The Objective Standard Blog

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Diplomacy Only Encourages North Korea’s Belligerence by Elan Journo

Posted by ARI Media at 1:05 am

When North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb in October, it erased all doubts about the threat it poses to not only South Korea and Japan, but also to the United States. To end this nuclear stand-off without bloodshed, many people are urging that we pursue negotiations with North Korea and engage in diplomacy. Pitched as levelheaded and practical, this approach would culminate in a supposedly win-win deal: the North promises to halt its nuclear program in exchange for a combination of economic and diplomatic concessions from the West.

But such a deal, like all previous ones, would reward the North for its aggression and strengthen it into a worse menace. North Korea has become a significant threat precisely because we have appeased it for years with boatloads of oil, food and money.

Some twenty years ago, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions became glaringly obvious. Ignoring this, the West pretended that this hostile dictatorship would honor a treaty banning nuclear weapons. To get its signature took years of Western groveling and concessions. The North’s promises to halt its nuclear program were predictably hollow. By 1993, after preventing required inspections of its nuclear facilities, Pyongyang announced its intention to withdraw from the treaty. Our response?

More “diplomacy”—in the form of the “Agreed Framework,” brokered in 1994. For agreeing to freeze its nuclear program, North Korea was offered two light-water nuclear reactors (putatively for generating electricity) and, until the reactors were operational, 500,000 metric tons of oil annually (nearly half its annual energy consumption).The United States, along with Japan and South Korea, paid for these lavish gifts. During these years of apparent tranquility, our handouts and assurances of security buoyed North Korea as it furtively completed two reactors capable of yielding weapons-grade fuel. By 2003—when the North actually did withdraw from the nuclear treaty—it was clear that Pyongyang had continued secretly to develop weapons-capable nuclear technology.

The pattern of America’s suicidal diplomacy is clear: the North threatens us, we respond with negotiations, gifts and concessions, and it emerges with even greater belligerence. Witness, in the current talks, North Korea’s threat to increase its nuclear arsenal unless its latest set of extravagant demands is satisfied.

Without economic aid, technical assistance and protracted negotiations affording it time, it is unlikely that the North—continually on the brink of economic collapse—could have survived. It is also unlikely that it could have built the fourth-largest army in the world. The North is believed to have sold long-range ballistic missiles to Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria. By some estimates, North Korea already has the material to create eight nuclear bombs. As it doubtless will continue engaging in clandestine nuclear development, the North may soon be selling nuclear weapons.

What made this cycle of appeasement possible—and why do our political and intellectual leaders insist that further “diplomacy” will work? Because they reject moral judgment and cling to the fiction that North Korea shares the basic goal of prosperity and peace. This fantasy underlies the notion that the right mix of economic aid and military concessions can persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear program. It evades the fact that the North is a militant dictatorship that acquires and maintains its power by force, looting the wealth of its enslaved citizens and threatening to do the same to its neighbors. This abstract fact, the advocates of diplomacy believe, is dispensable; if we ignore it, then it ceases to exist.

Notice how, in preparing the way for renewed talks, the Bush administration has ceased describing North Korea as part of an “axis of evil”—as if this could alter its moral stature.

What the advocates of diplomacy believe, in effect, is that pouring gasoline onto an inferno will extinguish the fire—so long as we all agree that it will. Thus: if we agree that North Korea is not a hostile parasite, then it isn’t; if we pretend that this dictatorship would rather feed its people than amass weapons, then it would; if we shower it with loot, it will stop threatening us. But the facts of North Korea’s character and long-range goals, like all facts, are impervious to anyone’s wishful thinking. Years of rewarding a petty dictatorship for its belligerent actions did not disarm it, but helped it become a significant threat to America.

There is only one solution to the ” North Korea problem”: the United States and its allies must abandon the suicidal policy of appeasement.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand—author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Copyright © 2006 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Regarding: ‘Bush’s March to the (Mediterranean) Sea,’ by Patrick Poole

Posted by John David Lewis at 8:47 pm

This piece draws on Bevin Alexander’s analysis of Confederate Civil War General Stonewall Jackson’s plan to march north against Washington, D.C. Rather than remain tied down before Union armies in Virginia, Jackson wanted to take the war to his enemy’s capital. Southern leaders, being unable to think more broadly than the immediate tactical situation, rejected the plan; the result was not a southern victory, but stalemate and slaughter. Poole suggests that America should follow Jackson’s strategy and extricate its troops from Iraq by marching through Syria to the sea, thus removing the Assad regime. The resulting civil war, he says, would change the situation in the Middle East fundamentally, and would serve American interests. Leaving aside Alexander’s analysis of the Civil War, what are the merits of Poole’s plan?

What’s good about Poole’s article is that it asks us to think outside the scope of how we are doing things right now. It calls for rejecting our present efforts at fighting an insurgency and for mounting a decisive offense. His plan also identifies the fact that Americans can win, want to win, and will vote for a leader who aims to win. The article is also right to observe that the Iraq Study Group report is a blueprint for retreat into defeat.

What’s bad about Poole’s actual plan is that it runs thoroughly counter to our proper purpose. There are no tactical reasons to march through Syria to the sea. Such reasons did exist for Civil War generals, given the logistics at the time, but they do not exist in today’s context. We should adopt such a plan only if it serves our legitimate policy goals, not on the grounds that it looks tactically impressive. This plan does not serve such goals. Our primary enemies are Islamic Totalitarians, not the secular thugs in Syria. To remove Assad’s secular regime—and not the regime in Iran—would leave an even larger power vacuum for Iran to move into. There would be civil war, and, in the end, it is nearly inevitable that the Shiite clerics would win that war. The result would be an Iranian caliphate stretching from the borders of India to the Mediterranean.

There is no escaping the strategic necessity of removing the Iranian regime prior to dealing with anyone else in the region. Syria depends on Iran, not vice versa. A proper respect for Stonewall Jackson would focus on his choice of objectives: Washington, his enemy’s capital. The capital we need to hit is Tehran, not Damascus. In the end, Poole’s piece does not take its own tactical suggestion seriously. Poole asks us to think about the broader context of the mess in Iraq, and to adopt a drive to victory rather than accept a stalemate; his particular plan, however, would take us in the wrong direction.

(Bevin Alexander’s books on Jackson are: How Great Generals Win [Norton, 2002], esp. Chapter 4; and Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson [Hippocrene, 2004].)

Thanks to reader N. Subramanian for pointing out Poole’s essay.

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War

Thursday, December 7, 2006

What Real War Looks Like by Elan Journo

Posted by ARI Media at 4:57 pm

The Iraq Study Group has issued many specific recommendations, but the options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: pull out or send more troops to do democracy-building and, either way, “engage” the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. Missing from the list is the one option our self-defense demands: a war to defeat the enemy. If you think we’ve already tried this option and failed, think again. Washington’s campaign in Iraq looks nothing like the war necessary for our self-defense.

What does such a war look like?

America’s security depends on identifying precisely the enemy that threatens our lives—and then crushing it, rendering it a non-threat. It depends on proudly defending our right to live free of foreign aggression—by unapologetically killing the killers who want us dead.

Those who say this is a “new kind of conflict” against a “faceless enemy” are wrong. The enemy Washington evasively calls “terrorism” is actually an ideologically inspired political movement: Islamic totalitarianism. It seeks to subjugate the West under a totalitarian Islamic regime by means of terrorism, negotiation, war—anything that will win its jihad. The movement’s inspiration, its first triumph, its standard-bearer, is the theocracy of Iran. Iran’s regime has, for decades, used terrorist proxies to attack America. It openly seeks nuclear weapons and zealously sponsors and harbors jihadists. Without Iran’s support, legions of holy warriors would be untrained, unarmed, unmotivated, impotent.

Destroying Islamic totalitarianism requires a punishing military onslaught to end its primary state representative and demoralize its supporters. We need to deploy all necessary force to destroy Iran’s ability to fight, while minimizing our own casualties. We need a campaign that ruthlessly inflicts the pain of war so intensely that the jihadists renounce their cause as hopeless and fear to take up arms against us. This is how America and its Allies defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan.

Victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan. The enemy and its supporters were exhausted materially and crushed in spirit. What our actions demonstrated to them was that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction and death. Since their defeat, Nazism and Japanese imperialism have essentially withered as ideological forces. Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran’s totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile.

We triumphed over both Japan and Germany in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die daily in Iraq. Why? Because this war is neither assertive nor ruthless—it is a tragically meek pretense at war.

Consider what Washington has done. The Islamist regime in Iran remains untouched, fomenting terrorism. (And now our leaders hope to “engage” Iran diplomatically.)

We went to battle not with theocratic Iran, but with the secular dictatorship of Iraq. And the campaign there was not aimed at crushing whatever threat Hussein’s regime posed to us. “Shock and awe” bombing never materialized. Our brave and capable forces were hamstrung: ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities. Instead, we sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers—a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.

U.S. troops were sent, not to crush an enemy threatening America, but (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. They were prevented from using all necessary force to win or even to protect themselves. No wonder the insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington’s self-crippling policies. (Perversely, some want even more Americans tossed into this quagmire.)

Bush did all this to bring Iraqis the vote. Any objective assessment of the Middle East would have told one who would win elections, given the widespread popular support for Islamic totalitarianism. Iraqis swept to power a pro-Islamist leadership intimately tied to Iran. The most influential figure in Iraqi politics is now Moktadr al-Sadr, an Islamist warlord lusting after theocratic rule and American blood. When asked whether he would accept just such an outcome from the elections, Bush said that of course he would, because “democracy is democracy.”

No war that ushers Islamists into political office has U.S. self-defense as its goal.

This war has been worse than doing nothing, because it has galvanized our enemy to believe its success more likely than ever—even as it has drained Americans’ will to fight. Washington’s feeble campaign demonstrates the ruinous effects of refusing to assert our self-interest and defend our freedom. It is past time to consider our only moral and practical option: end the senseless sacrifice of our soldiers—and let them go to war.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand—author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Copyright © 2006 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Posted in: Foreign Policy and War