Defense Secretary Robert Gates may be a crafty bureaucratic infighter and seasoned national-security pro, but he also knows the limits of his own considerable knowledge: “To any question beginning with ‘Why?’ with regards to North Korea, my answer is the same: `I don’t know.'”
South Korean soldiers recreate a battle from the Korean War / DoD photo
While Gates made that remark shortly before North Korea shelled the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killing four and wounding at least 15, it sums up the U.S. stance toward the Hermit Kingdom. One day it’s scaring the world with a brand-spanking new nuclear enrichment plant, and the next it’s terrorizing South Koreans by blasting their island from the North Korean mainland, and nobody really knows why.
Just like clockwork, the North’s Korean Central News Agency issued a statement following its artillery barrage blaming the South for the attack.
The south Korean puppet group perpetrated such reckless military provocation as firing dozens of shells inside the territorial waters of the DPRK side around Yonphyong Islet in the West Sea of Korea from 13:00 on Nov. 23 despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK while staging the war maneuvers for a war of aggression on it codenamed Hoguk, escalating the tension on the Korean Peninsula…The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK standing guard over the inviolable territorial waters of the country took such decisive military step as reacting to the military provocation of the puppet group with a prompt powerful physical strike.
It sounds like a cry for attention from a cold and starving nation that is eager for international fuel and food aid as winter approaches, but hasn’t been taught how to ask nicely. Its bellicosity has worked before, so it’s trying the same stunts again. “We’re not going to buy into this reaction-reward cycle that North Korea seeks to perpetuate,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday. “We’re not going to respond willy-nilly.” U.S. officials sought to calm things down. “There have been no additional North Korean attacks overnight,” U.S. Army Gen. Walter Sharp, the top U.S. commander in South Korea, told his more than 25,000 U.S. troops Wednesday. “Please continue with your normal activities.
The key U.S. goal is to keep the lid on the Korean peninsula. Seoul reacted to the island attack with threats to retaliate if Pyongyang does it again. But that would jeopardize the 10 million people living in Seoul, within range of North Korean guns, not to mention the 75,000 Americans in and around the South Korean capital. Of course doing nothing can be seen as weakness, or irresolution. Dispatching the carrier USS George Washington and its accompanying armada from Japan to participate in war games with the South Korean navy in the days ahead could be seen as a show of force — or farce, given the ships’ inability to actually change anything in North Korea.
The U.S. is talking to China, North Korea’s godfather, so to speak. “We believe that it’s important that we keep a unified and measured approach going forward,” Toner added. “We’re consulting closely with the Chinese on next steps.” But then he let the cat out of the bag: “It’s going to be a measured and unified response.” That means the only things that will happen are those that all five nations other than North Korea in the so-called six-party talks — South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan — can agree on, sort of a lowest common diplomatic denominator.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell acknowledged that while more punishing economic sanctions have been put on North Korea since it allegedly sunk the South Korean patrol vessel Cheonan in March, killing 46 sailors, they’ve been tightened about as tight as they can be. “It’s hard to pile more sanctions upon the North than are already there,” he told NBC.
Paul Stares of the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report before the island shelling warning that heightened tensions following the Cheonan’s sinking means a single misstep by either side could lead to war. “Although everyone concerned wants to prevent a major outbreak of hostilities – South Korea fears losing its hard-won prosperity and a much weaker North knows that another war would almost certainly result in its demise – the potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and unintended escalation cannot be dismissed, Stares writes.
But John McCreay, a former Defense Intelligence Agency who writes the blog NightWatch, says the North Koreans are not preparing for war:
A review of diplomacy, international relations and leadership activities confirms that North Korea is not preparing for war. Its volleyball team just advanced to the quarterfinals at the Asian Games in Beijing. Senior officials are receiving foreign diplomats as usual. Kim Jong il and his son were reported on 23 November visiting a plant together and Kim visited two others without his son. The number and detail of the activities show that the North does not expect the shelling incident to escalate. There also are no reports of increased civilian or military alerts in North Korea, which would be mandatory precautions if the North expected or intended an escalation.
One of the plants Kim Jong il visited Tuesday was “the newly built Soy Sauce Shop at the Ryongsong Foodstuff Factory,” the KCNA reported in a separate article. “It is a great success that the workers of the factory and soldier-builders have successfully built the modern shop as big as a food processing factory in a short span of time, he noted, expressing great satisfaction over the construction of a model shop,” it continued. “The factory could effect a new turn in the production of essential food as its officials, workers and technicians have dynamically waged a mass technical innovation movement true to the Workers’ Party of Korea idea of pushing back the frontiers of the latest science and technology while planting their feet on their land and looking at the world, he said, adding that this signal turn is a striking demonstration of the validity and vitality of the WPK’s policy on taking hold on science and technology as a lifeline for building an economic power.” Strange words coming from a country where thousands, according to this recent report by Amnesty International, subsist on grass and tree bark.