Bush’s Anaconda Plan

During our own Civil War, General Winfield Scott and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Rumsfeld of his time devised an economic blockade that may have been more decisive to the Confederacy’s defeat than Gettysburg. They called it the Anaconda Plan for its stated goal of constricting the South until it could no longer breathe.

The L.A. Times (free subscription required), via Barbara Demick, now reports that the Bush Administration is laying the groundwork for “other options” if the talks fail, as I predict they will, at least for now.

Wednesday’s suspension of a Pentagon program to recover the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War puts an end to one of the few regular channels of face-to-face contact between Americans and North Koreans. It also cuts off a source of hard currency for the communist nation’s army, which was being paid millions to assist in the search for remains.

Also this week, the U.S. refused to renew the contract of the American executive director of an international consortium in charge of supplying energy to North Korea.

The latter refers to KEDO, the Korean Energy Development Organization, which was building North Korea two light-water reactors under the disastrous agreement known as the Agreed Framework. The former should be seen above all as an example to other nations in the region. How can we expect other nations to stop aiding North Korea’s government while we were still aiding it? Having served myself, I’m very sympathetic to the families of the missing. What I would say to them is that many of their loved ones’ comrades lie in places that are now near secret North Korean installations, and possibly near gulags. This regime will never allow the recovery of those remains as long as it is in power. Furthermore, paying the North Korean regime could well be financing a threat to the security of the United States, which is what those men died to defend against.

“The U.S. is shutting down anything that is in any way remotely beneficial to North Korea,” said L. Gordon Flake, an expert on North Korea and head of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington.

He described this week’s moves as signs that the administration was “gearing up for the next phase” as the prospect of North Korea returning to multinational talks on its nuclear weapons program grew increasingly unlikely.

A former State Department official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said the suspension of the remains recovery program and Kartman’s termination indicated a concerted effort by the administration to tighten the screws on Pyongyang.

“They are putting all the pieces in place to shut everything down around North Korea,” he said.

Note that Jack Pritchard is quoted on the record elsewhere in the story. Even Pritchard confesses to being “aghast” at the amount of the Pentagon’s direct payments to North Korea. Then, on food aid, we see this:

Aid officials are worried that the United States might not make its annual contribution to a United Nations food drive for North Korea. The U.S. has been one of the largest suppliers of food to the impoverished nation, last year providing 50,000 tons. It has not yet indicated whether it will make a pledge this year, said Anthony Banbury, Asia director of the U.N. World Food Program.

“I think there is a real split in the U.S. government on whether conditions are ripe” for a contribution this year, said Banbury, who met with reporters Friday in Seoul.

In the past, the United States has been adamant that political factors did not influence its decisions on humanitarian aid. Asked last week about food for North Korea, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the nuclear issue would have no bearing on the decision.

As you can probably see from my recent posts, I’m strugging with this. I believe that we should be making every effort to feed North Korea’s underclass and the residents of its closed areas; my question is whether WFP aid, which depends on the regime’s Public Distribution System, substantially contributes to that. With everything I’ve read about food aid in North Korea, I lack confidence that most of the food aid is going to the hungriest people. It probably feeds many people, although most of the actual recipients are the military and others the regime considers loyal, and whose continued health sustains the regime and costs others their lives. The regime has actually tightened monitoring recently, in spite of strong WFP efforts to do more of it. And then there’s the recent revelation from Marcus Noland that North Korea has reacted to past food aid receipts by simply buying less food. Finally, I have little doubt that North Korea could feed everyone in the country from a small amount of its $5 billion annual defense budget, if it chose to do so. By comparison, its 2004 food aid receipts were $171 million. I’m inclined to believe that food aid without strict monitoring–which we lack now–mostly sustains the regime. I also believe that we should be looking for other ways to feed the hungry directly, without going through the regime’s distribution system. And if the regime were to agree to open its closed areas and agree to strict monitoring, I’d drop my own opposition to more food aid.

More generally, however, targeted sanctions that deliver a sudden blow to North Korea’s economy could upset the careful allocation of resources on which sustaining the regime’s power structure depends. Admittedly, sanctions have had a mixed record, but North Korea lacks a diversified economy and a strong output of legal goods for which there is a sufficient demand to tempt sanctions-busting. North Korea is also far more dependent on outside assistance than other nations in the world today.

There is, of course, a missing piece in all of this–efforts to offer the North Korean people a better political alternatives to this regime. Broadcasting efforts continue to lag despite the funding that was promised under the North Korean Human Rights Act. Destroying an economy or a regime does not account for the new system that will emerge to replace it. Hope in a better future may be the missing catalyst to coalesce the internal opposition on which such a strategy implicitly depends.

For more information on emerging plans to attack North Korea’s cash flow, see my previous posts here, here, and here at The Command Post.