North Korea’s New Target Opportunity
Get this (via the Times OnLine, as in London Times, aka “The Times”):
North Korean military engineers are completing an underground runway beneath a mountain that can protect fighter aircraft from attack until they take off at high speed through the mouth of a tunnel.
The 6,000ft runway is a few minutes’ flying time from the tense front line where the Korean People’s Army faces soldiers from the United States and South Korea.
The project was identified by an air force defector from North Korea and captured on a satellite image by Google Earth, according to reports in the South Korean press last week.
Now, read the whole thing (RTWT in old blog lingo).
Note that the reporter, or editor, or perhaps the NoKo defector, or perhaps all three think that the Israeli strike on the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor (the alleged Syrian reactor allegedly provided by North Korea), has led to a new wave of “military infrastructure hardening” by Pyongyang:
The airstrike [Israeli airstrike in Syria] appears to have convinced North Korea to harden its own defences and to spend more on its military, even as it struggles to cope with a new food shortage that could see millions of its citizens go hungry. In recent days North Korea has ordered its people to be vigilant against “warmongers”.
Hmmm…bad conscience regarding the Syrian reactor? No, Kim Jong-Il has no conscience, at least in any mature, pan-human sense of the word. Oh, he has the “conscience” (italicized) of a psychotic, self-absorbed, megalomaniacal narcissist (which is one reason is he is Stalinist– guess that also describes some members of Earth First!, Al Qaeda, and MoveOn.org).
Be that as it may, Kim’s hardened runway is designed to keep the dagger to Seoul’s throat. Based on the TImes’ description, it is a vulnerable dagger. Four (okay, perhaps two) precision-guided blockbuster bombs could close the tunnel’s exit, but in order to be effective those bombs would have to hit before Kim’s attack aircraft took off. Well, some people think first strikes are in order.
I love this historical stroke in the Times’ article:
The alliance between the two clan dictatorships in Damascus and Pyongyang is more than 35 years old. In another tunnel, this one under Mount Myohang, the North Koreans have kept as a museum piece the Kalashnikov assault rifle and pistols sent as gifts from President Hafez al-Assad of Syria to Kim Il-sung in the early years of their friendship.
Today North Korea and Syria are ruled by the sons of their 20th-century dictators – Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000 and Kim Jong-il took over in 1994. They inherited a hatred of America and a fondness for authoritarian family rule.
Jim Dunnigan and I describe North Korea as a “herditary dictatorship” (see Third Edition of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War, soon to be replaced by the Fourth Edition).
Both Syria’s and North Korea’s heriditary dictatorships are poised for first strikes, NoKo against SoKo and Japan, Suria against Israel. The Times notes:
The Scud-C is strategically worrying to Israel because Syria has deployed it with one launcher for every two missiles. The normal ratio is one to 10. The conclusion: Syria’s missiles are set up for a devastating first strike.
Since 2004 there have been a series of leaks designed to suggest that Syria has renewed its interest in atomic weapons, a claim denied by Damascus.
In December 2006 the Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Siyasa, quoted European intelligence sources in Brussels as saying that Syria was engaged in an advanced nuclear programme in its northeastern Hasakah province.
It also quoted British security sources as identifying the man heading the programme as Major Maher Assad, brother of the president and commander of the Republican Guard.
Early last year foreign diplomats had noticed an increase in political and military visits between Syria and North Korea. They received reports of Syrian passengers on flights from Beijing to Pyongyang, almost the only air route into the country. They also spotted Middle Eastern businessmen using trains between North Korea and the industrial cities of northeast China.
And:
The danger to Israel is multiplied by the triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria and Iran. Syria has served as a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50m of missile components and technology sent by sea from North Korea to the Syrian port of Tartous, diplomats said.
They say Damascus and Tehran have set up a £125m joint venture to build missiles in Syria with North Korean and Chinese technical help. North Korean military engineers have worked on hardened silos and tunnels for the project near the cities of Hama and Aleppo.
Feudal tyrants armed with weapons of mass destruction.
Anyone sane, honest, and cherishing the lives of loved ones still want to bitch about pre-emptive strikes by democracies?
Trust that Barack Obama will talk with these feudal tyrannies. As Glenn Reynolds would say, “Heh.”
In NoKo, the people starve. Eating bark off of trees for survival. While it’s been noticed that they are birthing smaller children. And, the adults aren’t growing as well, or as tall, as the South Koreans, for instance. (Just to compare what it means to be living in a population that starves.)
While its endemic in the fundamentalist tribal mindset of Islam to inter-marry cousins. Creating a large pool of birth defects in the many children they do have.
The problem, by the way, with “first strike,” isn’t where you start, but where you stop. And, America isn’t ready to “shut the operations down,” that are going on, now, all over the place. I’d bet in a think tank or two there’s a realization that some of these spots in arabia, and/or africa. And, or, pakistan. Go nuclear. But locally. Creating havoc in backwater places. Serving as “examples” on the ground. But not really a threat, yet.
Syria’s Assad, by the way, is alive and well, because Israel, in the summer of 2006, did not listen to the Bush White House, and go into damascus to “remove Assad’s head.” In weighing things, having Assad in syria is a known factor. Turning around, and handing this prize to the Saud’s was evaluated as being dumb and detrimental.
Irak? Had to pull itself up out of the slide the Saud’s had in store. When the smoke cleared, a few million Iraqis, Palestinians AND Sunnis, had fled. Payback’s a bitch. But Iraq doesn’t want to be ruled by Tehran OR Riyadh.
Most of the picture, meanwhile, goes unseen. (Except in Jerusalem. Where the cards are played very close to the vest.)
Obama doesn’t have a chance. He actually manage to do worse than McGovern. Not that the Left has learned much. Because they did take over the democratic party. With McCain as the republican choice, there are a lot of loose votes out there, that can take him into the White House. While anger between Blacks and feminists will show you the core of hatred that also exists on America’s college campuses. Just in case you thought the drool that passes for an education, wasn’t beset by group politics; making things there much worse. As if selling propaganda at high prices isn’t just being a sitting duck, in a model that dies on the vine.
Comment by Carol Herman — 4/27/2008 @ 3:23 pm
When the White House released information that the Israeli’s had destroyed a North Korean reactor in Syria, major media (Reuters, AP) responded with articles saying in effect: “why should we believe anything the White House says”.
In other words, the false but prevailing narrative that the White House made up the intelligence about Iraqi WMD’s dominates the thinking of elite opinion makers. Never mind that Saddam himself bragged of bluffing the world about the WMD’s, intentionally deceiving us into believing he had them when he did not. Never mind that every intelligence agency in the world apparently believed the same thing.
So pre-emptive strikes? The ability of the US to do so has been pretty well destroyed by the media’s false portrayal of the Iraq war (and more recently, the false portrayal of the NIE aout Iran).
Israel has the political ability to launch first strikes, but in the case of Iran, probably not the means to meaningfully damage their nuclear program.
So we don’t have the will, and they don’t have the power.
Iranian ICBM’s threatening US cities (with the ABM systems dismantled by Obama) are in our near future. I give it 3 years.
Comment by John Moore — 4/27/2008 @ 4:24 pm
The US still has the will and the power for pre-emptive strikes. What it doesn’t have is any political cover, once it is done. When it is done it will have to be done at a time when other things seem more important on the world stage.
Comment by abu al-fin — 4/27/2008 @ 4:57 pm
Don’t always agree with Carol Herman, but I’m still a fan.
Comment by Neshobanakni — 4/27/2008 @ 5:18 pm
President Truman’s Diary (public domain) on July 25, 1945:
“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark… I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children… The target will be a purely military one… It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful… .”
When I see on the news, pictures of Korea’s Kim Jong-il arm-in-arm with a terrorist state’s leader, I can smell the mushroom cloud brewing. As an American who has not forgotten September 11, 2001, I pray that John McCain is our next president who (in his own words) has “gumption”. Gumption to use this weapon as our pre-emptive strike. If not McCain, then perhaps Israel’s next president.
It will be an agonizing decision for whoever has to make it, but when you think about it…
History has been kind to President Truman and the American people did not fault him for saving their lives and the lives of their children.
Dr. Tanya
Comment by Dr. Tanya Hazelton — 4/27/2008 @ 6:13 pm
With respect to the use of nuclear bombs on Japan, not only would an invasion of Japan (which was a necessity, absent a Japanese surrender that was not forthcoming) have cost the US at least a quater of a million deaths, plus other casualties (increasing deaths during the war by 60 percent), it would also have killed immense numbers of Japanese. One can easily reach estimates of Japanese deaths of 10-30 million, due to combat, exposure, disease, starvation, and mass suicides of civilians (as on Saipan). That would be 100 times the numbers killed in both nuclear bombings together, or more. And that is not counting other deaths due to the extension of the war; Chinese killed by the Japanese forces, Allied prisoners murdered, Allied soldiers who died trying to root out Japanese garrisons all over East Asia and the Pacific, who would then have had no one to order them to surrender.
Truman showed tremendous moral courage with that decision, for it saved millions of lives. For that reason, the Japanese, and others, ought to pray for his soul every day.
Comment by Michael Lonie — 4/27/2008 @ 8:11 pm
Apparently this story has been around for awhile now.
http://www.ogleearth.com/2008/04/sifting_informa.html
Comment by David P. Burris — 4/28/2008 @ 7:14 pm