Slip-sliding Away
by James Howard Kunstler
July 18, 2005
It was a very bloody weekend in Iraq, including a gasoline tanker truck bomb on Saturday evening in the commercial center of Masayyib, where people had come out to shop and mingle once the fierce heat of the midsummer day abated. The explosion killed a hundred people, while half a dozen regular car bombs went off elsewhere around Baghdad.
The British government, meanwhile, confirmed a rumor in the wake of the London subway bombings, that they intend to withdraw a substantial number of troops soon -- and there were rumblings that the US Military had prepared a plan to get out sooner rather than later, too.
From a US strategic point-of-view, none of the options available are very appetizing. Staying in Iraq looks increasingly like an exercise in futility. The Jihad continues full-strength, Fourth Generation Warfare-style (in the phrase of Bill Lind), an archetypal asymmetrical clusterfuck of "little guys" with potent small arms paralyzing a military giant. Being a Jihad, it is directed against all "infidels" including the "crusader" western soldiers, the Shi'ite-dominated provisional government members (for cooperating with the occupying crusaders), and the Shia populace for being Shia.
The US could conceivably withdraw from the population centers and remain within a set of "Fort Apache" bases strung out in the desert, but that would mean abandoning the pretense of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East, while leading to serious questions of re-supply, since it has already been demonstrated that we can barely control the highway from Baghdad's airport to the Green Zone. It also leaves the central political problem of infidels occupying Islamic terrain, therefore requiring continued Jihad wherever opportunity allows outside Iraq, i.e. world-wide terrorism.
I hate to introduce this hoary old idea, but I believe it is true: an American withdrawal will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by aggressive enemies (and we do have enemies). If the US diminishes or gives up its military presence (that is, our police station) in the Middle East, it may only be a matter of time before we lose access to two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies that happen to be located there. We would also have to wonder how long our military bases in Afghanistan and several former Soviet republics could hold out in the face of a withdrawal from Iraq -- with the additional problem of the combined displeasure of Russia and China militating against our presence there.
What I believe will happen: the Jihadi violence will continue, the American public will lose patience with the attrition in Iraq, other flash points (North Korea, Pakistan, Venezuela, Mexico) will make it clear that the US Army is not capable of conducting land operations elsewhere, events will evolve to choke off oil imports to the US as our hegemony slips away, terror events in the Europe will continue and provoke a backlash against Islamic imigrants, which will only inflame the Islamic world further, the US will revert to a naval strategy of attempting to protect our interests -- namely access to oil -- which will not be effective, and America will be plagued at home by political recrimation, blaming, scapegoating, and a futile campaign to keep the car-dependent utopia going.
Ultimately, the world will enter The Long Emergency, a horizonless era of conflict, withering global economic relations, and energy starvation -- with plummeting standards of living.
Meanwhile, we are doing nothing at home to prepare for this future, for instance a crash program to restore the American railroad system, or to restore true fiscal discipline to the mortgage industry in order to stem the insane spread of even more car-dependent suburban sprawl (a.k.a. the housing bubble). Where is the Democratic party (my party) on this? Lost in the raptures of sexual and racial pandering.
And now for something even more depressing:
Behind Enemy Lines
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 12, 2005
PYONGYANG, North Korea
President Bush and his top officials are studiously pretending not to notice, but here in the most bizarre country in the world, the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, is throwing down a nuclear gauntlet at Mr. Bush's feet.
Senior North Korean officials here say the country has just resumed the construction of two major nuclear reactors that it stopped work on back in 1994. Before construction resumed, the C.I.A. estimated that it would take "several years" to complete the two reactors, but that they would then produce enough plutonium to make about 50 nuclear weapons each year.
This is the most regimented, militarized and oppressive country in the world, but the government seems very firmly in control. And this new reactor construction, if it is sustained, is both scary and another sign that U.S. policy toward North Korea has utterly failed.
I was able to get a visa to North Korea (after being "banned for life" after my last visit, in 1989, for reasons that remain unclear) by tagging along with The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on a visit here. The government arranged for us to interview senior officials, including the vice president, the foreign minister and a three-star general. Officials insist that the new reactors are intended solely to provide energy for civilian purposes - and that in any case, North Korea will never transfer nuclear materials abroad.
Don't bet on that. If Pyongyang gets hundreds of weapons by using the new reactors, there will be an unacceptable risk of plutonium's being peddled for cash.
"If they were to succeed in getting one or the other in operation, that would really change the dynamics of the situation," said Jonathan Pollack, a North Korea expert at the Naval War College.
Kenneth Lieberthal, who ran Asian affairs for a time in the Clinton White House, put it this way: "If they get those two sites up, that then creates the potential for them becoming the proliferation capital of the world."
The Bush administration has refused to negotiate with North Korea one on one, or to offer a clear and substantial package to coax Mr. Kim away from his nuclear arsenal. Instead, Mr. Bush has focused on enticing North Korea into six-party talks. The North finally agreed on Saturday to end a yearlong stalemate and join another round of those talks.
Mr. Bush is being suckered. Those talks are unlikely to get anywhere, and they simply give the North time to add to its nuclear capacity.
Li Chan Bok, a leading general in the North Korean Army, made it clear that even as the six-party talks staggered on, his country would add to its nuclear arsenal.
"To defend our sovereignty and our system," he said, "we cannot but increase our number of nuclear weapons as a deterrent force."
The threat of new reactors coming on line makes it all the more urgent that Mr. Bush try direct negotiations - not only about nuclear weapons but also, as some conservatives are suggesting, about North Korea's human rights abuses.
No one knows whether direct negotiations and a clearer road map of incentives would succeed, but they couldn't fail any more abjectly than the present policy.
The two projects that North Korea is resuming work on are a 50-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon and a 200-megawatt reactor in Taechon. The former is now just a shell that has deteriorated in the years since work was suspended, but Li Gun, a director general in the Foreign Ministry, says work on it may be completed this year or next. The Taechon reactor would apparently take at least two or three years to complete.
It's possible that North Korea is bluffing or is resuming construction only to have one more card to negotiate away. But if not, there will be considerable pressure in the U.S. for surgical military strikes to prevent the reactors from becoming operational.
General Li said that if the U.S. launched a surgical strike, the result "will be all-out war." I asked whether that meant North Korea would use nuclear weapons (most likely against Japan). He answered grimly, "I said, 'We will use all means.' "
So don't let the welcome resumption of the six-party talks distract us from the reality: Mr. Bush's refusal to engage North Korea directly is making the peninsula steadily more dangerous. More than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, we are on a collision course with a nuclear power.
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