What’s Really Going on In Pyongyang

Gabriel Rom

North Korea’s recent nuclear tests as well as their repudiation of their long standing armistice with South Korea signals a radical change in the way North Korea’s leadership would like the country to be perceived by the rest of the world. Blatant, aggressive, volatile…North Korea can no longer be put on the backburner. Nations across the world have condemned the tests with varying degrees of intensity, but North Korea has got what it wanted: Attention.

Do these actions make strategic sense? The short answer is no. “The suddenness of the  nuclear test shows North Korea following military, not diplomatic logic,” Hideshi Takesada, a Korea expert at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies, told Bloomberg News.

The Koreans have completely put diplomacy out of their minds, and are acting with military goals in mind, not diplomatic ones. Whether this change in attitude is an act to try and make diplomacy easier for the NoKos, or if it truly is the beginning of a military conflict in the area, is something no westerner and probably no one else besides Kim Jong-il and his closest advisers can know.

What we can deduce is this though: “During the past 40 years North Korean leaders have been blustery but fundamentally risk averse. They have done nothing that would risk the total destruction of their state…until now.”

The way Pyongyang has been acting in the past week demonstrates that they are willing to accept much larger and destructive risks than they were before. The question for Barack Obama and the rest of the world is this: Are the North Koreans posturing?

Consider this analogy (this will take a cursory understanding of Texas Hold Em’ poker): We’re at a poker table, and it’s North Korea’s turn to act. They raise big (the nuclear tests). Sitting across from NK is America and effectively all of the  Western powers.  Now it’s our turn to act. We have three options. Fold (Take no diplomatic, economic, or military action, basically keeping the situation static. Call (Some combination of economic and diplomatic response. Basically acknowledging that North Korea is a serious threat and that our response, whatever it is, must keep them in check. The risk level would be higher if we choose to call as we must remember exactly what we’re calling: A nuclear detonation from a rogue regime with a potentially mentally unstable leader. Finally, we can Reraise. This course of action would most likely include massive economic restrictions and likely be accompanied with a military campaign in the region. This response would obviously entail the most risk, but potentially the most reward.

Note: This analogy is simply meant to give context to an extremely complex situation. The Fold, Call, Re raise terminology is not hard and fast. For example one word, “call”, entails an indeterminable amount of strategies, contingency plans, and diplomatic philosophies of which any combination could be used. The only thing that unifies these responses under the word “call”, is that they maintain a certain level of restraint and risk aversion, as this is what philosophically defines a call in the poker world as well.  The world of geopolitics does not have to follow all the rules of the poker table. Additionally, remember that there are many other actors in this conflict (South Korea, Japan, China, etc)

These are Barack Obama’s options. Our next article will delve deeper into these options, discussing which action or combination of actions are the most rational and effective.

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Iraqi Leaders Opposed Biden’s Partition Plan

Daniel Senor

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Joseph Biden made a series of stunning arguments in defense of his plan for segregation of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines. When Mr. Biden first announced his partition plan in May 2006, Iraqi leaders and U.S. officials understood it to mean the establishment of strong Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regional administrations. The Biden plan would have also begun a phased redeployment of U.S. troops in 2006 and withdrawn most of them by the end of 2007.

Despite deep resistance from the Iraqi government, Mr. Biden tried to turn his plan into U.S. policy, introducing a nonbinding Senate resolution that called for its implementation. But his effort completely backfired in Baghdad. The proposal ended up unifying all the disparate Iraqi factions in opposition.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who called on the Iraqi parliament to meet and formally reject the Biden plan, immediately went on Iraqi television with a blistering statement: “[Biden] should stand by Iraq to solidify its unity and its sovereignty . . . [He] shouldn’t be proposing its division. That could be a disaster not just for Iraq but for the region.”

On “Meet the Press” Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Maliki’s objections because the Iraqi prime minister’s “popularity is very much in question.” Based on what? Most independent analysts who have recently traveled to Iraq point to his heightened popularity as a result of the stabilization of Anbar province, the decimation of al Qaeda in Iraq, and his decision to successfully confront Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in Basra.

The notion that a number of other Iraqi leaders supported the Biden plan is not correct either. Actually, it was just the opposite.

Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala’i, the representative of Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, called the Senate resolution “a step toward the breakup of Iraq. It is a mistake to imagine that such a plan will lead to a reduction in chaos in Iraq; rather, on the contrary, it will lead to an increase in the butchery and a deepening of the crisis of this country, and the spreading of increased chaos, even to neighboring states.”

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars also denounced the plan. “This is a dangerous partitioning based on sectarianism and ethnicity,” said Hashim Taie, a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni party in the parliament.

Qays al-Atwani, the moderator of the popular “Talk of the Hour” television show, interviewed Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis about the Biden resolution. He concluded: “For the first time in Iraq, all political blocs, decision makers and religious authorities agree on rejecting the [Biden] resolution that contradicts the will of the Iraqi people.” The Senate resolution even managed to provoke radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s political supporters to momentarily join their rivals — all in opposition to the Biden plan.

Secular Sunni parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi held a news conference in Baghdad to call on the Iraqi government to formally declare Mr. Biden “a persona non grata” in Iraq. As for Iraq’s neighbors, The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League both denounced the Biden resolution.

The uproar was unsurprising, as partition would have involved expelling Iraqis from their homes. How would a partition work, for example, in major cities like Kirkuk, which is majority Kurdish but also has a large Sunni population, and substantial Christian and Turkomen populations? The likely outcome would have been forced relocation. This could have sparked a wave of renewed sectarian violence, if not civil war.

On Sunday, when Mr. Biden was asked about the current progress in Iraq, he managed to take the lion’s share of the credit: “I’m encouraged because they’re doing the things I suggested . . . That’s why it is moving toward some mild possibility of a resolution.” But we should be grateful that Iraqis did not do as he suggested. Mr. Biden’s frustration with the looming Iraqi civil war in 2006 and early 2007 was understandable. The U.S. was on the verge of total defeat and Iraq was at risk of collapse. But Mr. Biden’s plan would have inflamed Iraq’s already volatile situation.

The Military Industrial Complex: A Tool

of Defense or Dangerous Profit for A Select Few?

Jon Goldsmith

I am not a conspiracy guy, I do not think the government’s motivation for everything is to get more money into the hands of the already rich 1%, but I am extremely skeptical and suspicious of war becoming a means of profit for corporations or those in power.

Let’s for a moment take a look at our current Vice President–Dick Cheney, Mr. Cheney, former CEO of Haliburton, has been approved under the table contracts for the United States Military with specific defense contractors including Haliburton. Since taking office, Cheney has increased his net worth from $8.82 million as CEO of Haliburton to over $30 million as Vice President when the Vice Presidential job only pays a whopping $106,000 per year. His net worth is increasing from something. It is a little suspicious to me that since the Bush administration taking office, Defense contracting corporations have increased net worth by billions in the last 6 quarters alone. Vehicles such as the new Stryker and F-35 Joint Strike fighter in addition to the F-22 Raptor are all going to cost in the high billions of dollars. A single F-22 Raptor unit costs $137.5 million dollars.

Arms manufacturing and sales in the military industrial complex are really like a bigger version of the automaker or for matter of fact, any gadget market. The mustang you had in 1965 worked fine until you heard about the new ford focus with power windows and anti-lock breaks. The old junk works fine, the defense contractors are making things bigger, more expensive, and more deadly to turn a larger profit. The government and the military industrial complex are so synergized that it is nearly impossible to distinguish where Boeing and Lockheed Martin start and the United states government ends.

One cannot deny that the military industrial complex certainly had its uses during the second World War and the cold war by employing millions of americans and stimulating the economy, however, Eisenhower warned in his farewell address against the dangers of war becoming profitable. Washington warned against having large peacetime-standing armies. War cannot become a business. Our army is all volunteer and all they ask for their tremendous sacrifice is that we do not put them in harms way unless it is absolutely necessary–we have violated that trust.