Hundreds
of thousands dead, to give an optimistically low estimate, is what awaits us if
war breaks out between the United States, our ally South Korea and North Korea.
Most significant is that the vast majority of these victims will be Koreans,
especially from South Korea. This means we have an even greater obligation to
avoid armed conflict between our forces and that of the North Korea’s Dear
Leader Kim Jong Un at all costs.
In a
recent article in The Quad that meant to paint a picture of what war with North
Korea might look like and who would win, the author did little else than
describe a numbers game of how North Korea’s military might compares (or
rather, doesn’t compare) to ours. While obvious that much accurate research was
done on the points he tackled, the article’s title was betrayed by his giving
no description of what a war with North Korea might entail, and the article
irresponsibly boiled it down down to an issue of who would ultimately win in
the long run, disregarding the losses both sides would take along the way. This
is as misleading as those who, when talking about the possibility of war with
Russia, explained that our military and nuclear capabilities were greater than
theirs. Yeah, this is true, but it fails to take into account the number of
casualties that would be piled up in the process of claiming victory. This is
not a battle with Yu-Gi-Oh cards where the person with the greater attack
points wins with no real damage to herself. This is real life.
Just
north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea are
thousands of conventional artillery, laid into the mountainside. As describe in
the Huffington Post, “[b]urrowed into
hard granite mountain faces and protected behind blast doors, 15,000 North
Korean cannons and rocket launchers are aimed at the glass skyscrapers,
traffic-choked highways and blocks of apartment buildings 35 miles away in
Seoul ― and the U.S. military bases beyond.” According to Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, a U.S. military official
estimated that if Seoul was broken up into three-square-foot blocks, the guns
would be able to pepper them all within hours. Seoul and its surrounding areas
are home to about 25 million people and bordered by mountains and a river,
making evacuation a near impossibility. (If we were to evacuate, it likely would
be before a first-strike. This could not be done while going unnoticed by the
North Koreans, thereby tipping our hand to the imminence of a strike on their
territory, and almost certainly prompting the firing of these artillery.) Kim
Jong Un is holding not only the North Koreans hostage to his regime, but also
the South Koreans, who he will pull the trigger on at the first sign of an
invasion or large scale attack. This is what stops us from attacking, and which
Mark Bowden noted was the reason that former President Nixon did not retaliate
militarily when North Korea shot down a U.S. aircraft, killing over 30 service
members.
While
aptly described by Sam Harris as a moral maniac, we know Rocket Man is not
totally irrational. While giving no regard to the well-being of the Koreans who
he claims to have divine right to rule over, his actions in regard to hostility
toward us have been quite rational as a strategy of deterrence and keeping us
on our toes. Having Nuclear weapons is an almost certain deterrent to other
countries’ desires to remove you from power, so long as they have reason to
believe you would use them, which we partly do have. However, we are sure Kim
understands that while launching a nuclear missile on the American mainland
(once he can do so, which may be before the end of Trump’s presidency) would
not be the end of America as a country, the response from us could be the
absolute annihilation of North Korea as a country. While a moral maniac, he is
not dumb. Although, there is always the chance that I am wrong, and he is one
of the people who really do deserve the ascription of the word “evil”, being
willing to let his people go down in flames just to wreak mayhem on the world. We
must assume the worst though, and hope for the best.
So for
the sake of argument let us imagine a conflict broke out and assume, entirely
unrealistically, that we successfully took out North Korea’s nuclear
capabilities, that we managed to avoid the destruction of Seoul, and that Kim’s
government was toppled. We would then be left with a stateless North Korea,
which holds a population of around 25 million that have been told for 3
generations of leaders that it is a master race, almost naturally destined to
be in conflict with the United States (an idea that has to be kept constantly
alive by Kim’s regime), and spread over a mountainous terrain where pockets of
resistance could easily gain footholds, likely led by Kim’s current military
commanders and leading to a guerrilla land war. This would cause a refugee and
humanitarian crisis that would make a post-Saddam Iraq or Civil War Syria seem
like a playground. Keep in mind that these people have been isolated from the
outside world almost completely, largely uneducated, told they are a master
race ruled over by a man through divine right, and that their very existence as
a state revolves around opposition to (some real but many imagined) threats
from the United States. This is also their justification for the pursuit of
military might. If they acquire the ability to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear
missile, they will be safe from our deadly reach. Do we expect such a
population to cooperate with an American-occupied post-war Korea?
So we
come back around to the question, what would a war with North Korea look like
and who would win? We would certainly win the war against Kim’s government.
But, this would likely come by the sacrifice of millions of lives, and it can’t
be stressed enough that nearly all of the lives lost will be Korean, meaning we
not only have no right to instigate a war but have a responsibility to avoid
one at almost all costs. The result of
such a war would inevitably be an American-South Korean victory on the
battlefield, but also would be one of the largest humanitarian crises the world
has seen, made more difficult by pockets of political and military resistance. Adding
to the confusion is the uncertain position of China and how they might respond
should war occur, as well as how Russia might try to capitalize on it given
their trade with the North Korean government. At the moment, there is just no
good outcome for the conflict between America, her ally South Korea, and our
adversary North Korea.
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