North Korea and the Deficit

North Korea, for all the trouble it's causing, is making life very easy for comedians. The favorite joke is that while Iraq (no weapons, minimal threat) got a full-scale invasion, Iran (moderate threat, developing weapons) is just getting a lot of diplomacy thrown at it, and the North Koreans (in possession of nuclear weapons, testing delivery systems, major threat) require a concerted effort, on our part, to even assemble a strongly-worded protest when they cook off a couple of bottle rockets over Japan.

(Full disclosure, I just got XM Satellite Radio for my car, and I've been listening to the comedy channels, on average, around two hours a day. They're pretty helpful when you're driving for extended periods of time.)

So we all get a good laugh. The Bush administration is so silly! They attack the wrong countries! Another favorite joke is about how Kim Jong-Il, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn't get no respect. He builds nukes, threatens World War III, shoots off missiles and kidnaps random Japanese citizens. And we're committed to negotiating with him. Poor guy can't get any attention.

The fact is that Kim Jong-Il knows that he has a lot more leverage than Saddam ever had. He's got nuclear weapons (although, by all accounts, they're still a little too big and clunky to be effectively delivered by rockets or aircraft) as well as an enormous military. These guys have the ability to rain 100,000 artillery shells an hour on Seoul, as well as a million-man army, a vast network of underground bases, and command-and-control systems designed to defeat the U.S. military's electronic surveillance capabilities.

Let's review. Enormous, scary military. Nuclear capability. Budding intercontinental rocketry program. Tough to surveil due to underground sites. These guys are bad news. And KCNA, North Korea's propaganda Wal-Mart, likes to threaten nuclear holocaust, total battle, and World War III. Why have we not wiped these guys off the map? And why are we getting wiped off the map in Iraq?

The answer is that North Korea can materially damage our vital national interests. It is in no one's interest to see the Korean Peninsula go up in nuclear smoke. (Where would we get our Hyundais?) South Korea is a vital trading partner, not to mention Japan. And our relations with China, no matter how a war turned out, would inevitably suffer, which may not be that bad diplomatically but would have ugly consequences for the American economy. So while North Korea would undoubtedly lose a war (if they went nuclear, we would retaliate) and their country would fall apart at its starving seams, the consequences would be entirely too terrible to contemplate for our country.

North Korea keeps demanding one basic thing- security for their regime. Kim Jong-Il is a paranoid psychotic who actually abducted Japanese actors, via his special forces troopers, to force them to act in (awful) movies he makes himself. He demands non-aggression pacts, which the U.S. can't honor because it would bind our hands if he started pulling anything more ridiculous inside his little nuclear treehouse. North Korea's primary demand is, let us stay in power.

The thing is, he's not crazy and their country isn't crazy. But they really want us to believe that it is. It's good political thinking, actually. If your opponent thinks that you're totally insane, he's just going to go attack you, since he has no chance. If he thinks you're totally rational, he might still attack you, or otherwise exploit you, because he can take advantage of your weaknesses. In the mindset of deterrence posture, being just a little crazy keeps you unpredictable, and therefore, difficult to take advantage of.

The North Koreans don't want to be boxed in by our demands anymore (and our primary demand is, don't go to war.) You'd think this would be simple. They don't go to war against South Korea (or anybody else,) we're happy to let them stay in power. But the X-factor is Kim Jong-Il's itching, burning case of paranoia and megalomania. He wants to be a member of the nuclear club, to have a button to put his finger on. And he wants to be able to make threats, even though his country is starving and he has to rely on counterfeiting and drug dealing to fund his military machine. So we can't rule out kicking his ass.

But they guy is gonna die anyway. Whether a smart bomb does it, or coronary artery disease from the expensive imported foods that he eats, Kim Jong-Il can't escape death. And he's too paranoid to appoint an heir apparent, since that person would become an immediate threat in his mind (and maybe in reality.) Kim holds enormous power, and would create an even-more-enormous power vacuum after his death, which the rest of the world sincerely hopes a better alternative would fill.

The North Koreans have nukes. No amount of intervention is going to change that. If we give them a reason to use them, they just might do it, too. But the only way they're going to do that is if Kim Jong-Il says so. So we have to play nice until the guy croaks, because going to war against a nuclear and conventional power like North Korea would be (even with our enormous military) incredibly costly. This policy of hands-off, wait-and-see, actually does make sense.

Unless.

North Korea needs money. We've been over this. They need it bad, and they're willing to do things like counterfeit and run drugs to get it. They've even got their hands in kidnapping and extortion. It's the world's first gangster nation. They'll sell anything to get their hands on cash, and that could easily include the nuclear weapons they've claimed to have built. They could become a nuclear K-Mart (a favorite grim joke of international relations types.) And that would be unacceptable. But are they doing this? Do they have buyers? Do they even have anything worth buying?

So we find ourselves coming back to one of my favorite complaints. We're sinking enormous- ENORMOUS- amounts of money into tax cuts for the super-wealthy and the war in Iraq. If we were to, say, remove the now-nearly-permanent tax cut and drastically scale back operations in Iraq (where it's becoming abundantly obvious that our presence perpetuates, rather than suppresses, the insurgency) we would have a lot of cash available to do three things that really need to get done.

1) Pay down the deficit. Oh, God, I don't even need to go into detail here. The Bush economic side effects are like Reaganomics but even more retarded. We're spending money we don't have and treating our international credit rating like a puppy treats a hardwood floor. If you support this administration because you've been living under a rock for the last six years, consider this: the war in Iraq is being paid for with money borrowed from shining beacons of international morality like, I don't know, China. Yep. That M-16 that's firing at Iraq insurgents got bought with yuan, boy.

2) Secure the homeland. It's not happening for a lot of different reasons. Some of them include the behavior of the recipients of federal homeland security grants- police and fire departments tend to spend the money on pretty toys like command vehicles and SWAT teams, rather than on the training and specialized equipment they'd need to deal with WMD attacks. But security for our seaports, our rail and public transit systems, and our borders (don't get me started) has been woefully underfunded. Airports still aren't properly secured, even given America's propensity for defending ourselves against the attacks that have already happened. The next one will arrive through a venue that a $2.1 million mobile command center that gets 247 movie channels cannot block.

3) Return our intelligence agencies to worldwide prominence. The CIA's analytical capabilities have been gutted by a power grab from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. One of the NSA's hands is trying to fend off Congress while the other is trying to sort through billions- literally billions- of electronic intercepts across the globe, and then (through some act of God) make sense of them. The DNI is trying to create their own in-house intel agency instead of forcing everyone else to work together. And the FBI's attempts at collecting domestic intelligence still get drawn into the stovepipe of their own bureaucracy instead of being properly shared with CIA or NSA. The war on terror will be won only when we can have people on the ground, infiltrating terrorist groups and collecting HUMINT. Fancy satellites and UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) aren't going to do the job, especially in places like hermetically-sealed North Korea. We're not going to get our way in the Korean Peninsula by force of arms alone. We'll need the old CIA, the kind of guys who (while I'm not encouraging this behavior wholesale) started revolutions and infiltrated governments.

Enormous operations like Iraq waste money and lives while creating abundant reasons for new terrorists to join the cause. A low-intensity shadow war would give us the opportunity to suppress the Hydra-headed, decentralized al Qaeda that military expeditions will only strengthen. And it'd be exponentially cheaper. Can you imagine the things the CIA could do with 10% of the money we're spending on Iraq? We could have a Guantanamo Bay in every strip mall!

Okay, maybe not such a good idea to go that far. But I think the point is made. Iraq and tax cuts are sapping money away from an actual defense of the homeland, and if places like North Korea decide to start selling nukes to terrorists, we have no way of detecting, deterring, or defending against utter mayhew. The current administration has chosen a path of unnecessary strength and unaffordable weakness.