04/05/13 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, April 5th, 2013, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Anti-War Radio All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash ScottHortonShow.
And you find my full interview archive, more than 2,700 interviews now, going back to 2003, right around this time, 2003, at ScottHorton.org.
And it's actually been a really good week for interviews on my other radio show this week.
I talked with Andrew Bacevich about his open letter to Paul Wolfowitz in Harper's Magazine about the preemption doctrine and the Iraq War.
Mark Weisbrot from The Guardian was on to talk about U.S.
-backed right-wing military death squads down in Honduras.
Ivan Ehlen was on to talk about wasteful Pentagon spending.
Adam Morrow was on.
IPS News reporter Adam Morrow from Cairo, Egypt, was on to talk about, well, basically, a two-year update on the revolution there.
We spoke with Robert Higgs about the effect of World War I domestically here in the United States.
Jason Leopold about the hunger strike down at Guantanamo Bay.
And Eric Margulies on the situation in Korea.
You can find all those interviews there at ScottHorton.org.
Of course, Korea is the biggest news of the week, threats going around on all sides, from the inherited communist dictatorship of Kim Jong-un in the north, South Korea, who has a brand-new president, a leader of their own there, and, of course, the United States.
Now, obviously, all decent people in the world are hoping that peace prevails and this thing blows over.
But to help us with the background, help us understand the situation as it stands on the Korean Peninsula tonight, we turn to Doug Bandow from the Cato Institute, author of the book Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire, and author of a couple of recent pieces about Korea, one in The Spectator and the other in U.S. News & World Report.
That's at usnews.com.
It's called North Korea is Not Our Problem.
Oh, thank goodness.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
Happy to be on.
Very happy to have you here.
So, first of all, obviously, there's been a lot of heated exchanges and talk back and forth and training exercises and overflights and provocative things on both sides and this, that, the other thing.
But the most substantive escalation of anything that seems to have happened in the last couple of weeks between the U.S. and North Korea is that the Americans, I forgot how they categorize it, but they basically said anything that the North Koreans do against the South, like, you know, shooting artillery at an island or, you know, whatever, a very small thing will all, you know, basically they move the red line.
Where if North Korea does anything, America is bound to intervene on the side of the South, which is apparently a lower standard for involvement than before.
Is that basically right?
Can you fill me in on that?
Well, I think what they're trying to do is they're worried that what the North is going to do is do what it did three years ago.
You know, it sank a South Korean ship that had bombarded the South Korean island.
So I think what they're really trying to do is say don't do anything at all, don't even think about small provocations.
My guess is that if something like that happened, in fact, the South would take the lead in responding.
But what the U.S. essentially is saying, we're backing them up.
So if things got out of hand, then all of a sudden we'd find ourselves in the middle of a shooting war, which is hardly what we need.
But how is that substantively different than how it has been all this time, that if they get into a war...
It's a mutual defense treaty, so it's a question of when you...
And, of course, it's mutual in name only.
We defend them, they don't defend us.
But the idea is, you know, there's stuff that could happen that you...
Basically, the U.S. has some ability to decide what falls within the treaty, you know, when is the treaty kind of triggered.
So if the North Koreans send an artillery shell over the border, we can ignore it because we haven't triggered the treaty.
But I think what it sounds like the administration is doing is trying to convince the North Koreans that even something small would be treated as triggering the treaty, and that at least theoretically could lead to war with the United States.
So I think it's one of these...
I think it's, frankly, part of this bluff that everybody's playing, but it's a very dangerous one because this is a situation where mistakes and miscalculations on either side could lead to real war.
Well, and now I guess this really should have been the first subject, is that nobody wants a war here, right?
The North Koreans would be absolutely suicidal to do it.
The South Koreans would win outright, but they'd take some severe hits, and Barack Obama would have to be absolute madman to want to go down in history as the next Truman on this one, right?
No, that's right.
Nobody wants it.
The North would lose.
You know, those guys want their virgins in this world, not the next.
They live well at the top.
They're not interested in war.
And from an American or South Korean standpoint, it also would be nutty.
No one gains.
Seoul would probably be destroyed, even though the South would win.
We obviously get absolutely nothing out of it.
The last thing any American wants to do is have a war in the Korean Peninsula over who knows what.
So that's what makes this all in certain ways so stupid, is everybody's posturing and threatening over it's not even clear what, because nobody actually wants to go to war.
Well, and now, I mean, it makes sense.
We're used to this, right?
That's what everybody keeps saying on all sides of this issue in the American media and the American government.
We're used to this.
I think Margulies said, Eric Margulies on the show said, right around every March, the North Koreans say a bunch of bellicose things, and the Americans do some training exercises with the South Koreans, and then nothing happens, and we do this all the time.
No, that's right.
I think the North has denounced the armistice like nine different times or something.
So, I mean, I don't know how many times you can kind of say it's not in effect when you decide it's not in effect.
I mean, it's all kind of silly.
What's happening now, I think, is the North is kind of unusually bellicose.
That is, normally they don't again and again and again say, we're going to drop nukes on you or something.
But I think this really is not different in a substantive way than it has behaved in the past.
You're right.
The U.S. and South Korea have these annual military exercises.
That's standard.
It's in the calendar.
That's nothing unique about what's going on today.
The other side is louder, and I think part of it is because, at least nominally, Kim Jong-un, the kid, is in charge.
I'm not convinced he's actually running things, but you've had a change of leadership, so that's got a lot of folks a bit more on edge because they're not quite so certain about who's in charge and what the objectives are.
Well, and that seems like the most likely root cause of all this is that he's got internal politics he's got to deal with, right?
I don't know if you saw this, but Justin Raimondo pointed to an article about the aunt and uncle and how they have a big influence on the kid, and apparently they're trying to get him to lean back toward the Communist Workers' Party and a little bit away from the military.
And Justin's theory was, well, maybe this is a way of telling the military, hey, I still like you and you can still all have a lot of money, don't get rid of me, but I want to lean a little bit back toward this other center of power for a little while, that kind of a thing.
What do you think of that?
No, I mean, that's certainly consistent with what we've seen.
The uncle, I think, could very well be the most important guy there.
The aunt matters a lot.
She was a favorite sister of the late dictator.
What they did last year was they threw out a guy who was kind of this marshal who was one of the top military guys.
That appeared to be kind of reasserting party control over the military.
It certainly was not reducing military access to resources.
And you can imagine what's going on now is kind of a reaffirmation saying, yes, yes, the military is critically important, we love it.
It's simply they want to make sure the military stays under their control, but they don't plan on kind of weakening the military.
They just want to use it in a different way.
Hopefully not offensively.
No, again, I think that's right.
The good news, I think, is that these people, either evil or not stupid, they know they'd lose.
I mean, they can blather away all they want, but, I mean, they know they'd lose any war.
I was there 20 years ago, and I remember when they pointed to Pyongyang and said, yes, we're very proud we rebuilt the city.
You know, you Americans destroyed it all in the Korean War.
And what stood out to me was the fact, well, they knew the U.S. destroyed it.
That is, they understood the destructive power of the U.S. military.
These are not people who want to go through that again.
Yeah, well, and, you know, probably there are at least some people in the U.S. Air Force who would love a chance to carpet bomb North Korea off the face of the earth again like their forebears and go down in history and all that cool stuff.
Those guys have got to be held at bay somehow.
Well, and I actually think that the good news is, you know, there's not a lot of fervor within the Pentagon for wanting to go to war.
I worry a lot more about, you know, kind of the politicians, and I worry about the guys outside, you know, the kind of the sofa samurai and the think tank warriors.
These are the people who really seem to enjoy the idea of let's go have regime change somewhere, let's go do some other exciting, you know, battle.
But even they aren't saying a lot here, I think in part because everybody knows it'd be really messy.
The North would lose, but they have a lot of soldiers, a lot of tanks, a lot of artillery, and they could make a real mess of South Korea before it ended, and there really isn't anyone who wants to see that happen.
All right, now, so listen, your article here at U.S. News & World Report, Doug, is North Korea is someone else's problem, and I think you told NBC News that the best way to solve this problem is to just ignore them.
It's not a big deal.
They play into their game at least to this degree, and this degree includes overflights of nuclear bombers and very provocative moves and then not just taking them seriously by saying, well, we're going to put in extra anti-missile missiles in Alaska and Guam and all this stuff, which is playing into the North's rhetoric way too much.
But flying B-2 bombers over the DMZ, what the hell are these Democrats doing?
It doesn't make any sense to do that, does it?
No, but look, they're trying to show that they're tough.
I mean, the problem is they're in an alliance relationship.
A lot of this is because they know that the South Koreans are nervous, and there's this weird determination in Washington that we have to convince our allies, who we've been defending for, you know, decades, that we're serious about defending them, because if we don't do that, maybe they'll build up their militaries, which, of course, is what we should basically say is if you guys want to defend yourselves, go ahead, leave us out of it.
But unfortunately, we live in this world where folks in Washington are constantly determined to show the rest of the world how powerful we are, that our resolve is strong, we have to convince everybody, and I think that's what those overflights are about.
It's theater.
It makes no sense.
It's not good policy.
But it's great theater when it comes to the Pentagon.
Yeah, well, and it might be great theater for American domestic politics, too, but I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the average North Korean or, say, a military guy, an officer in North Korea, and they're looking at B-2 hydrogen bomb delivery vehicles flying over, you know, stealth bombers flying over their country.
That is the kind of thing that can lead to bad decision-making, you know?
No, obviously, you know, these are the sorts of things that whatever we say it might be, these things could be interpreted differently.
You want to be very careful that you don't convince the North, you know, that we actually plan a military operation and plan a regime change, because then suddenly they have an incentive to strike first.
And that's always one of these dangers.
You know, they can see what happened to Serbia.
They can see what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They don't want to be on that list, so you don't want them thinking we're about to do that because they might decide, well, let's just start this thing if it's going to happen.
Right.
Well, that's even what they said on state TV, right, is that, well, since nuclear war is inevitable, we will protect our supreme interest with a preemptive strike on Washington, D.C.
That's right.
That's right.
Which, in fact, let's go ahead and get to this.
Have they ever proven that any of the three nukes that they've tested so far actually work, and, you know, more than halfway or anything?
And is there any indication that they could even deliver one of their nukes if they assume, you know, I guess most experts assume they have half a dozen or so.
Could they actually even deliver one to Seoul other than in the back of a flatbed truck or something?
Well, not at the moment, not that we know of.
I mean, all we really know is they have enough plutonium to make a half dozen or a dozen bombs.
And, you know, they set off nuclear tests which suggest that they have the capability of making weapons, but we don't know they've actually made them.
And we certainly have nothing that suggests that they've been able to miniaturize them so they could actually put them on something and shoot it off.
You know, the problem is you can have a great big weapon, but if you can't put it on some kind of a, you know, missile, it's not going to hit much of anything.
You know, it's very hard to drive that flatbed truck to, you know, Japan.
Even pretty hard to drive it to South Korea, let alone America.
So there's no particular evidence that they have a lot of capabilities now.
A lot of this is, again, theater.
And I think from their standpoint, they want to be seen as and recognized as a nuclear power.
Well, that is basically kind of a state of mind much more than actually having the weapons.
Well, and for the record, too, I don't know if you're an expert on this or not, but I know Gordon Prather, the former nuclear weapons scientist, and he says there's no such thing as a suitcase nuke.
All these rumors about North Korean secret sleeper agents are going to somehow sneak into the country with one, something like that is absolutely fanciful.
No one should believe that for a moment.
No, look, they have no reason to.
I mean, the point is, again, the last thing they want to do is start something which brings America's wrath down upon them.
I mean, they'd lose.
They know that.
So, you know, they want to bluster.
They want to get the world's attention.
There's a whole bunch of stuff they want, but they actually don't want a war because that would not be in their interest.
And, you know, kind of sending over a suitcase nuke and hoping that we don't figure out where it came from, that's not a good strategy either because, you know, if we figure it out, they're gone.
I mean, all of them, the entire ruling establishment, you know, that's the last thing those people want.
Right.
Well, I think the smallest nuclear weapon anybody actually ever produced and, you know, made usable, Gordon says, would take up at least the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car or something, if not the back of a pickup truck.
There's just no such thing as one that you could fit in even a really big suitcase.
No, I think that's right.
I mean, these are complicated weapons.
If you want to pack firepower in there, you know, there's a certain size you're stuck with.
You can only shrink them so far.
When it comes to just delivering conventional weapons, how far do their longest rockets go, their best rockets?
They got to outer space, after all, Doug, just a couple of months ago.
Well, if they were lucky and, you know, they shot off their longest one and it worked, you know, it theoretically could hit America.
The problem is they can't aim it.
I mean, they can try to aim it, but it won't hit anything.
They have no capability of targeting.
So, you know, the fact that you have something that theoretically could kind of go all the way doesn't matter an awful lot.
You can imagine them shooting one of these things off and hoping that maybe it'll plop down in Alaska, maybe.
You know, they have much greater capability, short range.
You know, they could put Scuds into Sol.
They're certainly working on missiles that could make the Japanese nervous.
But, again, you know, they're not in a position to drop missiles on us.
And, look, even if they were, they wouldn't because we'd wipe them out.
I mean, the U.S. has the most capable missile and nuclear force on Earth.
So, you know, unless they're suicidal, they're not going to do it.
And, again, I've seen nothing to suggest they're suicidal.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, as far as solutions to this problem go, you know, obviously everybody wants to avert war.
You say in your U.S. News and World Report piece here, again, at usnews.com, North Korea, is someone else's problem?
That's someone else's problem.
Tell the Chinese to worry about it.
Something like that.
But I just kind of think that maybe we should send Jimmy Carter and the Harlem Globetrotters back over there and talk to them and make friends and put all this behind us for the long term.
Well, look, it's going to be hard to make friends with the current crew over there simply because they are kind of a nasty group of folks.
The main thing we can do is simply say at some level it's just not our problem, that we're happy to have diplomatic relations.
We'll engage them.
We're not going to send them boatloads of money.
They don't deserve it.
We're broke.
That's not going to happen.
But, you know, there's no reason to kind of be threatening each other and having hostile relations, and ultimately the issue of who constrains them, who worries about whether they get nuclear weapons, and all this stuff, you know, those issues are going to be for their neighbors.
It's for South Korea.
It's for Japan.
It's for China and Russia.
You know, they have the capability to do more if they want.
They can decide, can you buy them off?
Do you want to do something else?
We just should say, look, it really isn't our problem.
Look at a map.
We're not there.
We don't have to be there.
And then, you know, have a diplomatic relationship and not much more.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it seemed like the agreed framework deal, the Clintonites never even lived up to their side of the deal, and the North Koreans stayed within it anyway until George Bush basically put a gun to their head and demanded they withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty.
Yeah, I mean, I think they're willing to cut deals.
I think at this stage, you know, we've moved beyond the earlier deal.
So my guess is that they're not likely to be negotiated out of having nuclear weapons.
They might very well be negotiated to not expanding their arsenal and certainly not engaging in proliferation.
And it's fine to have those discussions, but we should be realistic.
You know, we should have no illusions here that they're going to disarm.
I think they've gained, you know, a lot from having a nuclear program.
I don't think they're going to give that up, and especially the internal dynamic.
Who wants to tell their military, you know, we're giving away your toys?
I just don't think that's going to happen in today's environment.
Yeah.
You know what's funny about this?
It sort of seems to me like we'd be having the same conversation whether or not there was even a rumored plutonium nuke bomb in North Korea whatsoever, right?
We're already sufficiently deterred without them even having nukes, just from the artillery and whatever.
We could still beat them even with nukes, but they can still hit us hard, in this case maybe a bit harder than before, but they didn't really need nukes to keep us out of Korea, did they?
No, their real deterrent capability is the ability to devastate Seoul.
I think what nukes do is gives them kind of international respect and international attention, and that's what they crave.
And also I think from their standpoint adds to the factor of trying to extort money.
You know, if you want the South Koreans to give you more cash, you rattle the cage.
So you kind of keep after that is how you try to get them to give you more money.
Nukes add to that.
It's a much more fearsome thing, even though in practice they could kill lots of South Koreans with artillery and scubs.
Yeah.
Now, listen, could you give us the real short version of how the agreed framework deal broke apart and the North Koreans decided to go ahead and try to make nukes anyway because it was just, what, ten years ago?
They didn't have nukes.
Well, I mean, we don't know exactly what they had.
It looked like they were living up to the agreed framework.
The idea was the U.S., South Korea, and Japan would provide them with a light water reactor, which would be harder for them to kind of use the fuel for nuclear weapons.
And we'd also give them heavy oil and other things, you know, that they would basically dismantle their other reactor and get rid of the fuel they had.
And basically they lived up to that agreement.
One of the problems was trying to get the Republicans in Congress to appropriate the money that the Clinton administration had promised.
That was never popular.
And what always irritated me was not that the Republicans criticized the agreement, but they never had an alternative.
So they just said, we shouldn't do this, but they didn't bother to explain what else they'd do.
And, you know, with the Bush administration came in, you know, George W. Bush, they're part of the Axis of Evil.
I loathe him, you know, this sort of thing.
And that's fine as a personal matter, but it's not very helpful when it comes to diplomacy.
And then there was a question about whether or not they were engaging in uranium enrichment, which was separate, was not formally banned by the agreed framework, but kind of violated the spirit of it.
You know, that came up, and it basically blew apart any attempt to negotiate.
The president, that is President Bush, was very clear he wasn't going to follow the Clinton administration in terms of its negotiating patterns.
And Secretary of State Powell originally planned on that.
But then the president, who of course runs things, said no way.
So basically we went, you know, two or three years where that administration tried to isolate the North Koreans.
And they said, fine, we'll just keep up with our nuclear program.
So at the end of that, the Bush administration found itself in a far worse position, having achieved absolutely nothing for taking this hard-line stance.
You know, I can't remember anymore which documentary it was, pardon me, that showed Colin Powell, who was right after Bush and the crew were sworn in in 2001.
And Colin Powell gave this big speech that basically said, I'm Mr. Foreign Policy of all things in this administration, whatever, whatever.
And just the clip that they chose, they were actually trying to illustrate that Dick Cheney's standing in the background grumbling and saying to himself, yeah, that's what you think.
But it was that clip as he's saying, yes, the Clinton policy on North Korea has really been working great, and we're going to pursue that.
And it's kept them within the treaty, and that's what's most important to us.
And that's the clip where Cheney's standing in the background.
I think he's got Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz standing next to him.
And they're standing there going, grumble, grumble, grumble.
We're not going to let you get away with that, and we'll see what you're in charge of, Powell.
No, I mean, it was pretty brutal.
They had President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea showed up in town, and at that point the South Koreans had their sunshine policy subsidizing the North.
It was a very frosty summit with President George W. Bush.
And right around that time was when he cut the legs out from under Colin Powell, where Powell said, yes, we'll negotiate, we'll pick up where the other administration left off.
And Bush said, absolutely not.
It's pretty brutal to be on the world stage and have your boss do that to you.
It was pretty nasty treatment.
Yeah, and I think even a couple of years later, maybe a few years later, Bush undercut, I think, the next prime minister or president of South Korea as well.
They had a misunderstanding during a joint press conference.
Gordon Prater used to point this out all the time, where I guess the president of the ROK said, oh, excuse me, Mr. President, did I hear you right?
Did you just say that we can get to talking on peace talks with the North Koreans and maybe also deal with the nuclear issue at the same time or something?
And Bush gets all mad at him and says, no, nuclear issue, the unsolvable crisis that he created first, and only then, never, the peace talks and negotiation and sunshine, et cetera.
And it was really clumsy and horrible the way it went down, too.
Well, that's simply not surprising, unfortunately.
That president's attitudes on these issues, and they did change near the end.
I mean, that was the irony, is that under Condoleezza Rice, kind of at the end, they were much more willing to negotiate.
But at that point, too much had happened to achieve very much.
And I think an element of it is, as the North developed nuclear weapons, there was a point, it's what we've already done, so why should we give them up?
We're in a stronger position.
They didn't deal with us then when we were willing to, so that's fine.
Let's just make as many as we can.
All right, and then one last point here on the media, if you would.
Is it amazing to you, or are you just used to it by now, when you turn on the TV and you hear them say things like, oh, my God, North Korea's threatening to nuke us, and then they don't provide any of the context about how that's impossible?
Yeah, they want you to watch.
They kind of want to sensationalize.
And, look, part of it has to do with what's the administration doing?
I mean, the administration's saying, oh, this is very dangerous.
We've got to send our bombers over.
So if the administration's doing that, why shouldn't the media assume that it's really serious?
And I think that's really part of the problem.
Why indeed.
All right.
Listen, man, it's great to have you on.
Thanks very much, Doug.
Absolutely.
Take care now.
I really appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that is the great Doug Bandow.
He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
He's the author of the book Foreign Follies, America's New Global Empire, and he's got pieces about Korea in The Spectator and U.S. News and World Report at usnews.com.
It's North Korea is someone else's problem.
All right, y'all, and that is anti-war radio for this evening.
I'm Scott Horton here every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org, and you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashscotthortonshow.
Thanks very much for listening.
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