Should we do something? Ought we do something? Can we do anything (that will make a difference)?
Here’s a video on North Korean children: Children of The Secret State
Here are some links on North Korea:
Why, we should invade them, overthrow their leadership, and install a democracy!
It’s worked so well for us so many times.
Seriously, thanks to geography, North Korea is pretty immune to censure till it all goes boom.
Now, anything we can do privately to destabilize the government is okay with me, but I just don’t have the right connections.
What if the U.S. were to unilaterally simply pull out of South Korea? Confer first with China in secret to get assurances that they would not interfere militarily, then just pull out. Leave the Koreas to their own devices.
On the diplomatic front, we could stay involved, and encourage peace talks between the two.
In theory, U.S. forces could invade NK. We wouldn’t even need to deal with all those fortifications in the DMZ. The U.S. Navy could simply land troops on both the east and west coasts at once and march to Pyongyang in a matter of days. But we’re not going to invade NK, because:
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We’re not going to be invading anybody while the bulk of our troops are tied down in Iraq.
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NK has no oil, nor strategic proximity to any oil-producing regions.
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NK cannot be invaded without provoking China.
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NK might actually have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them.
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Even NK’s conventional long-range artillery could pound Seoul into rubble before the hostilities end – even if hostilities last only a few hours.
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There is always the danger we might win, which we cannot afford. Just imagine the cost of the reconstruction commitments.
What should we do? Here’s a beautifully simple idea – I proposed this two years ago in this thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=270106:
The U.S. and South Korean governments should evacuate all the troops they’ve got patrolling the southern side of the DMZ – not as an admission of weakness, but as a show of strength. In essence, we’d be telling the North (and the whole world): We don’t even need to guard this border! You want to smuggle some spies south? Go ahead. We won’t even try to stop you. We don’t care. Because you know and we know that if war comes, there’s no way you can win and no way your dysfunctional, exhausted regime can survive. Spies won’t help. And it’s likely half of them will decide they don’t even want to go home.
How would Kim Jong Il react?
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Invade – no, out of the question. Suicide.
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Keep things as they are – which would leave thousands of North Korean soldiers patrolling their side and looking south at . . . nothing and nobody. What starts going through their minds then? “Hey, what are we doing here?”
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Evacuate troops from the north side of the DMZ. Saves money. And then, after a few years without active border defenses on either side, somebody will say, hey, why do we need all those walls and fences and minefields? Let’s get rid of them. And after that, civilians might start traveling back and forth across the border, in both directions, out of curiosity or to visit long separated relatives – illegally, but the governments might decide to turn a blind eye. And after that . . .
If Kim has even a shred of sanity (who knows if he does?), he should be able to see that his regime is on its last legs. What he should want, in the future, would be a peacefully unified Korea where his Communist Party is one of the parties in government, even if it doesn’t run the whole show. Kim could still be a major political player then – a smaller fish than he is now, but still a big fish, in a bigger pond. And that is a result that SK and the US should be willing to accept. Anything that brings that day closer is worth doing.
The problem is any attempt to promote human rights in North Korea is passed off as a US attempt to overthrow the government by NK propaganda. I don’t know if that is just US attempts or if they blame EU attempts on that too. The government could care less about its people so any kind of economic or political sanction (that harms the NK public) is almost meaningless. We tried that in Iraq and all it did was end up causing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to starve to death, with their deaths being blamed on the US instead of Saddam.
The best thing to do is promote information. People in NK are totally ignorant of almost everything political and global, all their info comes from NK propaganda. The US passed the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 which in part promotes information as well as humanitarian assistance.
Cell phones are also becoming a popular way to break the NK propaganda. As long as they are Chinese cell phones.
http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/0509A_MacKinnon.html
http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/200412120.asp
Beyond that I have no idea. However NK is the most oppressive, evil government on earth of all the 200 governments we currently have. And it is a shitty little 3rd world country with only 20 million people in it that is always on the brink of revolt. It sucks that they do this but you have to look at all the progress being made on earth WRT human rights and liberal democracy. Just 60 years ago several superpowers (the USSR, Germany & Japan) were just as evil and they controlled about 1/3 of the world. Now two of them are liberal democracies with universal human rights and all three are democratic, many (but not all) of their vassal states from 60 years ago are liberal democracies with good human rights records too. It is not unreasonable to assume that the evil governments of today (Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan) may be liberal democracies in 50 years as well. These kinds of atrocities are very limited in scope compared to yesterday.
I would read the book ‘rogue regime’ the author talks about how in NK it is not uncommon to see phrases like ‘death to Kim Jong Il’ spraypainted on bridges or whatnot. So there is some rebellion inside, but it is fragmented.
War with NK would be a bad idea for several reasons.
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NK has chemical and biological weapons, and probably nuclear ones. They’d use them on Japan and SK, and potentially the western coast of the US.
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NK can destroy Seoul with artillery. Current US military capacities give them the ability to destroy an artillery piece after its first shot (ie a plane will be able to spot an artillery piece after shot no. 1 and destroy it, meaning each piece can only shoot once before it is destroyed) but that may still be enough to destroy Seoul since NK has over 10,000 artillery pieces as well as chemical and biological weapons.
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NK has an extensive underground bunker system so if there was a war the NK government would easily just hide underground and wait out the war.
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NK has a very loyal force of about 100,000 commandos who would travel abroad to Japan, South Korea and the US and perform acts of assassination and terrorism if war broke out. It only took one person to almost kill Reagan and it only took 19 people to commit 9/11. So just imagine what 100,000 NK commandos in Japan, SK or the US would be capable of.
Hmmm? I’ve never even heard a rumor about NK being “on the brink of revolt.” Do you have a cite?
Nice idea, BG. Seriously. These first two are very plausible.
But I don’t think this would happen. I don’t think that Kim would withdraw the troops because of all the propaganda about protecting NK from the “monsters from the south”. To pull the troops away would expose the lie, even if it was just to the troops themselves. And without them, his power disappears.
Plus, he would never allow civilians to have a glimpse at that man behind the curtain.
Never heard of that either. Cite?
THe best solution is to stage a state funeral in Peking. When Kim crosses the frontier in his train, lock him up. Then the Chinese have the best chance of taking on the headless PDRC. Gold for those who surrender, guns for those who want to fight.
That requires the Chinese to take action . . . Just what is the PRC’s attitude towards NK these days? My impression (no more than an impression) is that they regard the whole country as an embarrassment, but they still would go to war to defend it, just on general principles.
Both cites are in the book rogue regime. NK is on the verge of revolt. I remember not too long ago reading in the book rogue regime about how two generals worked together where one would overthrow some city with his military division (I think a mining town), another with his division then they would march on Pyongyang. The plot was found out though. There is some mention to a plot (it may have been this plot) in the link I have below that talks about a military plot in 1992. Kim’s own bodyguard has supposedly tried to kill him too.
http://www.drc-jpn.org/AR-6E/fujimoto-e02.htm
The total strength of Special Corps and Special Battalions is about 100,000
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,325971,00.html
In a new, soon-to-be-published book about North Korea, Jasper Becker, 48, a British author and journalist living in Beijing, writes that factories, military units, and even entire towns revolted against the leadership in Pyongyang.
I wouldn’t worry too much about deep cover sleeper commando terrorists. I can just imagine some guy living in an apartment in the South Korea, or Japan, or the US getting a call from his handler to pull off some assassination. “Um, yeah, I’ll get right on that…what’s that?..oh, the transmission’s breaking up, Comrade…I can’t hear you…too much static on the line…I’ll hold for future orders, once these communication difficulties are cleared up…”
Who’s gonna blow their cushy life in the West (er, I mean, South) to carry out lunatic orders from Pyongyang? You can brainwash some of the people some of the time, but not when they’ve gotten out and are living independenly in another country, seeing with their own eyes the difference between the way people live in North Korea and the way they live in the rest of the world.
I don’t know. A sleeper cell could give problems but you have to consider that that soldier’s family is still in NK and any disobedience in his part will lead to his parents, spouse and child being sent to a concentration camp. Besides, many will not cast off 30 years of brainwashing due to a 2-3 day mission in South Korea.
Yeah, but the incidents from your link weren’t deep-cover sleepers being activated, they were commando raids. Sure, you can maintain command and control over commando teams out on a weeklong covert mission. But if you send that same commando to live in South Korea and establish a cover identity for a couple of years, why exactly is he going to activate himself when you call? Why not just disappear? If you’re concerned about your family, call up the South Korean police and defect, only have them publicly arrest you as a spy.
And besides, how can impoverished North Korea maintain thousands of undercover operatives? They have almost no hard currency, how can they maintian these cover identities? Heck, it’s more likely that they’d tell the undercover guys to all get jobs and mail any extra cash back to Pyongyang.
by Brainglutton
I’m gonna have to take you to task on this one. This is an amazingly foolish statment, and I’m afraid it displays everything I dislike about left-wing thinking in this country.
Do yyou really think Kim Jong Il cares one whit for his country? All he wants is what he has now: a personal fiefdom where he gets eberything. He has it all: cars, money, women, palaces, shrines to himself. He’s virtually worshipped as a living god. What more would he want? Why should he want to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond, when he can be the biggest fish around in any size pond?
He’s not going to roll over and give it up because you think it might be a good idea. He wants power and he has all of it. Kim Jong Il has demonstrated that he has no concern at all for anyone else’s life. He doesn’t care if they wallow in mud, as long as he dwells in palaces.
People keep talking about the problem with KJI being that he’s insane. This is another foolish idea fostered by our media (though he likes to play it up as well). He’s not insane. He’s gambling smart, albeit ruthlessly. He’s just vicious and completely amoral, and will burn in Hell for all eternity when he dies.
And for those of you thinking he could somehow make out money-wise after a reunification, think again. He’s got everything now. It doesn’t take much to keep a small elite rolling in it, and North Korea is adept at smugling operations. COmbine that with the sheer number of servants, and his current wealth is unconceivable.
Yeah, I didn’t notice that part. BrainGlutton, how exactly could Kim be a player in the new reunified Korea? I mean, how would he escape jail? Y’know, for the murders, the famines, the brutality, the torture, the secret police, that stuff?
There might be amnesty for former North Korean officials as part of a reunification deal. But that’s not going to leave Kim as the leader of one party in a new multiparty democracy. Who’s going to vote for him? All the happy starving north korean peasants that he’s tortured and murdered over the years? If he agreed to unification and amnesty he’s going to spend the rest of his life in some secluded place, where his former victims can’t reach him.
This is a fantasy, it can never happen. This wouldn’t be like the president of Canada agreeing to merge with the US so he can be a small fish in a big pond instead of a big fish in a small pond. North Korea is George Orwell’s 1984 come to life. South Korea might accept amnesty for the torturers and murderers, if that were the price neccesary to make them go away. But they certainly can’t accept those torturers and murderers into their political establishment, not and still be a liberal democracy.
As for wealth, being absolute dictator of 20 million people is hard to replace, even if those 20 million people are desperately poor. How can you buy the feeling you get when you send your enemy to the firing squad and turn over his wife and daughter to your guards to do with as they will? How can you buy the feeling you get when you totally control the media? How do you buy the feeling of being able to have anyone who criticizes you taken out and shot? How do you buy the feeling of absolute power over the lives of 20 million people?
Yes, Donald Trump probably lives much more luxuriously that Kim does. Yes, Donald Trump has armies of flunkies and supermodels at his beck and call. But Donald Trump can’t order those flunkies tortured to death when they displease him.
Well there aren’t 100,000 sleepers, there are just 100,000 highly trained commandos in NK. I don’t know how many sleepers there are in Japan, the US or SK. If war broke out alot of them would travel abroad to commit terrorism and assassinations. As the link said it wasn’t uncommon to use small numbers of 20-30 to try to kill the SK dictator Park Chung Hee.
The average north korean is pretty brainwashed, even defectors talk about what a great man Kim Il Sung is. Even if you are arrested as a spy I think there is a risk your family will suffer for it.
I don’t know how NK does it. They can barely keep their embassies open. But they make money from drugs and counterfeiting. The elite political and elite military seems to be the no. 1 priority in NK. If you read the book ‘under the loving care of the fatherly leader’ one ex-commando turned defector talked about how even during the famine he was being trained in how to spend money like water to fit in in South Korea. I don’t remember the exact details of how it worked, just that it was a training exercise designed to teach him how to act like a regular tourist by buying a bunch of unnecessary crap. I think he traveled to SK and spent alot of money, I honestly don’t remember. I just remember the author talking about how it struck him as heartless that during the midst of the famine the NK military elite was being trained (and given practice) on how to throw money away to fit in with the SK people.
No he doesn’t. Kim is worth $4 billion at least. That is just the money hidden in Swiss bank accounts. True most people in NK are dirt poor but the political elite and military elite do pretty good by western standards, and the super elite like Kim do great.
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/kim-il-sung.html
Donald Trump is worth about $2-3 billion.
http://www.brainboost.com/search.asp?Q=Donald+Trump+Net+Worth&lfmq=1
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