paraded the Scuds in front of the
nearest TV camera, proclaimed a victory in the war against terrorism,
and then restated the Axis of Evil theme and reminded the Asians that
they're supposed to work with us to shut down the North Korean nuclear
program.
Instead, inevitably,
the North Koreans have told us to ship off and shut up, and are resuming
their nuclear activities, and the South Koreans, upon whom we were depending
to put pressure on the hermit kingdom to the north, are telling us to
get out of their place, to which we respond wimpily by promising to renegotiate
the whole military relationship.
No doubt some master
negotiators and crisis-resolution types are celebrating this new show
of American concern for the tender sensitivities of our allies in the
war against terrorism, but you can be sure that the real celebrations
are being held in Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and the various dens of the
terror masters.
Some war strategy
we've got, huh?
—
Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author
of The
War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen,
Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair at the
American Enterprise Institute, can be reached through Benador
Associates.
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