Go Get ’Em, George!

The June 22, 2006, edition of the PBS series “Frontline” carried an interview with Ashton Carter, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy in the Clinton Administration.   

What is most shocking about the Carter interview is the suggestion, if not the recommendation, that it is pointless to negotiate with the North Koreans and that we’d best be prepared to stage a preemptive military strike against North Korean nuclear facilities.

As Carter describes events, in June 1994 the North Koreans were preparing to remove a number of fuel rods containing weapons-grade plutonium from a research reactor at Yongbyon – enough plutonium to develop “at least five or six nuclear weapons.”  

According to Carter, “That was unacceptable to (the Clinton Administration). We were not…confident that we could talk them out of taking that step. Therefore, we looked into the possibility of compelling them by force to set back their nuclear program. We designed a strike of conventional precision munitions on Yongbyon, which we were very confident would destroy the reactor…, and that we could mount such a strike and carry it out without causing…a Chernobyl-like radiological plume downwind.”

However, Carter went on to explain that, “The larger consequences would be far from surgical. North Korea maintains a million men on the DMZ. Thousands of artillery tubes are trained on (American and South Korean positions), and Scud missiles are trained on (Seoul),” the South Korean capital.

“We were confident in 1994 – and I’m sure we’re very confident today – that we would, within just a few weeks, destroy North Korea’s armed forces if they started that war.…We reckoned there would be many, many tens of thousands of deaths: American, South Korean, North Korean, combatant, and non-combatant.” According to Carter, the outcome would never be in doubt, but the loss of life would be “horrific.”

The United States maintains a 37,000-man force south of the DMZ, in support of 600,000 South Korean troops. However, with more than a million North Korean troops, and thousands of long-range artillery pieces and Scud missiles ready to be unleashed on a moment’s notice, the North Korean forces would quickly overrun American and South Korean positions.    

In nearly four years of fighting in Iraq, the United States has suffered some 2,500 casualties.  If the United States were to precipitate a war with North Korea, as suggested by the former Clinton Administration officials, the United States and South Korea could easily suffer ten times that number of casualties in just the first week of fighting.

Up until this point in the interview Carter sounded merely hawkish, for a Democrat, but mostly realistic. But then he apparently remembered the Democratic talking points tucked away in his breast pocket; he suddenly remembered that, in addition to scaring the hell out of people in the United States, Japan, and South Korea, he’d be expected to do it in such a way that it would do some serious political damage to the Bush Administration.

Carter then tells the interviewer, “…The North Koreans take progressive steps toward a nuclear status, and we have not articulated…an overall strategy for dealing with this situation. What is our approach? Are we going to let it happen? Sit back and watch? Are we going to try to talk them out of it?  If we’re going to try to talk them out of it, when are we going to start talking?” And “(if) we are going to use a military option…, who would bear the brunt of an assault from North Korea?”

Liberals and Democrats would have us believe that our military and diplomatic planners should be an open book…but only in Republican administrations, never in Democratic administrations. Recent experience tells us that Democrats are willing to publish even our most closely guarded military secrets if it will allow them to pound their chests about First Amendment rights, while at the same time scoring political points against the hated and despised George W. Bush.

But isn’t it odd how they and their friends in the “drive-by” media can find our four-year casualty figures in Iraq and Afghanistan to be totally unacceptable, reason enough to impeach George W. Bush, yet when the really tough decisions are not theirs to make, when a Republican president sits in the Oval Office, they are willing to quite cavalierly discuss plans to sacrifice the lives of 10,000 or 20,000 Americans in a single week.  

It’s easy sitting in the cheap seats, shouting, “Go get ‘em, George!” What is not so easy is to make the really tough decisions that must be made in the face of a radical Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi insurgency, al Qaeda, and the indescribable dangers posed by madmen in Iran and North Korea with nuclear weapons at their fingertips.