A simple but frightening conjecture: What if Iraq and North
Korea are working together?
Let’s start with the obvious. Just as American plans to invade
Iraq were hitting high gear, scraping together armed forces, active
and reserves, to make a powerful fighting force to take Baghdad,
what should happen? North Korea springs into action against the
United States and the United Nations. Pyongyang defies U.N.
agreements about restricting nuclear technology, brings forbidden
weapons into the DMZ, threatens nuclear attack against the U.S. and
our allies in the region.
This has to affect U.S. war plans. If there is even a slightly
good chance that the Communist North will attack South Korea or use
nuclear weapons even in a test, the U.S. will have to split up our
already too-thin forces between Iraq and faraway Korea. This
drastically complicates our ability to concentrate forces against
Saddam.
Is this possibly a coincidence? Well, of course, possibly it is.
Anything is possible. But North Korea and Iraq are already closely
linked militarily. North Korea has been a major supplier of
forbidden missile technology and presumably Scud missiles
themselves to Iraq. That link is already established. North Korea
is chronically short of money because of its insane economic
policies and the costs of maintaining an army of over one million
in a small country. Iraq is immensely rich from oil. It is well
within the realm of possibility that Iraq simply paid North Korea
to stir the pot in the Far East just as Iraq was feeling vulnerable
so that Iraq might win some sort of respite from U.S.
attentions.
If this is true, it tells us something we need to pay attention
to: contrary to the pipe dreams we had in the Clinton years, the
world is not yet in a golden age. The forces of terror and violence
are still strong on the ground out in the murky fields of reality.
We find enemies in North Korea, in the Middle East in many places,
in Islamist extremism all over the world and in terrorist movements
in Central and South America. We no longer face the might of the
Soviet Union, but we do face an immensely powerful and still
militant China, with clear designs on Taiwan, oft stated and
extremely problematic to deal with.
We are an island, a large and rich island to be sure, but an
island, in a sea of angry, armed, and dangerous nations, peoples,
and movements.
We are already at war with some of these — namely Islamic
extremism — and war against all of them simultaneously is a
possibility. History has a knack for delivering the worst
possibilities.
This tells us that we have to finally wake up and start
rebuilding our defense capacity in a big way. For more than a
decade, since the Gulf War, the U.S. armed forces have been
steadily allowed to wither. We have far fewer armed forces
personnel, ships, and aircraft than we did eleven years ago. We are
now spending roughly three percent of our national income on
defense. This is not enough in a world as dangerous as the one we
face. During World War II we spent close to half of our GDP on
defense. During the Cold War we spent close to ten percent year in
and year out on defense. Now is the time to move up the scale
again. Defense is the number one priority of Americans, the number
one requirement to preserve the nation. We should have enough
military so that we could fight in Korea without having to go
nuclear right away. We should have enough active duty military to
fight in Iraq without having to use reserves who might be needed
elsewhere. This is a terribly rich nation. The preservation of our
nation is a far greater imperative than tax cuts or more consumer
spending.
As a nation, we have allowed our strength to ebb under the
delusion that the world was a much safer place than it is. Now,
let’s grit our teeth and pay for the defense we need … starting
with decent pay for our armed forces. Nations do not pass from the
scene because they have too much defense, and if we have to err,
let us err on that side. Defense is our greatest priority. We
neglected it terribly in the Clinton years. Now is the time to
rebuild our strength, and it is not a moment too soon. If North
Korea and Iraq can work together — just a hunch at this point —
then so can all of our enemies, and we need to be strong enough to
deal with them all. We can afford it. The only thing we can not
afford is to fail to defend ourselves.
