North Korea Is Worse Than Iraq

We haven’t heard from that chorus much since the war in Iraq started, but Rebecca at NKZone posts a warmed-over blog post to that effect. I posted a partial response in the comments. Here is my response in full:

I would first offer my congratulations to the Lightweight for managing to contradict himself in his very first paragraph. So is North Korea really “a meaningful military threat to its neighbors, who are our allies/trading partners” or “too impoverished to invade [its] neighbors?” You can draw a hair-thin distinction, I s’pose, but not one that matters to this discussion; either it’s a threat or it isn’t.

As for his main assertion, “North Korea is worse,” he misses the point–intentionally. Our government isn’t supposed to start fights it can’t win, it’s supposed to analyze each complex foreign policy problem, weigh the merits and risks of each alternative, and pick the one that’s less bad than all the others. Here, Lightweight can make plenty of good arguments about Iraq without resorting to bad ones (no need to thank me).

Saying that North Korea is worse than Iraq is as true as it is irrelevant. In Iraq, we had options; in North Korea, we haven’t had any obvious ones since Jimmy Carter and Warren Christopher (as seen in “Weekend at Bernie’s”) cooked up that diplomatic masterstroke in ’94 that got us where we are today. Comparing Iraq to North Korea is simply a way to change the subject from a place where we had options to one where we seemingly don’t—to one where the military option carries unacceptable risks and where diplomacy has only managed to worsen those risks and sustain a murderous regime. “North Korea is worse” is, by the Lightweight’s admission, an excuse to do nothing in either place (note his glee that North Korea could “really fight back;” go North Koreaaaaaaa!). You should also note that the Lightweight offers no fresh ideas for solving the NK nuke / humanitarian crises (ie., training and funding a resistance movement, strengthening the PSI, economic warfare, a blockade, radio and propaganda drops, food drops directly to the starving, coating the country with fake money and travel papers, or even a credible case for more deals and payoffs).

Lightweight also uses “North Korea is worse” to suggest that Bush’s concerns about human rights are insincere. Please. There’s no point in Lightweight attacking Bush’s convictions on human rights when his whole piece is swimming in cynical relativism, incredulity that America could or should care about mass murder abroad on any scale, and a cynical faith that any professed concern could possibly be anything but disguised greed (which explains why we’re all paying $2.10 a gallon for gas now and why Bush scheduled the pacification of a dysfunctional Middle Eastern dictatorship for the denouement to his reelection campaign . . . but I digress . . . and by the way, he made up the whole WMD thing but it never occurred to him that we’d fail to find them–or even bother to plant some—in an election year, too, that crafty s.o.b. . . . but I digress again). Also, I don’t recall seeing Lightweight and his friends at the Capitol on April 28th. Where, then, is there a whiff of a hint of a shred of a wisp of evidence that the appeasers would take one tangible step to ease the suffering of the North Korean people? The “North Korea is worse” chorus forgot them the moment North Korea ceased to be a useful way to change the subject from Iraq. They’ve turned their wagging fingers toward Abu Ghraib, where the scale of the cruelty will never approach that of one tough day in Camp 51, which gets more press in day than the North Korean gulags do in a year, and where the UCMJ is already running at full throttle.

There are solid arguments against intervention in Iraq (and good ones against how it was done), but “North Korea is worse” isn’t one of them, particularly given how disingenuous its proponents turned out to be. Admittedly, Iraq contains lessons about how to manage post-KJI North Korea, but that’s about the extent of it. In fact, North Korea is at least as strong an argument favoring war in Iraq as opposing it–Iraq unchecked would eventually have become another North Korea, a problem posing grave dangers but defying lasting and peaceful solutions. Isn’t one of those plenty? That was the point of going into Iraq when we did, while it was still a “grave and gathering” threat, not an immediate one—like North Korea is now. That is also the point of preemption itself—to stop grave threats while you still can, to exercise options before you lose them, to fight small wars sooner rather than big ones later, and to maintain a credible enough threat of force to make effective diplomacy possible. In Libya and Sudan, we learned that such a credible threat of force can pay dividends for diplomacy and peace. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, we learned that a toothless foreign policy tempts even those who claim to be your friends to stab you in the back. No foe is less forgiving of weakness or gullibility than North Korea.

The final reason “North Korea is worse” is irrelevant is the fact that we are already in Iraq, and the only way out leads through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s perforated skull. Although many have recently discovered, to their feigned astonishment, that war is hard sometimes, the road to Pyongyang leads through Baghdad now, even if you didn’t believe that 14 months ago (I had my doubts), and even if you think (as I do) that the solution to the NK crisis isn’t a military solution, but a combination of targeted political and economic subversion. Success in Iraq—for NK purposes, that means a security situation that is steadily getting better and unlikely to get much worse—will allow us to apply all of our diplomatic power and military deterrence to Pyongyang, thus making war less likely. Failure in Iraq will leave us where we found ourselves in June 1975, with our military demoralized, our diplomacy paralyzed, and our enemies poised to attack ruthlessly, secure that our atrophied hand-wringing will stay our fists. Defeat in Iraq means that no terrorist or tinpot dictator need ever fear us again. That would be an irreversible turning point in our history, one in which bus bombings, anthrax attacks, and suitcase nukes would be the steady punctuations of our nation’s slow but certain extinction.