MMMMMM
02-08-2004, 01:50 PM
An Auschwitz in Korea
By Jeff Jacoby, 2/8/2004
"TWO WORDS -- "never again" -- sum up the most important lesson that civilized men and women were supposed to have learned from the 20th century. It is forbidden to keep silent, forbidden to look the other way, when tyrants embark on genocide and slaughter -- if Auschwitz and Kolyma and the Cambodian killing fields taught us nothing else, they taught us that. Or so, at any rate, we like to tell ourselves. As Samantha Power discovered upon returning to the United States after two years as a war correspondent in Bosnia, the lesson of "never again" is invoked far more often than it is applied.
ADVERTISEMENT
"Everywhere I went," Power recalled in a speech at Swarthmore College in 2002, "I heard `never again.' Steven Spielberg's `Schindler's List' had been a smash hit. The Holocaust Museum had opened on the Mall in Washington. College seminars were taught on the `lessons' of the singular crime of the 20th century. But why, I wondered, had nobody applied those lessons to the atrocities of the 1990s: the systematic murder of 200,000 Bosnian civilians in Europe between 1992 and 1995 and the extermination of some 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994.
"Did `never again' simply mean `never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?' "
Power went on to write "A Problem From Hell," her Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure to intervene in the genocides of the 20th century. The book was hugely and deservedly praised. It made clear, as no book had before, how much Americans knew about some of the most horrific massacres of the last century even as they were happening, and how little we did to stop them -- or even, in most cases, condemn them.
Which brings us to North Korea.
It is not exactly news that the communist regime of Kim Jong Il has sent millions of North Koreans to early graves. Estimates back in 1998 were that as many as 800,000 people were dying in North Korea each year from starvation and malnutrition caused by Kim's ruthless and irrational policies. World Vision, a Christian relief organization, calculated that 1 million to 2 million North Koreans had been killed by "a full-scale famine" largely of Pyongyang's creation.
Nor is it breaking news that North Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North Korean life, but their entire families, including grandparents and grandchildren.
And, of course, it is widely known that Kim is openly pursuing nuclear weapons, has fired missiles capable of reaching Japan, and controls one of the largest military forces on earth.
All of this is hideous enough, and more than sufficient reason for making Kim's ouster -- and his prosecution for crimes against humanity -- an explicit goal of the United States. But now comes something new.
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."
Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw. "I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.
"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."
Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" -- and mean it?"
An Auschwitz In Korea (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea)
So what can be done? If we were not so preoccupied with problems in the Middle East I would suggest that perhaps the best course would be to defeat North Korea militarily, both for humanitarian reasons and to pre-empt Kim's nuclear threat potential. After North Korea's defeat, it could be integrated with the South, and after recovery, grow and prosper in freedom as does the South.
Here is the basic analysis and bluprint, tactically speaking:
by R. James Woolsey and Thomas McInerney
Wall Street Journal
August 4, 2003
"The White House had a shape-of-the-table announcement last week: North Korea would participate in six-sided talks with the U.S., China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. This was welcome but it changes nothing fundamental. Kim Jong Il has clearly demonstrated his capacity for falsehood in multilateral as well as bilateral forums. The bigger, and much worse, news is the overall course of events this summer.
In early July, krypton 85 was detected in locations that suggested that this gas, produced when spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed into plutonium for nuclear weapons, may have emanated from a site other than North Korea's known reprocessing facility at Yongbyon.
There would be nothing surprising about a hidden reprocessing plant -- North Korea has thousands of underground facilities. But if the reprocessing of the 8,000 spent fuel rods that the North Koreans took out of storage at Yongbyon last January -- when it ousted international inspectors and walked away from the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- has been completed clandestinely, then Kim Jong Il may already have enough material for several more weapons to go with the one or two he is thought to have from previous reprocessing.
Several Additional Bombs
But even if the krypton was emanating from Yongbyon, this still means that several additional bombs' worth of plutonium could be available a few months from now. Add this to Pyongyang's breach of the 1994 Agreed Framework by its secret uranium-enrichment program, and its boast in April that it would sell weapons-grade plutonium to whomever it pleased (rogue states? terrorist groups?), and it is apparent that the world has weeks to months, at most, to deal with this issue, not months to years.
Interdiction of shipments out of North Korea will not stop the export of such fissionable material. Even if current efforts for nations to intercept North Korean shipping are successful, this would be completely inadequate to the purpose. The North Koreans' principal exports today are ballistic missiles and illegal drugs, both clandestine. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry recently noted, the amount of plutonium needed for a bomb is about the size of a soccer ball.
There is no reason the North Koreans would refrain from using air shipments, including those protected by diplomatic immunity, to smuggle and sell such material.
In the midst of the just announced six-way talks, one fact stands out: The only chance for a peaceful resolution of this crisis before North Korea moves clearly into the ranks of nuclear powers is for China to move decisively. Indeed we see no alternative but for China to use its substantial economic leverage, derived from North Korea's dependence on it for fuel and food, to press, hard and immediately, for a change in regime. Kim Jong Il's regime has shown that agreements signed with it, by anyone, mean nothing.
What could induce China to follow such an uncharacteristically decisive course? North Korea's escalating nuclear aspirations run the risk of creating not one but four new nuclear powers in Asia. South Korea, Japan and probably Taiwan will find it very difficult to refrain from moving toward nuclear capability as North Korea becomes more threatening. Also, China must be clearly told that North Korea's long-range ballistic missile program and the prospect of its sale of fissionable material to terrorists make this a direct matter of U.S. security. Presidents Bush and Roh declared in May that they will "not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea."
Unfortunately, the reflexive rejection in the public debate of the use of force against North Korea has begun to undermine U.S. ability both to influence China to act and to take the preparatory steps necessary for effectiveness if force should be needed. The U.S. and South Korea must instead come together and begin to assess realistically what it would take to conduct a successful military operation to change the North Korean regime.
It is not reasonable to limit the use of force to a surgical strike destroying Yongbyon. Although the facility would need to be destroyed, the possible existence of another plutonium reprocessing plant or of uranium-enrichment facilities, or of plutonium hidden elsewhere, makes it infeasible to limit the use of force to such a single objective. Moreover, military action against North Korea must protect South Korea from certain attack (particularly from artillery just north of the DMZ that can reach Seoul). In short, we must be prepared to win a war, not execute a strike.
U.S. and South Korean forces have spent nearly half a century preparing to fight and win such a war. We should not be intimidated by North Korea's much-discussed artillery. Around half of North Korea's 11,000-plus artillery pieces, some of them in caves, are in position to fire on Seoul. But all are vulnerable to stealth and precision weapons -- e.g., caves can be sealed by accurate munitions.
Massive air power is the key to being able both to destroy Yongbyon and to protect South Korea from attack by missile or artillery. There is a significant number of hardened air bases available in South Korea and the South Koreans have an excellent air force of approximately 550 modern tactical aircraft. The U.S. should begin planning immediately to deploy the Patriot tactical ballistic missile defense system plus Aegis ships to South Korea and Japan, and also to reinforce our tactical air forces by moving in several air wings and aircraft carrier battle groups, together with the all-important surveillance aircraft and drones.
The goal of the planning should be to be prepared on short notice both to destroy the nuclear capabilities at Yongbyon and other key North Korean facilities and to protect South Korea against attack by destroying North Korean artillery and missile sites. Our stealth aircraft, equipped with precision bombs, and cruise missiles will be crucial -- these weapons can be tailored to incinerate the WMD and minimize radiation leakage.
The key point is that the base infrastructure available in the region and the accessibility of North Korea from the sea should make it possible to generate around 4,000 sorties a day compared to the 800 a day that were so effective in Iraq. When one contemplates that the vast majority of these sorties would use precision munitions, and that surveillance aircraft would permit immediate targeting of artillery pieces and ballistic missile launch sites, we believe the use of air power in such a war would be swifter and more devastating than it was in Iraq. North Korea's geriatric air defenses -- both fighter aircraft and missiles -- would not last long. As the Iraqis understood when facing our air power, if you fly, you die.
Marine forces deployed off both coasts of North Korea could put both Pyongyang and Wonson at risk of rapid seizure, particularly given the fact that most of North Korea's armed forces are situated along the DMZ. With over 20 of the Army's 33 combat brigades now committed it would be necessary to call up additional Reserve and National Guard units. However, the U.S. forces that would have the greatest immediate effect are Expeditionary Air Forces and Carrier Battle Groups, most of which have now been removed from the Iraqi theater.
An Assured Victory
The South Korean Army is well equipped to handle a counteroffensive into North Korea with help from perhaps two additional U.S. Army divisions, together with the above-mentioned Marine Expeditionary Force and dominant air power. We judge that the U.S. and South Korea could defeat North Korea decisively in 30 to 60 days with such a strategy. Importantly, there is "no doubt on the outcome" as the chairman of the JCS, Gen. Meyers, said at his reconfirmation hearing on July 26 to the Senate.
We are not eager to see force used on the Korean peninsula. It is better to resolve this crisis without war. However, unless China succeeds in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons development -- and we believe this will require a change in regime -- Americans will be left with the threat to our existence described by Secretary Perry when he recently said that the North Korean nuclear program "poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
We can hate it that we are forced now to confront this choice. But we should not take refuge in denial.
Mr. Woolsey was CIA director from 1993-95. Gen. McInerney, a retired three-star Air Force lieutenant general and former assistant vice chief of staff, is a Fox News military analyst."
How To Win War With North Korea (http://www.benadorassociates/article/498)
Those claiming the costs would be too high are probably wrong, even in human terms. Also there is an intangible but very great value to being able to live in freedom rather than under despotism. Again, if we were not so busy elsewhere I think this would probably be a good idea.
By Jeff Jacoby, 2/8/2004
"TWO WORDS -- "never again" -- sum up the most important lesson that civilized men and women were supposed to have learned from the 20th century. It is forbidden to keep silent, forbidden to look the other way, when tyrants embark on genocide and slaughter -- if Auschwitz and Kolyma and the Cambodian killing fields taught us nothing else, they taught us that. Or so, at any rate, we like to tell ourselves. As Samantha Power discovered upon returning to the United States after two years as a war correspondent in Bosnia, the lesson of "never again" is invoked far more often than it is applied.
ADVERTISEMENT
"Everywhere I went," Power recalled in a speech at Swarthmore College in 2002, "I heard `never again.' Steven Spielberg's `Schindler's List' had been a smash hit. The Holocaust Museum had opened on the Mall in Washington. College seminars were taught on the `lessons' of the singular crime of the 20th century. But why, I wondered, had nobody applied those lessons to the atrocities of the 1990s: the systematic murder of 200,000 Bosnian civilians in Europe between 1992 and 1995 and the extermination of some 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994.
"Did `never again' simply mean `never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?' "
Power went on to write "A Problem From Hell," her Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure to intervene in the genocides of the 20th century. The book was hugely and deservedly praised. It made clear, as no book had before, how much Americans knew about some of the most horrific massacres of the last century even as they were happening, and how little we did to stop them -- or even, in most cases, condemn them.
Which brings us to North Korea.
It is not exactly news that the communist regime of Kim Jong Il has sent millions of North Koreans to early graves. Estimates back in 1998 were that as many as 800,000 people were dying in North Korea each year from starvation and malnutrition caused by Kim's ruthless and irrational policies. World Vision, a Christian relief organization, calculated that 1 million to 2 million North Koreans had been killed by "a full-scale famine" largely of Pyongyang's creation.
Nor is it breaking news that North Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North Korean life, but their entire families, including grandparents and grandchildren.
And, of course, it is widely known that Kim is openly pursuing nuclear weapons, has fired missiles capable of reaching Japan, and controls one of the largest military forces on earth.
All of this is hideous enough, and more than sufficient reason for making Kim's ouster -- and his prosecution for crimes against humanity -- an explicit goal of the United States. But now comes something new.
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."
Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw. "I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."
Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.
"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."
Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" -- and mean it?"
An Auschwitz In Korea (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/02/08/an_auschwitz_in_korea)
So what can be done? If we were not so preoccupied with problems in the Middle East I would suggest that perhaps the best course would be to defeat North Korea militarily, both for humanitarian reasons and to pre-empt Kim's nuclear threat potential. After North Korea's defeat, it could be integrated with the South, and after recovery, grow and prosper in freedom as does the South.
Here is the basic analysis and bluprint, tactically speaking:
by R. James Woolsey and Thomas McInerney
Wall Street Journal
August 4, 2003
"The White House had a shape-of-the-table announcement last week: North Korea would participate in six-sided talks with the U.S., China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. This was welcome but it changes nothing fundamental. Kim Jong Il has clearly demonstrated his capacity for falsehood in multilateral as well as bilateral forums. The bigger, and much worse, news is the overall course of events this summer.
In early July, krypton 85 was detected in locations that suggested that this gas, produced when spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed into plutonium for nuclear weapons, may have emanated from a site other than North Korea's known reprocessing facility at Yongbyon.
There would be nothing surprising about a hidden reprocessing plant -- North Korea has thousands of underground facilities. But if the reprocessing of the 8,000 spent fuel rods that the North Koreans took out of storage at Yongbyon last January -- when it ousted international inspectors and walked away from the Non-Proliferation Treaty -- has been completed clandestinely, then Kim Jong Il may already have enough material for several more weapons to go with the one or two he is thought to have from previous reprocessing.
Several Additional Bombs
But even if the krypton was emanating from Yongbyon, this still means that several additional bombs' worth of plutonium could be available a few months from now. Add this to Pyongyang's breach of the 1994 Agreed Framework by its secret uranium-enrichment program, and its boast in April that it would sell weapons-grade plutonium to whomever it pleased (rogue states? terrorist groups?), and it is apparent that the world has weeks to months, at most, to deal with this issue, not months to years.
Interdiction of shipments out of North Korea will not stop the export of such fissionable material. Even if current efforts for nations to intercept North Korean shipping are successful, this would be completely inadequate to the purpose. The North Koreans' principal exports today are ballistic missiles and illegal drugs, both clandestine. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry recently noted, the amount of plutonium needed for a bomb is about the size of a soccer ball.
There is no reason the North Koreans would refrain from using air shipments, including those protected by diplomatic immunity, to smuggle and sell such material.
In the midst of the just announced six-way talks, one fact stands out: The only chance for a peaceful resolution of this crisis before North Korea moves clearly into the ranks of nuclear powers is for China to move decisively. Indeed we see no alternative but for China to use its substantial economic leverage, derived from North Korea's dependence on it for fuel and food, to press, hard and immediately, for a change in regime. Kim Jong Il's regime has shown that agreements signed with it, by anyone, mean nothing.
What could induce China to follow such an uncharacteristically decisive course? North Korea's escalating nuclear aspirations run the risk of creating not one but four new nuclear powers in Asia. South Korea, Japan and probably Taiwan will find it very difficult to refrain from moving toward nuclear capability as North Korea becomes more threatening. Also, China must be clearly told that North Korea's long-range ballistic missile program and the prospect of its sale of fissionable material to terrorists make this a direct matter of U.S. security. Presidents Bush and Roh declared in May that they will "not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea."
Unfortunately, the reflexive rejection in the public debate of the use of force against North Korea has begun to undermine U.S. ability both to influence China to act and to take the preparatory steps necessary for effectiveness if force should be needed. The U.S. and South Korea must instead come together and begin to assess realistically what it would take to conduct a successful military operation to change the North Korean regime.
It is not reasonable to limit the use of force to a surgical strike destroying Yongbyon. Although the facility would need to be destroyed, the possible existence of another plutonium reprocessing plant or of uranium-enrichment facilities, or of plutonium hidden elsewhere, makes it infeasible to limit the use of force to such a single objective. Moreover, military action against North Korea must protect South Korea from certain attack (particularly from artillery just north of the DMZ that can reach Seoul). In short, we must be prepared to win a war, not execute a strike.
U.S. and South Korean forces have spent nearly half a century preparing to fight and win such a war. We should not be intimidated by North Korea's much-discussed artillery. Around half of North Korea's 11,000-plus artillery pieces, some of them in caves, are in position to fire on Seoul. But all are vulnerable to stealth and precision weapons -- e.g., caves can be sealed by accurate munitions.
Massive air power is the key to being able both to destroy Yongbyon and to protect South Korea from attack by missile or artillery. There is a significant number of hardened air bases available in South Korea and the South Koreans have an excellent air force of approximately 550 modern tactical aircraft. The U.S. should begin planning immediately to deploy the Patriot tactical ballistic missile defense system plus Aegis ships to South Korea and Japan, and also to reinforce our tactical air forces by moving in several air wings and aircraft carrier battle groups, together with the all-important surveillance aircraft and drones.
The goal of the planning should be to be prepared on short notice both to destroy the nuclear capabilities at Yongbyon and other key North Korean facilities and to protect South Korea against attack by destroying North Korean artillery and missile sites. Our stealth aircraft, equipped with precision bombs, and cruise missiles will be crucial -- these weapons can be tailored to incinerate the WMD and minimize radiation leakage.
The key point is that the base infrastructure available in the region and the accessibility of North Korea from the sea should make it possible to generate around 4,000 sorties a day compared to the 800 a day that were so effective in Iraq. When one contemplates that the vast majority of these sorties would use precision munitions, and that surveillance aircraft would permit immediate targeting of artillery pieces and ballistic missile launch sites, we believe the use of air power in such a war would be swifter and more devastating than it was in Iraq. North Korea's geriatric air defenses -- both fighter aircraft and missiles -- would not last long. As the Iraqis understood when facing our air power, if you fly, you die.
Marine forces deployed off both coasts of North Korea could put both Pyongyang and Wonson at risk of rapid seizure, particularly given the fact that most of North Korea's armed forces are situated along the DMZ. With over 20 of the Army's 33 combat brigades now committed it would be necessary to call up additional Reserve and National Guard units. However, the U.S. forces that would have the greatest immediate effect are Expeditionary Air Forces and Carrier Battle Groups, most of which have now been removed from the Iraqi theater.
An Assured Victory
The South Korean Army is well equipped to handle a counteroffensive into North Korea with help from perhaps two additional U.S. Army divisions, together with the above-mentioned Marine Expeditionary Force and dominant air power. We judge that the U.S. and South Korea could defeat North Korea decisively in 30 to 60 days with such a strategy. Importantly, there is "no doubt on the outcome" as the chairman of the JCS, Gen. Meyers, said at his reconfirmation hearing on July 26 to the Senate.
We are not eager to see force used on the Korean peninsula. It is better to resolve this crisis without war. However, unless China succeeds in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons development -- and we believe this will require a change in regime -- Americans will be left with the threat to our existence described by Secretary Perry when he recently said that the North Korean nuclear program "poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities."
We can hate it that we are forced now to confront this choice. But we should not take refuge in denial.
Mr. Woolsey was CIA director from 1993-95. Gen. McInerney, a retired three-star Air Force lieutenant general and former assistant vice chief of staff, is a Fox News military analyst."
How To Win War With North Korea (http://www.benadorassociates/article/498)
Those claiming the costs would be too high are probably wrong, even in human terms. Also there is an intangible but very great value to being able to live in freedom rather than under despotism. Again, if we were not so busy elsewhere I think this would probably be a good idea.