>Subject: Bush Gang plotting next Korean War?
>
> From todays' NYT Op-ed page:
>
>February 28, 2003
>
>Secret, Scary Plans
>
>By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
>
> Some of the most secret and scariest work under way in the Pentagon
>these days is the planning for a possible military strike against
>nuclear sites in North Korea.
>
>Officials say that so far these are no more than contingency plans. They
>cover a range of military options from surgical cruise missile strikes
>to sledgehammer bombing,
>and there is even talk of using tactical nuclear weapons to neutralize
>hardened artillery positions aimed at Seoul, the South Korean capital.
>
>There's nothing wrong with planning, or with brandishing a stick to get
>Kim Jong Il's attention. But several factions in the administration are
>serious about a military
>strike if diplomacy fails, and since the White House is unwilling to try
>diplomacy in any meaningful way, it probably will fail. The upshot is a
>growing possibility that
>President Bush could reluctantly order such a strike this summer,
>risking another Korean war.
>
>The sources of information for this column will be as mystifying as the
>underlying U.S. policy itself, for few will discuss these issues on the
>record. But it seems those
>interested in the military option — consisting primarily of raptors
>clustered around Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and in the National
>Security Council — have until
>recently been slapped down by President Bush himself.
>
>Recently Mr. Bush seems to have become more hawkish. He is said to have
>been furious when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (one of the
>few senior
>Bush aides who know anything about Korea) told Congress that the U.S.
>would have to talk to North Korea.
>
>So the White House has hardened its position further, swatting away its
>old willingness to engage North Korea bilaterally within a multilateral
>setting. Now the
>administration has dropped the bilateral reference and is willing to
>talk to North Korea only in a multilateral framework that doesn't exist.
>The old approach had a
>snowball's chance in purgatory; now it's less than that.
>
>"We haven't exhausted diplomacy," one senior player noted. "We haven't
>begun diplomacy. . . . We could have a slippery slope to a Korean war. I
>don't think that's
>too alarmist at all."
>
>Other experts I respect are less worried. James Lilley, an old Korea
>hand and former ambassador to Seoul and Beijing, says my concerns are
>"much too alarmist."
>He says the State Department controls Korea policy and realizes that
>"the military option is almost nonexistent."
>
>Maybe. But meanwhile, North Korea is cranking out provocations and
>plutonium. This week it started up a small reactor in Yongbyon. More
>worrying, America's
>spooks detected on-and-off activity at a steam plant at Yongbyon, which
>may mean that the North is preparing to start up a neighboring
>reprocessing plant capable of
>turning out enough plutonium for five nuclear weapons by summer. Look
>for reprocessing to begin soon, perhaps the day bombs first fall on
>Iraq.
>
>Dick Cheney and his camp worry, not unreasonably, that the greatest risk
>of all would be to allow North Korea to churn out nuclear warheads like
>hotcakes off a
>griddle. In a few years North Korea will be able to produce about 60
>nuclear weapons annually, and fissile material is so compact that it
>could easily be sold and
>smuggled to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Al Qaeda.
>
>The hawk faction believes that the U.S. as a last resort could make a
>surgical strike, even without South Korean consent, and that Kim Jong Il
>would not commit
>suicide by retaliating. The hawks may well be right.
>
>Then again, they may be wrong. And if they're wrong, it would be quite a
>mistake.
>
>The North has 13,000 artillery pieces and could fire some 400,000 shells
>in the first hour of an attack, many with sarin and anthrax, on the 21
>million people in the "kill
>box" — as some in the U.S. military describe the Seoul metropolitan
>area. The Pentagon has calculated that another Korean war could kill a
>million people.
>
>So if the military option is too scary to contemplate, and if allowing
>North Korea to proliferate is absolutely unacceptable, what's left?
>Precisely the option that every
>country in the region is pressing on us: negotiating with North Korea.
>
>Ironically, the gravity of the situation isn't yet fully understood in
>either South Korea or Japan, partly because they do not think this
>administration would be crazy
>enough to consider a military strike against North Korea. They're wrong.
>
>
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