The Center for International Policy’s Selig Harrison has a solution to the problem of North Korean bellicosity – force our South Korean allies to make concessions on issues not in play:
The Northern Limit Line was so named because it was meant to impose a limit on any potential South Korean encroachment into North Korea. The South’s president, Syngman Rhee, still dreamed of winning the war — he refused to sign the armistice — and repeatedly vowed to overthrow the Pyongyang regime.
Rhee’s hopes were never realized, but one thing the Northern Limit Line did was to give the best fishing grounds in the area to South Korea. It’s no coincidence that many of the clashes there have occurred during the summer crab-fishing season. If the boundary were refashioned in a more equitable way, tensions would undoubtedly ease.
And, fortunately, President Obama has the authority to redraw the line. On July 7, 1950, a United Nations Security Council resolution established the United Nations Command for Korea and designated the United States as the executive agent, with authority to name its commander. That original command is still with us today in vestigial form. It is commanded by Gen. Walter Sharp, who is thus the current successor to Gen. Mark Clark, who signed the 1953 armistice.
The Obama administration would do well to consult with both Seoul and Pyongyang on where to best set the new boundary, get an agreement from both governments to abide by it, and put it on the map. South Korea should not be given a veto over the redrawing. And North Korea should be warned that any future provocations on its part like the shelling of Yeonpyeong will result in swift, appropriate retaliation by the joint forces of the United States and South Korea.
Ideally, redrawing the line would not only ease the present crisis, but also set the stage for negotiations among the United States, North Korea and China on a peace treaty that would replace the temporary armistice and formally end the Korean War.
Ideally, the Anschluss would have satisfied Hitler. But then of course there were those Germans living in the Sudetenland and Danzig.
All that this would serve to do is to embolden our already maniacally energized enemies while enraging our allies.
Some people never learn.
Mmm…Let’s see if I can get this straight now. An aggressor attacks–out of the blue–a nation at peace, is rebuffed, and
for it’s aggression loses the best fishing waters off it’s coast as part a mutually agreed-upon by ALL parties “temp” settlement called an “Armistice.” NOW, we are to unilaterally reward not only the aggressors *original* aggression, i.e., what he could not achieve by force of arms but his further aggressive and illegal depredations against South Korea–with no resultant quid pro quo. It’s all very clear to me. I see it all now–perfectly logical in Lefty-World. Unfortunately the rest of us have to live on the same planet with them.
Space travel can’t come quick enough. We’ll even buy their one-way tickets…charitable contributions won’t be hard to come by..
Isn’t the Northern Limit Line the Yalu River?
3 words: land for peace.
It worked so well for Israel, it can’t help but work for South Korea.
And soon it’ll work for the US as well, ceding Texas, New Mexico, and southern California to Mexico in exchange for promises to stop the flow of illegal immigrants.
And North Korea should be warned that any future provocations on its part like the shelling of Yeonpyeong will result in swift, appropriate retaliation by the joint forces of the United States and South Korea.
Swift and utterly inappropriate and disproportionate would be a better idea.
Seriously, how highly educated do you have to be to become this stupid?
Brad, if you go to Journalism school, then you to can aspire to be that ignorant. Doesn’t that just excite you all to pieces?
Upgefucht.
So let’s see – a line drawn in the water, which inequitably distributes the resources available from those waters, is a major bone of contention that may well result in a war which could kill tens of thousands of people and destroy God only knows how much real estate. And we don’t want to be seen as stiffing our “Ally”, who, while light years away from the vile crowd, to include Syngman Rhee, running around some 50 years ago (a large majority of whom were Japanese colaborators), because … well, I’m not sure since if there was an invasion from the north the 30K plus American sitting there would more than share the brunt of assault, so we’d sure and hell feel the pain of being appeasers.
North Korea on the whole is a reprehensible entity, BUT for as much as it’s responsible for great evil and harm in the world, what’s often overlooked and more often not even realized is how equally bad were the South Koreans (did I mention that most of those in power back then were in league with the Japanese? Yeah, I guess I did, and it was those in the North who resented this … I wonder how we’d feel about this here were the shoes on our feet) were during the war and for a good number of decades afterwards. Many tens of thousands of Koreans were slaughtered by the south, and we often either turned a blind eye or aided and abetted the process, to include napalming the north to a cinder (if that’s not a war crime I don’t know what is – I know of nothing ANYWHERE that justifies, legally or morally, the destruction of civilians to the degree that we did in Japan, German, North Korea and North Vietnam, and what’s even more ironic is the overwhelming evidence that for whatever the justification it doesn’t work as planned, i.e. it doesn’t destroy civilian morale and the will to continue the war, it just pisses them off all the more – who’d have thought, not us, clearly.) Yet no one talks of this today, instead painting an easy picture of the whackos up north. They may be whacko, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t bonafide reasons to be pissed off with the south and us.
Moving a line a bit to avoid a war, when our tails are in the end on the line for it? Yeah, go for it, if you can get the whackos to sit down at a table and commit to starting to act like adults. If we got that it’s WELL worth it – how likely it is to happen, I’m not holding my breath, both because the whackos are whacko and haven’t seen much advantage to acting otherwise, and too many of us don’t bother to understand how our peaceful ally today wasn’t nearly that not that long ago, and helped, wiht us, to make the whackos whacko.
And then when they want the line moved “a bit” more, what? Move it south again? And the time after that? The time to stop paying protection money is on the first demand for it, not after giving away the house to pay it.
Actually, they’re not the ones “asking” for anything. This is a suggestion from the author of the article in question, one intended to maybe help defuse a situation that’s been ongoing there for a long time.
My point being, in toto, is that our knee jerk response in this country to anything to do with the NK’s is they’re wrong and evil, so what can we do to de-stabilize the country and get out the current leadership (I’m all for the latter.) What’s often missed and largely not even known is what has created the current situation, what our part in it was, and maybe it’s worth some time and effort to try to work with the NK’s. If they can’t be reasonable or worked with, and God knows they’ve shown that often enough in the past, then we have the status quo, nothing gained, nothing lost. We’re still there, we’re still on the line for anything that may happen, life goes on with the constant threat of things going sour. If moving a line in the water shows some willingness to work with those in power maybe it’d do more than floating a CV BG through their waters, and in the long run do more to facilitate what we all want – a united country with the nut jobs out.
“Carrots” of appeasement have led to what we have now. The very nuclear reactors and much of the technology that he uses came to KJI as a gift long ago, for initially agreeing to sign the NPT in 1985. We (and the rest of the world) have given them food and oil which they use to heat and feed their armies. The remaining cash goes into weapons because a large portion of their income comes from weapons sales (as well as narcotics and counterfeiting operations). South Korea built a giant industrial complex, Kaesong, the number one cash cow in the DPRK. Read a little about what’s going on with that, I won’t spoil it.
Here’s some perspective: we actually had nuclear warheads pointed north, at the DMZ, until 1991 when we dismantled them as part of an ostensible denuclearization pact with the DPRK for the entire peninsula. How did that one pan out? “Life goes on” as you say….until the DPRK exports nuclear material to someone willing to use it. Incidentally, KJI’s government actually asserted last year that they are in a ‘state of war’ with South Korea and declared that it unilaterally withdrew from the Armistice anyway.
I have noticed a certain tendency – I do not know what else to call it – for some to argue that inconvenient facts from decades ago somehow prevent us from doing anything positive about inconvenient facts in the here and now. According to this tendency, we had no moral standing to object to Saddam Hussein’s recklessness and tyranny in 2003 because Rumsfeld shook hands with him in 1983. We cannot now object to Iran’s impending nuclearization because the CIA had a hand in Mossadegh’s 1953 overthrow. And now we are counseled that what is today a free and vibrant democracy, allied to us in a critical part of the world, must not be supported in favor of a brutal, murderous thugocracy because 60 years ago there was not so much to distinguish the two parties.
It’s important to let our understanding of history inform our discussions, but for progress to occur we must not let history blind us to the realities of the here and now, nor bludgeon us into relativistic passivity.
The time to do a post-mortem on a rabid dog is after he is dead.
Inconvenient facts? You see, they’re “inconvenient facts” in the context of the American perspective. For others, whom we so often are unable to understand or appreciate largely based on our self-centeredness and general ignorance, and of course our incredible tendency to wrap ourselves in the self-righteous perspective of we do no wrong, those inconvenient facts are very real and still open wounds, made especially problematic when we wonder why the heck they just can’t get over it and get on with life, typically American but atypical for cultures that focus on the past as much as the future.
Now let’s not trivalize the destruction, largely through the use of napalm, the wonder chemical of WWII, of the better part of a nation, and the random, systematic, and unjustified (well, unless the rules of war were somewhere changed) slaughter of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. You’re going to equate that with shaking hands with a tyrant or with helping to overthrow a government? Honestly, your moral compass and sense of perspective, sir, is a bit askew.
You’re right, history should inform our discussion – how many really know what sort of destruction was wraught upon the NOKs? Or what sorts of dirt bags the SKs in power were, but who we supported largely under the flag of “They Kill Commies Good”, at least so long as they’re unarmed or otherwise lightly armed as anything else more often than not had ROK troops hightailing in an opposite direction.
And who is saying that the South shouldn’t be supported? You’re twisting what you’re reading there Lex. I said very clearly that what’s there now deserves to flourish as it’s shucked off its past and made a better place for its people. But to relegate people to the category of rabid dogs without a sense of why they’re rabid, that speaks to little to no appreciation of history or in anyway trying to understand why what is came to be and how we might resolve what is by some other means than killing the “rabid dogs” as that hasn’t worked for the last 60 odd years. The SOBs in power ain’t going away anytime soon, and anyone with a sense of history would have figured that out by now. So maybe we should be taking a different tack on this, hopefully one that will derail nuclear ambitions and other nasty things that go bump in the night north of the 38th parallel as the alternative will indeed most likely topple the rabid dogs in power, after doing incalculable carnage and damage to both the north and the south.
The rabid dog lying dead in my yard was healthy and viabrant as a pup, but that dog is better off dead at this particular time.
You going to bother to detail that “different tack”? Or are you more content to simply sneer down from the peanut gallery? Because, all I’m hearing from all of your posts is “look how evil OUR side is”. I’m getting a bit tired of how moral relativism gets used as a smokescreen.
Moral relativism? Now that’s interesting. No, I’m thinking more along the lines of moral balance, decidedly missing in a discussion regarding the NOK. We’re good, they’re bad, and apparently you like it that way because … well, it makes you feel good, I’m sure, and that’s nice, but is divorced from reality on the whole, a reality that most, to include I’d guess you, share. But it’s not that black and white, by a long shot, and most people, for the very reasons I just laid out, are hardly aware of it. What’s relativistic about that? I see it as recognizing reality, so I’d look at it as moral realism. Now all things considered given them and us I’d chose us, without hesitation. But to lack an understanding of them, and to not appreciate why they have long standing issues with us, well that’s divorced from being able to get anything done because you have no basis to understand what it is you’re dealing with and how to address or correct it.
Now as for laying out a different tack: I don’t presume to be a diplomat, or to have my fingers on the pulse of what the average American, who thinks we’re the moral exemplars of the world (and as you may have concluded by now, we’re hardly that), is willing to buy off on. What I do know if continuing on the tack we’ve been on has gotten us no where, and to not consider other options is to maintain the status quo or worse. So if you’re so interested in the different tack (well, maybe re-drawing that sea line that’s been the cause of so much fuss of late, that would be a different tack to start with), demand something new from those who are responsible for this, or otherwise be willing to watch things as they unfold, as most are.
One more for you: How is very nearly wiping out a nation with napalm and killing countless numbers of noncombatants, done in three wars not just one, and acknowledging that as wrong and worth consideration when dealing with a nation still pissed off with us, relativistic? I see not understand that as a stunted perspective.
Just curious: Who do you think the moral exemplars of the world are?
In modern industrial war it is all but impossible to be a non-combatant. You will be supporting the war in some way. In Japan a lot of there industrial output came from cottage industry. Curtis LeMay, and others, described what they saw when they put their boots on the ground in Japan soon after VJ day. Machine tools were about the only thing surviving in a lot of houses around factories.
Yes, we burned women and little girls. I don’t think anyone who posts here would view that with relish. It is reprehensible, but it happens with war. I would also point out that Japan delivered the opening blow and, consequently, brought it on themselves.
I don’t have to like burning women and little girls. But if my country calls me to war in a conflict such as that against Japan I would work to do my part to end the conflict with victory for my country. If the targets I have to take out means burning women and children, then I do it without hesitation. I may shed tears at the barbarity of it, but I’ll toggle the bombs while those tears fall.
War is sometimes necessary. Just imagine what might have happened if we had surrendered to Japan instead the opposite. I’ll take the historical outcome if it’s all the same to you.
James, do you even know what napalm is? It is a tactical weapon, not a burn a city to the ground weapon. I think it is a word you don’t like, without even knowing what it is.
QM, Arthur Harris omce said that you can build a factory in a year, but it takes 25 years to raise a machine tool operator.
As Kipling put it,”if you pay the Dane the Geld, you never get rid of the Dane.”
Giving despots what they want never works. They just move the goal posts. The left in this country works the same way.
Hey, J. T. Wenting … Don’t y’all go “ceding Texas” to Mexico. We who live here might, if the rest of the country keeps bugging us with nutty ideas like this, choose to secede from the U.S. of A., since when we consented to join the United States, we had already been a Republic on our own, and before we joined you, we specified that if you guys acted up sufficiently badly, we could always go back to being the Republic of Texas again.
The borders of Texas are our borders, and we’ll fight for them, as often as necessary until you Yankees stop challenging our state sovereignty, and those folks from south of our borders learn once again to respect them.
There. I feel better.
Marianne
I love transplanted Confederates. You were obviously, as a good friend in Ohio put it, a Yankee only by geographic accident.
Don’t forget to mention the part where we only seceded from Mexico after a tyrant tore up the Mexican Constitution and declared himself dictator for life. We weren’t the only Mexican state to rebel against him, either; we just happened to be the farthest north (he put down the other rebellions, rather brutally). Even then, if not for what could be considered a legitimate miracle, we’d have been his next conquest, making this issue rather moot.
Dang, Marianne, I haven’t seen you that riled up in forever. It’s a shame more folks around the country don’t understand the sovereignty of the various Republics comprising the nation. Those in California could use a refresher course.
I understand certain inhabitants in Northern Mexico, particularly Sonora, believe the new border with Arizona is somewhere along Interstate 8. Reports I’ve read have it that some have even begun defending their newly acquired ‘territory’ with guns, which is leading to open gunfights in broad daylight with native Arizonans and their supporters.
Y’all in Texas keep it up, and don’t give ‘em an inch.
Of course! The dispute is simply over fish. And the periodic attacks at the DMZ are over…um potato crops. And the tunnels that have been dug underground that are large enough to allow tanks and 30,000 troops to pass per hour…they were just digging for turnips.
There really aren’t a lot of DPRK apologists left. It’s almost charming to see one. Kind of like Hans Blix in Team America, floating in that shark pit.
Quartermaster … Yes, my husband has always defined me as “the most Northern of the Southern girls,” and says that I got down here as soon as I could. I’m reminded of an old Brit saying about being more Royalist than the King. Can’t help it. I know that J. T. Wenting was probably kidding, but I felt I ought to draw a line in the sand. Just to clarify….
Marianne
P.S. When I’m feeling cranky, I fly the Gadsden flag from our front porch
Try flying the Confederate First National flag to really confuse people. Or maybe the Sterling Price flag: http://s243.photobucket.com/albums/ff30/subdjoe/?action=view¤t=ATT000312.jpg
When I was Morgan County Engineer I laughed when I saw a Confederate display with a First national Flying over it. Ia asked people if they noticed the Confed flag over in Malta across the river. I got some real strange looks. And this was a town that held annual “War of Northern Aggression” days.
When I was just a wee small badger, there was a tv show called, Animals, Animals, Animals, and the theme song went, Because there’s animals, animals, animals eveywhere! There are times that I feel as if I am in a spin off, because there’s idiots, idiots, idiots everywhere!
At times it makes ya wish Dad’s was an intoxicant.
James, the Germans had legitimate historical grievances stemming from Versailles. The western democracies guilt over those injustices, and their appeasement of the Nazis who flamed the fires of those grievances did the world no favors. Not for the Russians, Brits and French. Nor even for the Deutsche volk.
It may be true that Americans are more interested in setting the conditions for a better future than in re-litigating the past. But the lessons of the most recent Balkan genocides makes that seem to me far the better approach.
Rewarding tyrants for their importunities also has a sad history.
Again, I think you’re missing the boat here.
The Germans had legitimate grievances, but over conditions imposed on them for a war they were largely responsible for starting, and economic hardships imposed by the Treaty were onerous, certainly, but how does that compare to wiping out the better part of a nation and the associated noncombatants living there? There are grievances and then there are grievances, and as the Jews will surely tell you some count more than others, yet we don’t seem to acknowledge that with countries still pissed off with us over those very grievances.
Re-litigating the past … that’s not the point. One, we don’t appreciate the past in this country mostly because it means so little to us when so many of us are from somewhere else and the future is what’s important here. And for cultures where the past is a very real issue and thing of value, well our not appreciating and understanding this sets the stage for no progress between the parties concerned.
I’m not advocating appeasing anyone, but rather trying harder to acknowledge past wrongs, of which we and the ROK are surely guilty of (actually the ROK had its own version of Truth and Reconcilliation counsels to address many of the longstanding and hurtful issues of the war and before and after, yet we see no reason for that here – hell, get people to even think about dropping an atom bomb on Japan at the Smithsonian, merely bringing the matter to a point of discussion and reflection, gets the VFW on a headhunt for Smithsonian upper echelon types), and making reasonable concessions which can be verified and worked through in such a way that can acknowledge progress or otherwise set the clock back. Again, the main point is acknowledging a past that’s hardly clear or clean, and moving forward from there.
No, I think we’re talking past each other. I’m just not one of those who needs to get it all off his chest and have a good cry when the barbarians are at the gate.
Do you honestly think that bringing the Norks to the table and admitting that everyone was pretty much beastly to everyone else after the end of the Japanese occupation will bring us any closer to “peace for our time? Because I don’t. And while the Germans may have had it coming to them – those old enough to remember World War I anyway – the same might be said to be true of the North Koreans, who aggressively attempted a conquest of their own brothers and sisters. No doubt the South would have been better off if they’d won, yah? At least the electricity bills would be lower.
You clearly feel differently, and in any case, rather than confine your discussion to the instant topic would prefer to roll around in Hiroshima for a while. Might as well throw in slavery and the native American genocide, while you’re at it.
Well, help yourself to that, because so far as I’m concerned you’re welcome to all of mine.
The Germans didn’t largely start WW1. It started as a fight between Serbia and the Austrians, whose Crown Prince was murdered by a Serbian. Germany came in because of alliance with Austria-Hungary because Russia came in. The Brits and Franks came in because of alliances with Russia. The entire thing took on a life of its own and cascaded out of control. I have as yet to see a persuasive argument that could assign blame to any one party to the conflict for starting the war they ended up with.
All the crowned heads were related, through Victoria, as I recall, thus leading to the largest family spat the world had ever seen.
Ah, yes, the Evil Nuclear Weapon argument. Perhaps Operation Downfall would have been better. Because they had been fighting us for 3 1/2 tears, the IJN and the IJA knew the type of shore we would need to put division sized units ashore, and the type of tidal conditions we would need. The Imperial High Command went to the Emperor, and said that, ” We know where the Americans need to come ashore, and the time that they can come ashore. There is nothing we can do to stop them. All we can do is make them pay. We know that we will lose at least 20 Million killed, and Japan may cease to exist, but the World will remember that we stood up to the Americans.”
We believed that we would take 200,000 casualties in Operation Coronet, the invasion of Kyushu. We had 8 TAFFIES flying all fighter Air Groups assigned to defend the Gators, but the Japanese had discovered that wooden framed training planes were invisible to radar, so the CVEs would have been hunting many of the kamikazis optically. At night.
Operation Olympic, the invasion of Honshu would have been a bloodbath. We planned on going straight up the Kanto Plain, to Tokyo. At the time, the Kanto was mostly rice paddys, so our troops would have been fighting along the dikes between the paddies, with artillery and mortars zeroed in every inch of the way. Total casualties were estimated for the Allied Forces were 750,000-1,000,000.
Personally, I would rather end the war with 300,000 casualties inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, than having to kill 20 million Japanese. I will say that a better aim point for release at Nagasaki than the nice radar return from the copper roof of Urakami Cathederal could have been found. but even so, better to end the war, NOW.
South Korea should start it’s own nuclear program. This would accomplish a couple of things. First, even if they were unsuccessful, we would take them more seriously, and they could get concessions from the U.S. and the UN.
Secondly, if they managed to succeed and had a few deliverable weapons, even of battlefield size, they could thwart the inevitable attack from the N.Koreans. South Korea needs to see to it’s own defense, I think it very unlikely that the U.S. would commit forces. It seems much more likely that we will negotiate with the N.Koreans and come away with an agreement that guarantees peace in our time.
Twenty years ago, South Korea did have nuclear weapons facing North. We took them out in ostensible exchange for DPRK cooperation to disarm the penninsula of nuclear weapons.
Is Selig Harrison somehow related to Daladier or Chamberlain? Just askin’….