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| Flickr user: Joseph A Ferris III |
I was at a dinner with friends last night following a conference on peacebuilding, when someone announced that North Korea had declared that is was in a "state of war" with South Korea, and almost by extension, the US. The group, mostly international relations experts, quickly broke into a kind of excited, mocking flurry of conversation. I confess to joining in the sarcastic hand wringing while brushing off the (remote but real) possibility of war against the US mainland.
North Korea, we are told, really does not have the capability to mount an attack against the US positions in Guam or Hawaii as it claims to be preparing, much less a strike against Washington DC or Austin, Texas, another purported target. The constant stream of threats against the "Imperialist Americans" and their South Korean "puppets," which have reached fever pitch in recent weeks, is mainly for domestic consumption, so say the experts. The Kim dynasty bases its rule on a manufactured strength through bellicosity; the new "dear leader", Kim Jung Un, is simply going through the motions of strengthening his base and consolidating his rule.
As part of this wave of threats and declarations, the North Korean state has released a series of images and video featuring Kim Jung Un touring military facilities and observing military drills. It appears that some of the images emanating from the so-called Hermit Kingdom have been doctored to show a greater strike capacity than really exists, or to hide embarrassing equipment malfunctions. One article shows eight hovercraft, four or five of which appear to be clones of the others, airbrushed to look like a more robust invasion force, conducting beach landing drills.
I admit, to me many of these images and outrageous rhetoric strike me as a government "playing war"--dressing up, building big forts, and making fantastical claims about the destruction of their enemies. It doesn't help, I suppose, that Kim and his junta of generals--who always seem to be dressed in ill-fitting uniforms and overcoats, complete with ridiculously oversized visor caps--are perpetually paying homage to the fantasies in which the pudgy Kim supposedly is born of heaven or achieved miraculous feats on the battlefield. Kim's "US Mainland Strike Plan," replete with unrealistic straight-line ballistic trajectories, sounds like something I might have dreamt up as an eight year old.
In that sense, it all seems very childlike. But no matter how ridiculous, symbols and threats have real consequences, and the room for error seems to be shrinking.
Speaking on BBC news this weeks, Duyeon Kim of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation described a situation in which the North embarks on the kind of small scale attack like the 2010 sinking of the (South Korean) Cheonan or shelling of a disputed island. In those cases, cooler heads prevailed, but as Kim explains, the South's new president Park Geun-hye has given military leaders the go-ahead to respond to Northern provocations without prior word from Seoul, thus reducing the space between miscalculation, overreach and escalation.
In such a scenario the US could easily become involved; so too could China. And again, while it seems likely that American troops and technology would save the South from becoming the "sea of fire" that the North promises, the loss of life, particularly among Northerners, would likely be devastating. Most observers pin the North Korean army at around 1.2 million. It isn't clear how many reserve forces or citizen militia could be called up in the case of war, or if this contingency force figures in to the 1.2 million number. Either way, the possibility of so many souls marching to their death for the sake of a tyrannic dictator should take some of the sheen of amusement from the North's recent gestures.
One might question my sympathy for the soldiers of a regime like Kim's, but in a state like North Korea, not unlike Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, it is nearly impossible, particularly for outsiders, to draw lines between the willing and the coerced--between the guilty and innocent.
