BRITISH FOCUS ON TORTURE WORRIES WASHINGTON

The CIA and the White House are watching nervously as political and public pressure builds in Britain for the truth to be told about the British role in facilitating the rendition of suspects to CIA black sites and to Middle East intelligence services that routinely use torture.
Just like the clamor that forced the British government to launch an open inquiry into the Iraq war there is now similar pressure for a major investigation into whether the British government of Tony Blair permitted British intelligence services to participate in the rendition process and allowed the CIA to house “ghost detainees” at Britain’s Diego Garcia air base in the Indian Ocean. A human rights committee set up by both Houses of the British parliament waded into the fray on August 4, 2009, with a report calling on the government to order an independent inquiry into whether Britain was complicit in the alleged torture of detainees. The committee also issued a stinging criticism of the government for trying to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of the issue. Some commentators in Britain believe this could have the effect of blowing the lid on rendition and torture.
In a move that could have legal repercussions, even in any future inquiry in the United States, the committee laid out the criteria constituting complicity in torture:
1. A request to a foreign intelligence service, known for its systemic use of torture, to detain and question a terrorism suspect.

2. The provision of information to such a foreign intelligence service enabling them to apprehend a terrorism suspect or facilitate their extraordinary rendition.

3. The provision of questions to such a foreign intelligence service to be put to a detainee who has been, is being, or is likely to be tortured.

4. The sending of interrogators to question a detainee who is known to have been tortured by those detaining and interrogating them.

5. The presence of intelligence personnel at an interview with a detainee being held in a place where he is, or might be, being tortured.

6. The systematic receipt of information known or thought likely to have been obtained from detainees subjected to torture.

Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, told the committee that when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, she ordered the intelligence services to disregard any evidence, which they knew had been acquired under torture, but Tony Blair changed that policy after 9/11. David Davis, a former Shadow Cabinet Minister, reacted to the committee’s recommendations by saying he was certain Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, had seen evidence of Britain’s “clear violations of its international obligations.”
For months, the Obama White House has grown increasingly concerned that a British inquiry into rendition could expose the history of the program and how the CIA did business with intelligence services that tortured. Recently, Obama instructed Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton to impress upon her British counterpart, Foreign Sec. David Miliband, the need for the British government to keeping rendition and intelligence acquisition classified matters. After Clinton met Miliband in Washington, he declared publicly that the U.S. and Britain had a unique intelligence sharing relationship based on “fundamental principle that they did not disclose each other’s intelligence publicly.” Nevertheless, deep down Miliband must have known the rendition train had already left the station.
Most British politicians have made it clear they are fed up with the drip-drip of information from government since 2005 when the practice of rendition was first made public. It took years for the government to admit that at least two renditions took place through Diego Garcia. Now, M.P.’s want to know why the Diego Garcia flight records for 2002 to 2008 have vanished without trace. A further scandal has erupted over revelations that the British intelligence agency, MI5, may have been aware of the torture in Morocco of former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Binyamin Mohammed. Two High Court judges have already said, from evidence they reviewed, they believe MI5 sent the CIA questions to ask Mohammed while he was being interrogated.
In 2005, Tony Blair and his then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, gave the House of Commons an assurance that Britain had never played any role in the rendition of suspects. In 2008, David Miliband was forced to apologize to parliament, saying the assurance given by Blair and Straw had been inaccurate. That was followed by the Home Secretary publicly admitting in February 2009 that Britain had played a separate role in the rendition of two suspects from Iraq to U.S. custody in Afghanistan.
There have also been questions asked in parliament about a “ghost detainee,” Mustafa Naser, whose whereabouts have remained a mystery since 2005. His wife has hired British lawyers to pursue the case of her husband because one of their children was born in Britain. Naser is Spanish and a Spanish judge has also launched an investigation into his disappearance. Two retired CIA officers have told Naser’s lawyers he was in CIA custody in 2005 before being transferred to Syrian intelligence for interrogation. The Spanish authorities have sources that suggest he may still be held somewhere in Syria.
One of the cases that may open up the British role in the CIA’s rendition program is that of Mohammed Madni who was pulled off the streets of Jakarta in Indonesia in January, 2002, beaten and placed in American custody. His lawyers say he was put in a coffin and flown by way of Diego Garcia to Cairo where he was tortured by Egyptian intelligence. Later he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay and eventually released without charge. According to Madni, the authorities at Guantanamo admitted they had made a mistake and told him that when he was arrested in 2002 he had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the British government is forced through a court order to admit that Madni was rendered through Diego Garcia, it will open the flood gates to a series of legal actions that could place Britain in the dock of the European Human Rights Court. As Madni’s lawyers have pointed out, if the Blair government knew suspects were being sent for interrogation to countries like Syria and Egypt, they also knew it was not for a Club Med experience.
The ongoing cases in Britain of men who were renditioned is very worrying for Washington because it could shine a light into one of the most questionable and secret programs of the Bush era, especially the CIA’s use of what were termed “black sites.” They were facilities housed within prisons, detainee camps and on board ships in international waters.
While Diego Garcia is believed to have housed at least two major Al Qaeda suspects, others sites included The Salt Pit, an old brick factory outside Kabul in Afghanistan, which was used as a prison but had a sealed off section given over to the CIA. Szymany Airport in Poland, a former Soviet base, was another CIA interrogation and holding center. Temara, an interrogation center within the HQ of the Moroccan security service, was the place where the British detainee, Binyam Mohammed, was held for 18 months. His British lawyers have assembled a large file of information about his captivity including years he later spent at Guantanamo. They claim that while he was being tortured in Morocco his penis was sliced with a knife. Two other CIA “black sites” were located within the Eagle Base in Bosnia and the Ariana Hotel in the center of Kabul, which has been under CIA control since 2001. Camp Bucca, a detainee holding facility in Iraq, close to the border with Kuwait, had within it a classified area used only by the CIA. It was sometimes visited by members of allied and foreign intelligence services. The two U.S. ships that had CIA interrogation facilities were the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu.
The Bataan was previously used as a floating prison and rendition site during the Clinton era, which raises questions about how long rendition has been a secret practice. While many focus on the Bush era as though rendition began then it clearly did not. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, suspects were also “disappeared” and sent to countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia for interrogation. That is why the Obama White House and the CIA fear a wide ranging investigation of rendition in Europe. It could potentially open up a can of words and it might prove difficult to put the lid back on. When Tony Blair was challenged recently about rendition he shocked the Obama White House by suggesting Obama would probably continue using aspects of rendition. Some of Blair’s critics in Britain said it was a typical example of Blair turning the spotlight on others to shield himself from it. Of course, Blair has more to worry about than Obama, Bush or Clinton. He sits at the heart of Europe with a court system that would not flinch from trying him for crimes against humanity if evidence pointed to his guilt. Some British lawyers argue that, if it could be shown Blair approved rendition that led to torture, he could be brought before the international criminal court in The Hague. From Obama’s perspectives, he has made it clear he does not wish to dwell on the past because it could divide the country and complicate his presidency. However, the British inquiry into the Iraq War has the potential to produce startling revelations and if the rendition program was exposed too through yet another inquiry, both those events could force Obama’s hand.

SHAME ON ISRAEL

When protesters were beaten on the streets of Teheran following the recent election there, both parties on Capitol Hill condemned the Iranian regime as fascist and called for sanctions against it. It is only fair to ask why we did not hear from those same Congressional voices when the Israeli military killed 300 children in Gaza. In fact, the overall civilian death toll in Gaza was 1,400 with thousands injured, many of them maimed for life. And, where was the outrage in the White House, or in the mainstream U.S. media, when Israel, which claims to be a modern democracy and America’s premier ally, was committing war crimes against Palestinians?
The answers to those questions have become easier to answer over time. For a start, Israel has enough clout in the corridors of power in Washington to silence criticism. It is also adept at making its critics think twice about speaking out because they risk a withering condemnation from sections of the media and are likely to be branded with an Anti-Semite label. As a consequence, critics of Israel, even within universities, are increasingly reluctant to voice their opinions when Israel’s foreign policies threaten peace in the Middle East or promote military strategies that display a total disregard for civilian life. Israel will continue to deny that it committed war crimes in Gaza but the evidence is now available for all to see and the Israeli military can no longer attribute the death of so many civilians to Hamas by claiming it used civilians as human shields. For anyone with a sense of justice, Amnesty International’s recent report on Israel’s Gaza operation confirms that the Israeli government and its military chain of command lacked a moral compass by showing a total disregard for international law and human life.
Amnesty, like other groups that have looked at the Gaza death toll, reached the conclusion that you cannot, as Israel tried to do, explain away the deaths of so many children by claiming they died in crossfire or were used as human shields. Amnesty goes as far as to say if civilians were used as human shields it was by the Israeli army, who put them in harm’s way and, in some cases, made them go into buildings they suspected were booby trapped.
During the Gaza invasion - codenamed “Cast Lead” - Israel deployed weapons that Amnesty says should never have been used in civilian areas, including Hellfire missiles, phosphorus bombs, 120 mm mortar rounds and tank shells filled with thousands of metal darts that acted like shrapnel. Hospitals were attacked and ambulance staff were killed and prevented from tending civilian wounded for days. Families were directed to homes that were then shelled and over 200 policemen were killed in a sustained bombardment of their facilities. Some civilian victims, including women and children, were clearly shot at close range. Others were terribly maimed when phosphorus bombs were used indiscriminately.
To get a sense of the cruelty of the Israel military the Amnesty report drew attention to two families. The first was the Sammouni extended family that lost 31 of its members in south east Gaza City on January 5, 2009. The day before, Israeli soldiers moved dozens of the family’s members from one of their homes to another and then shelled the second home. Not everyone died immediately. Some took days to die from their injuries because ambulance personnel were not allowed to get to them. A few children who survived were found clinging to their dead mothers. In other instances, Amnesty confirmed that bodies were left decomposing for days in parts of Gaza.
The second example of a family tragedy occurred on January 12, 2009 when a grandmother, mother and three children were sitting outside their home at nine in the morning. They were killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a drone. The missile and drone were supplied to the Israeli military by the U.S.
The Amnesty report concluded that the largest numbers of civilian fatalities and injuries resulted from long range, high precision weapons fired from helicopters, drones, tanks and mortars. The victims were not caught in crossfire, as Israel alleged, and were not used as human shields by Hamas militants.
“Many were killed when their homes were bombed or they slept. Others were going about their daily activities, sitting in their yard, handing the laundry on the roof when they were targeted in air strikes or tank shelling. Children were studying or playing in their bedrooms, or on the roof, or outside their homes when they were struck by missiles or tank shells. Paramedics and ambulances were repeatedly attacked while rescuing the wounded or recovering the dead,” said the report, adding it believed Israel failed to take steps required under international law to protect civilians. Amnesty also unequivocally dismissed Israel’s argument that the deaths of 300 children reflected “collateral damage” and the “panicked reactions of lone soldiers.”
The Amnesty report quoted an Israeli commander, who gave his men the following advice during a security briefing: “I want aggressiveness. If there is someone suspicious on the upper floor of a house, we’ll shell it. If we have suspicions about a house, we’ll take it down. There will be no hesitation. Nobody will deliberate. Let mistakes be over their lives, not ours.”
That particular strategy led to tanks firing shells from a distance of 7 kilometers, with the result that they often collapsed more than one house. In the targeting of a mosque, the house next to it was hit and five girls ranging in age from 4 to 17 years were killed. When shells filled with 5,000 tiny metal darts were fired into Gaza, people in a 300 x 100 meters radius of an exploding shell were at risk of death or serious injury. Amnesty Investigators were disturbed by the fact that since the end of the Gaza operation Israel has refused to explain how high precision weapons, whose operators could see the smallest details of a target, could kill so many women and children.
The indiscriminate use of phosphorus came in for special condemnation by Amnesty yet Gaza was not the first time Israel used the weapon against civilian targets. It fired phosphorus shells into Lebanon and, just as it had done during the Lebanon conflict, it reacted with public outrage when reporters accused it of using the weapon in Gaza. We now know the public outrage was fake because the evidence from Gaza is clear. The Israeli military repeatedly fired phosphorus shells over densely populated parts of Gaza, including a hospital.
“Phosphorus was often launched from artillery shells in air-burst mode, which aggravated the already devastating consequences of the attacks. Each shell ejected over 100 felt wedges with highly incendiary white phosphorus, which rained down over houses and streets, igniting on exposure to oxygen and setting fire to people and property,” said Amnesty, which further accused the Israel military of preventing people from being properly treated for horrific phosphorus burns. The very fact the Israeli Defense Forces did not come clean about using phosphorus meant many lives were not saved because surgeons did not knows what had caused, and how to treat certain types of wounds. The Amnesty report added that white phosphorus and artillery shells were used in attacks that were indiscriminate and violated international law.
“The Israeli military could not have been unaware of the presence of civilians in locations, which were repeatedly attacked……..Israeli forces continued to employ the same tactics for the entire duration of the 22-day offensive……. Much of the destruction was wanton and deliberate. It was often the result of reckless and indiscriminate attacks which were seemingly tolerated or even directly sanctioned up the chain of command, and which at times appeared intended to collectively punish local residents for the actions of armed groups…..Children, women and elderly people were among those trapped and denied access to medical care,” were just some of the report’s conclusions.
Throughout operation “Cast Lead” the Israeli military denied the international media and independent observers access to Gaza and, since then, it has refused to speak to investigators. It has made no effort launch an internal inquiry and that testifies to a mindset that places scant value on the lives of Palestinians. At the very least, Congress should ask Israel to explain why it killed, injured and maimed so many civilians and particularly why it slaughtered 300 children. On the other hand, if Congress and the America mainstream media are not prepared to address the issue, why should Israel? It is made to feel confident that its closest ally will stand by it no matter what crimes it commits.
For those who wonder whether Amnesty dealt with the role of Hamas and its cruelty in targeting innocents Israelis with rockets, Amnesty condemned Hamas outright. But the actions of Hamas, which is not a State funded to the tune of billions by U.S. taxpayers, paled in significance to Israel’s sustained bombardment of Gaza. Had any other nation launched an operation like “Cast Lead” against a densely populated civilian enclave Congress and the White House would have called it an international outrage. The Obama White House, Congress and the mainstream media prefer to condemn the Iranian regime while turning a blind eye to the slaughter of innocents in Gaza. Condemning Israel would raise questions about the heavy subsidies and weapons its military receives from the U.S. In particular, one might want to ask why America continues to fund a military with a seemingly total disregard for international laws.

AFGHAN WAR COULD LAST DECADES

With Afghanistan’s presidential elections looming and the war widening, NATO has no exit strategy and some nations within the alliance are not pulling their weight.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration is committed to sending more troops and to carrying the bulk of the workload for a new counter insurgency policy, which has no guarantee of success. In Washington, gone are the goals of winning the war and making Afghanistan a model democracy, which were some of the aims of the Bush administration. Gone too is the Tony Blair promise of 2006 that Afghanistan would be a “quick in - quick out” affair. Instead, the latest policy is designed to enable troops to clear areas so they can be held while efforts are made through policing and economic programs to help communities rebuild.
It is a strategy that worked well in parts of Iraq but it faces serious obstacles in Afghanistan. For a start, while NATO may have the troops to clear areas of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants it does not have the manpower to continue to hold those same areas long after they have been liberated. It also lacks the policing elements communities will need for a peaceful rebuilding to lead to the creation of proper governance. Therefore, the holding and rebuilding elements of the counter insurgency strategy could prove to be its downfall because their success will depend on manpower being provided by the Afghan army and police. Unfortunately, the Afghan army has not shown that it can be trusted to independently keep areas safe from militants and policemen are not only renowned for being corrupt, they are feared by local people throughout the country. NATO also recognizes that the Afghan government may not be able to provide much needed support for the new plan since its authority rarely extends much beyond the capital, Kabul. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who is likely to be re-elected, has lost much of the support he received when first elected president in 2004. In the intervening years, he has brought corrupt officials and discredited warlords into his administration and, as a consequence, he has lost the confidence of the U.S. and many of its allies. Given that the Afghan army and police will be vital components in the counter insurgency strategy there is a growing worry among NATO top brass that Karzai is not the ideal partner.
British and U.S. generals are nonetheless agreed that failure in Afghanistan could lead to a resurgent Al Qaeda and more importantly the collapse of Pakistan. The prospect of Pakistan becoming an extreme Islamist state with its finger on the nuclear button is a nightmare scenario Western military planner have had to contemplate. Therefore, avoiding failure in Afghanistan will require the full and unqualified commitment of all NATO members to a unified Command - something that has been lacking for years. One British general is on record complaining that, until this year, the Command was in such a mess there was near anarchy at its highest levels. While major Command improvements have been made, there continues to be resentment in London and Washington that some NATO members are content to sit back and let the U.S. and British do the hard fighting. That has forced the British government to point out that burden sharing, which has always been a shared principle of NATO, must be “honored in practice and not just in theory.”
As more U.S. troops join the fight there is no indication the Obama administration has an exit strategy. The problem for Obama is that Afghanistan’s history of lawlessness, drugs cultivation, tribal disputes and lack of central governance will not be altered overnight. Lord Paddy Ashdown, a diplomat and former Royal Marines officer, has argued that even with the right troop levels, it could take 25 years. He accepts NATO alone cannot fundamentally reset Afghanistan and it will also be up to its disparate tribes to commit themselves to change. That is easier said than done when the Afghan government is discredited and powerless. For that reason, NATO is going ahead with its plans to energize politically and economically the areas it clears of militants. The British, who have a long history in counter-insurgency warfare, believe NATO must also reach out to Taliban members who are not driven by ideology. Those Taliban, they argue, should be encouraged to return to their homes and offered a role in the reconstruction process. They should even be given jobs in the Afghan army or police.
The counter insurgency strategy is a high risk one and it will come with increasing casualties, which may result in a weakening of public support among Europeans. In the meantime, the politics of the NATO role may require calibration if, as expected, Hamid Karzai is re-elected president. He has said he intends to seek a new “contract of partnership” with NATO in which Afghans are not, “losing their lives, their property, and their dignity as a consequence of the partnership." However, amidst all the recent chat in Washington and other NATO capitals about the war his name has rarely been spoken. The British Foreign Secretary, David Milibrand, made no reference to him when outlining the British proposal for dealing with non-ideological Taliban elements. It is therefore difficult to see how NATO can work effectively with him in the future. Earlier this year, the State Department had to pressure him to abandon a plan to allow a warlord, General Rashid Dostum, to return from exile in Turkey to join his administration. Dostum was a U.S. ally at the start of the Afghan invasion in 2001 but it was later alleged he killed close to 2,000 Taliban prisoners by locking them in metal containers and leaving them in the sun. Nicknamed “Heavy D” and “D-Diddy,” Dostum has a reputation for changing sides. During the Soviet occupation he fought against the Mujahideen before eventually joining them. In 2005, Karzai appointed him Chief of Staff to the Commander of the army but then ordered him into exile in Turkey in 2008 after he was involved in the kidnapping of a rival. The U.S. and Britain would prefer Dostum remained abroad because he could switch allegiances at any moment. The very fact that the State Department had to lean heavily on Karzai over the issue was an indication to some that Karzai’s judgment was seriously flawed and his continuing presence as president will not benefit NATO in the long term. On the vital question of how long NATO will remain in Afghanistan, well that is now anybody’s guess.

RUSSIA & CHINA COULD BREAK KOREAN CRISIS

Many Americans watching today’s Korean crisis are unaware that the Korean War, in which millions died, never ended in 1953. Instead, hostilities were brought to a close and since then a ceasefire and demilitarized zone have been the only things standing in the way of a renewed conflict that this time could see many more casualties because of the threatened use of weapons of mass destruction.
Recent Pentagon war games have concluded that if the war resumes, US and South Korean military casualties will be half a million in the first 90 days. Civilian casualties will reach into the millions very quickly. With that assessment in mind, the Obama White House is desperate to find a way to manage an escalating situation that has not been helped by decades of foreign policy blunders and more recently by belligerent statements from neocons of the Bush years. When Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary he declared the U.S. could not only fight a war in Iraq but one in Korea at the same time and win both. He also called for regime change, which was a Bush doctrine mantra.
Even knowing North Korea was being run by a seriously dysfunctional family, the Bush White House never developed a coherent strategy for dealing with a regime that uses heated rhetoric, political blackmail and the threat of force just to get the aid it desperately needs to feed its starving people. Whatever food it has is used to feed its army of 1.5 million men and women.
The Bush White constantly blamed China for not reining in the Korean leader, Ki, Jong-il and his cohorts by them refusing them aid, but the reality was that China feared taking any action that would result in North Korea collapsing. That fear has heightened in 2009 with the realization that an imploding North Korea would have a major economic impact on China. Millions of North Koreans would flow across the border looking for food and shelter. China also worries that if a war broke out the U.S. would win it and a united Korea would result in a pro-American state at its back door. For those reasons alone, China is now considering placing serious diplomatic pressure on North Korea. It realizes that the regime’s renewed belligerence risks setting off events that could get out of control.
The deputy chief of China’s general staff, Ma Xiaotin, said as much in May when he admitted that “all countries big and small, rich and poor, strong or weak have a strong responsibility to safeguard regional stability.” It was an admission that China and other nations, not necessarily in the region, had a major role to play in reducing tensions. In June, an editorial in China Global Times, a state- controlled newspaper, complained that North Korea “did not respect China’s advice and put the Chinese government in an awkward position by producing security crises in East Asia.” That was intended as warning to Kim Jong-il that Beijing was losing patience with him. Meanwhile, the Russians have been using backdoor channels to encourage China to take a tougher stand with the regime and Moscow has indicated that it too is willing to use its economic links with N. Korea to bring the regime to the negotiating table. Recently, the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, stressed that he was opposed to an expansion of the nuclear club. He added that he felt North Korea was endangering international security and that was an “unacceptable” reality.
It may come down to Russia and China providing the mechanism whereby the Obama administration can defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula and ultimately in the region. That will not, however, solve the underlying problems North Korea poses for Obama. They may take much longer to deal with. For example, the North Koreans are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future because they regard them as bargaining chips in their bid to stay afloat economically.
China has increased its exports to North Korea at least four-fold in the past five years even though it does not get paid for them. Therefore those exports are essentially a form of aid. If China were to reduce its exports the move could be more effective than sanctions. Were Russia to follow suit it might force the Kim Jong-il to negotiate.
In the final analysis, the U.S. will still have to make major decisions about how it sees its role in that part of the world, irrespective of whether it can, with the help of Russia and China, defuse tensions for the time being. In the longer term, it is unlikely North Korea is going to have a regime other than the unstable one it has presently and the U.S. must decide whether it wants to play policeman in that part of the world or simply diplomat.
Some within the Obama Administration, especially Dr. Kurt Campbell, who is soon to become assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, believe the developing Korean crisis offer an opportunity for a strategic realignment in relations with Japan and South Korea. However, any rebuilding of that axis will have to take into account the fact the U.S. is obliged to hand back operational control of South Korean forces to South Korea in 2012. The move is being opposed by conservative politicians in South Korea, who would like the U.S. to delay or abandon the handover. Those same elements would also like S. Korea to have an independent nuclear deterrent, something the United States has all always opposed. The planned transfer of operational military control now looms large as tensions rise and the U.S. will have to decide if it wishes to remain tied to a war that has not ended, or stand back, withdrawing its troops and working with other powers to defuse the situation through a mixture of diplomacy and sanctions.
Japan, for its part, is acutely aware of the threat from North Korea because the North Korean testing of ballistic missiles has sent missiles over Japanese territory. There has also been a debate within Japan about whether it should have a stronger foreign policy that requires less reliance on the U.S. and whether it should consider developing a potent military. Ultimately, Japan will vote to remain within a tight strategic partnership that embraces Washington and Seoul. During the Bush years, Japan felt isolated from Washington but now feels it could benefit from a clearer foreign policy relationship with the U.S.
Dr. Kurt Campbell will likely move Obama towards a stronger partnership with allies in the region but, in terms of a strategy for handling the deadlock with N. Korea, he will advocate a mixture of diplomacy and sanctions imposed with the support of China and Russia. Back in 1997, he told a Department of Defense sub-committee that only North Korea and South Korea could resolve the divisions in Korea. At that time he recommended that the U.S. should merely play the role of facilitator. If he gives the same advice to Barack Obama he will, in effect, be saying America should not play the policeman and but merely be the enabler of a process of dialogue between the two parts of Korea.
The one danger that cannot be dismissed, however, is that an ailing Kim Jong- il or his 25-year-old son, who is likely to succeed him, will light a spark that will engulf the whole region in war. In that event, the military options for protecting the 38,000 U.S. military personnel on the DMZ and the South Korean capital, Seoul, which is within range of at least 10,000 artillery pieces, many of them capable of firing shells carrying chemical and biological weapons, are limited. There is also the nuclear package the North might deliver and its massive army. The White House has made it clear that nothing will be off the table in the event of major hostilities and that means America’s superior nuclear arsenal would come into play. But all of that should be considered a doomsday scenario while there are opportunities to work with allies and others to try to move North Korea towards meaningful dialogue. The alternative is unthinkable.
If the U.S. goes ahead with the planned transfer of operational control of South Korea’s forces to South Korea in 2012 that might offer an opportunity for the U.S. to withdraw its troops from the DMZ and ultimately out of South Korea. That would not imply the U.S. had no strategic partnership with South Korea or Japan. Instead it would be an indication the U.S. now felt other countries should be in the business of solving their own problems without expecting the U.S. to play the role of world policeman.