04/01/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
You can find the full archives at scotthorton.org.
And our next guest today is the great Eric Margulies.
He is a journalist and author, most recently, of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He keeps a website at ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And his latest piece is called War Risk Rises Sharply in Korea.
Eric, don't do a W and two R's in a row.
I can't talk, right?
Welcome back to the show.
You're doing great.
Very happy to have you here.
We'll work on your titles in the future, I guess.
So, listen, TV said I should be terribly afraid that North Korea is going to invade Washington State.
No, that was a movie.
But the new dictator, the grandson, now he's making scary noises, and TV seems to think that they're pretty scary.
So I was hoping that maybe you could tell me how afraid I should be, first of all, here.
Well, Scott, I think the best measure of this crisis, and it is a real crisis, is the fact that in South Korea, in Seoul, which is 30 miles from an artillery range of the militarized zone, life is going on as normal and people are shopping and going to work and shrugging off this as the latest annual crisis with North Korea.
Okay, you hear that, conservatives?
You can climb out from under your beds now.
That's right.
First of all, you know, this has become, I call this a Korean kabuki because it's become an annual stylized ritual.
What happens, every March, the U.S. and South Korea, and until two years ago, the South Korean armed forces used to be under American military command.
Imagine that.
The U.S. and South Korean forces, this year joined by Australia, staged what had to be called menacing war games hard on the North Korean border, by air, land, and sea, war games designed to mimic an attack on North Korea.
And every year, the North Koreans go ballistic and jump up and down, make all kinds of threats, fire some artillery shells, but this year was a bit different because, first of all, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon some months back that brought renewed, tightened sanctions on North Korea by the U.S. and other nations.
And secondly, the rhetoric increased.
And then thirdly, because of this, the U.S. trying to up the pressure on North Korea and its new young and experienced leader, Kim Jong-un, flew, first of all, B-52s less than 30 miles from the North Korean border.
A stark reminder now that in the Korean War in the 1950s, that the U.S. carpet bombed all of North Korea and literally bombed it back to the Stone Age.
Then, just yesterday, a flock of F-22 Raptor, a most modern fighter, flew from Japan to South Korea, flew along the Korean border, and drove the North Koreans into a frenzy, and they threatened all kinds of nuclear annihilation and things, which everyone knew that they're not capable of doing there.
Wow.
All right.
So, lots to go over there.
First of all, I think from the pictures I saw, I hate to correct you, but I think it was B-2 H-bomb delivery devices there that they flew.
Stealth bombers, which B-52s, I can see that being, you know, threatening like a napalm carpet bombing type of thing.
But a B-2 seems to be a threat that will drop an H-bomb on you.
The, I should, I forgot to mention the B-2.
Well, it was first B-52.
Was it both?
Oh, it was both.
It was both.
And now it's the more modern B-2 stealth bomber.
What makes that unique is that the North Koreans don't have much of an anti-aircraft capability, and they probably would never see the B-2s flying over them.
But the B-2 is the only American aircraft that can carry the dreaded MOAB, M-O-A-B, superbomb.
It's the mother of all bombs.
It's a 30,000-pound bomb.
It's the biggest explosive device this side of nuclear weapons.
It's a thermobaric device, meaning it uses like a fuel-air explosive to create huge overpressures.
It's like a small nuclear device.
And this bomb was designed to go after deeply buried underground facilities, nuclear installations, and even more important, command and control, i.e. the leadership bunker of Kim Jong-un and his general staff would be target number one for a B-2 attack.
So that's why the North Koreans reacted so violently to this particular.
So the B-2, it wasn't a threat necessarily that we'll drop an H-bomb and vaporize Pyongyang as much as this is what we'll use to take out all your hardened artillery and all your command and control and whatever tunnel you try to hide in, pal.
The U.S.
7th Fleet, which is in the area, has its own nuclear weapons and could vaporize North Korea in an hour if it wanted to.
So the North Koreans are constantly under threat of U.S. nuclear attack.
That's one of the reasons they developed their own rather primitive nuclear weapons is to force stolen attack.
The North Koreans cannot strike North America with a nuclear weapon and wouldn't anyway because what's the point of lobbying two nuclear devices at the U.S. when you know you're going to be blown off the face of the map?
Well, could they even nuke Seoul?
I mean, could they even deliver the nukes they got?
They might be able to.
Neither U.S. nor, amazingly, South Korean intelligence knows whether they can deliver a nuclear device.
But if they can, if they've miniaturized one and got it in a warhead small enough, the real target is Japan and U.S. bases in Japan and as North Korea said they would attack U.S. bases in Guam.
Guam's become a big floating aircraft carrier for the U.S. and Okinawa.
So there is that possibility.
Secondly, I've been up in the DMZ repeatedly and the North Koreans have 11,000 heavy artillery pieces and rocket batteries, long-range rocket batteries, buried into caves on the DMZ facing Seoul.
30 miles, 35 miles away, they can destroy with repeated barrages a large portion of the South Korean capital which has 11 million people.
So that's even a bigger threat in a way than a nuclear weapon.
You know, I've read a lot of different things about that.
Some people saying, you know, that it's a real serious threat and there's not too much the Americans could do.
It's going to take them a long time of, you know, dropping those MOAB bombs to really destroy all those hardened artillery emplacements, that kind of thing.
But I've read other things that said, too, I think somebody was quoting Anthony Kordzman is saying, you know, you've got to have a lot of artillery as far as density to really destroy much.
Yeah, they could kill some people, but is it a real threat to Seoul?
Probably not.
I wonder what you think of that.
Well, I think Kordzman is a very well-informed analyst, and I have great respect for him.
But they could cause a tremendous amount of damage with that kind of shelling.
It wouldn't take Seoul off the map, but it would cause panic.
It would destroy much of the government buildings in the north, and it would be a huge damage.
That fires, disrupt transport, and it depends how long they keep firing.
Look at Verdun, World War I, you know, where a million shells were fired at one fort.
It can be done.
All right.
Now, I want to get back to all this current stuff.
But first, I can't help but ask you about what you mentioned about the Korean War that Harry Truman started and Eisenhower called a ceasefire, I wouldn't say finished, back then in the 40s and 50s.
Really, they called it the Forgotten War.
That's one of the only things anybody knows about it is that it's called the Forgotten War and that that's the one where Trapper John and Hawkeye Pierce were over there cracking jokes with Radar O'Reilly and all them.
But, you know, I grew up watching MASH, and they actually never really show the war.
They just show, you know, the MASH unit, what's going on in their little part of the war.
And they never taught me, I don't think, a word on that.
And I must have seen every episode when I was a little kid of that show.
I don't think they ever mentioned carpet bombing the North once or the reality of American air power versus the helpless North Koreans.
I think we've all seen video footage of carpet bombing of Vietnam, and then it's easy to imagine that that kind of thing happened a lot more than just the footage we've seen.
But when it comes to the war against North Korea, particularly, say, for example, the air war against North Korea, I think probably most of us know even less than me about it.
And the only thing I know about it is that guy Bruce Cummings.
I read one article he wrote about this one time about all the napalm and whatever.
And that's all I know about it.
So could you kind of give us a little bit of a history of that and just how bad all that was?
In 1950, there was, you know, when the war ended, the U.S. was left in control of the Korean Peninsula south of the 38th parallel.
And the Korean communists who were backed and formed and run by the Soviet Union had the North.
There was huge bad blood between the communist leadership of Kim Il-sung and between the South Korean leader Syngman Rhee, who was a fanatical Christian who wanted to, you know, fight to the death against communism.
And the two sides really led the peninsula into a war.
North Korea attacked first with full Soviet backing and Russian T-34 tanks and initially caught the U.S. flat-footed and beat the U.S. forces badly.
The U.S. response was mainly through air power because its ground troops put up a miserable performance.
So the U.S. used B-29 heavy bombers, same things that had destroyed at least a third of all Japanese cities or half, to do the same thing in North Korea, which was already a very primitive backwards country.
But they flattened everything that was flattenable.
Seoul, Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was just rubble.
Seoul changed hands three times, and it was rubble at the end of the war.
But the psychology of the U.S. B-29s coming over really terrified the North Koreans.
The success in carbo-bombing, the same way it did to the Japanese.
To this day, Japanese have not gotten over the bombing of Japan and the mass destruction.
And look, North Korea, in the end, after two years of fighting, it became a stalemate.
In spite of MacArthur's brilliant landing at Incheon, which caught the North Korean army from behind, China intervened in the war, sent a million troops south over the Yalu River, and pushed the U.S. all the way back again.
So in the end, after a huge amount of loss, 55,000 dead Americans, 2 million dead Koreans at least, maybe more.
And we were responsible for a lot of civilian casualties, but the story has never come out.
In the end, Korea remained exactly where the war began, on the 38th parallel.
And the war has never ended today.
It was ended by an armistice, but never a peace agreement.
And now, so, I guess to bring us back to the current, well, actually one more thing about back then.
Could you tell us, do you have any estimate, or do you remember what you've read about how many North Koreans died, civilians and or military deaths from that war back then?
I don't trust my memory on this, but the numbers were very large.
On the Chinese side, perhaps over 100,000 dead.
Certainly Korean civilians, of the 2 million Koreans killed, civilians killed, I don't know how much were in the North and how much were in the South, but there were a lot of dead.
Maybe more than we even know.
Because I guess, you know, when it comes to Vietnam, we sort of hear this just sort of conventional wisdom.
Maybe 3 million, maybe as many as 5 somewhere in there, and Laotians and Cambodians, depending on how you count.
I never even hear reference to North Korean dead or Korean dead from that war at all, you know.
No, the story has just been swallowed up or nobody ever bothered to look into it or to get behind all the war propaganda that was going back and forth.
But there's one thing for certain.
Today's crisis is caused by the fact that this odious regime in North Korea, it is one of the world's ugliest regimes, has been under siege by the U.S.
We've tried to overthrow it.
We wage economic warfare against North Korea, such as we've done against Cuba and Iraq and Iran, and they're trying to overthrow the government there.
All kinds of plots.
The North Koreans have tried to overthrow the South Korean government.
The father, there was an assassination attempt against the father of the current president of South Korea, the newly elected one, Park Geun-hye, General Park Chung-hee.
North Korea has tried to assassinate him.
So both sides have a lot to answer for, but they've been sparring back and forth.
And once again, very conservative groups in Korea play a big role in the South in keeping this confrontation going.
And I think we've talked before.
Maybe you could illustrate for us why you think they still can't work it out after all of these years.
Does America, don't they want to help reunite the North and the South?
Why wouldn't, for example, Obama try his best anyway to take advantage of Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters, who are the coolest people in the whole world, who went over there to try to break the ice a little bit, have a conversation about basketball.
That's a good setup for the next time we have a conversation about something else.
Maybe work out a new agreed framework.
Can they dig up Warren Christopher, something like that?
But they don't seem to ever want to take advantage of any opportunity, really, it seems like.
Well, you know, I ran into Governor Bill Richardson.
I was in Doha in January, and he had just come from North Korea.
We chatted about this.
You know, there are thoughtful people in the U.S. government like Richardson, others who for years have been trying to establish normal relations with the North.
But there is a powerful group in Washington, most of them neocons, who don't want normalized relations and have done everything, and who managed to sabotage the last agreement that was made in 1994 that caused North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons development.
There's a feeling, there's concern because North Korea has gotten involved in the Middle East, and it's considered a dangerous country now.
The idea is it must be overthrown.
It challenges American domination of the North Pacific.
It's disobedient, and it's got to be squashed.
But it also justifies keeping 27,500 U.S. troops based in South Korea, who have been there since the 1950s, and dominating South Korea, which is still under tremendous American influence.
So America hates North Korea, but it finds itself as a useful enemy.
Well, yeah, you know, you mentioned Bill Richardson there.
The Clintonites actually had a pretty good deal going with that agreed framework.
Bush blew up with his lies and aggressive posture, his sanctions, and the PSI posse, that's what Gordon Prather called them, the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was basically a claim that we can seize your boats on the high seas if we feel like it, that kind of thing, in order to force them out of the NPT.
Just horrible.
Just horrible.
But then, you know, in the end of the Bush years, he at least sent Christopher Hill over there and tried to work out a little bit of a something, and we'll take you off the terrorism list if you agree to turn off your reactor that you just turned back on again, and this kind of thing, a little bit of that.
But then what's Obama done?
He's come in and, well, he sure as hell hasn't talked with him or tried to really work anything out.
I don't know if he's as bad as Bush's first term, but he doesn't seem as good as Bush's second to me.
Obama, the Obama administration, is too busy failing in the Middle East and in Afghanistan and vis-a-vis Iran to tackle another problem.
Status quo seems to suit everybody in the region.
You know, Russia, for example, which is right next to North Korea, has been calling for talks for a long time.
It's been ignored.
The Japanese really don't want to see any subtle.
I mean, they're scared of North Korea's nuclear weapons, but on the other hand, they don't want to see a united Korea because the Koreans are really very anti-Japanese and would be a serious rival.
So China's been ambivalent.
It's gone backwards and forth, but it doesn't want to see a united Korea.
So these different countries are happy to see things continue as they are, and they were except that this year, because of North Korea's nuclear test, the U.S. decided to pressure North Korea and to try its new leader, Kim Jong-un, and see how he responded, well, it got its answer.
Right.
You know, I was just so disappointed.
Maybe it's only because I love the Harlem Globetrotters, and I want so bad to see them again someday.
I saw them when I was like seven or something with my buddy Jimmy, and, man, it was just the greatest thing ever.
I think if you'd ask me, anyway, for what that's worth, I'm not sure, Eric, but if you'd ask me how do we warm up relations with the North Koreans, I would say you take the whatever dozen coolest guys in red, white, and blue in the history of the world, and you send them over there to play a game of pickup basketball, for Christ's sake, man, especially when Barack Obama, who actually plays basketball, is a tall black president of the United States.
Maybe there's something where we could, like, have a real opening, like when ugly old Madeleine Albright went and saw the fantastic gymnastics ceremony and all of that kind of thing.
This is how you warm up relations.
Send your gymnastics guys here.
We'll send our basketball guys and our symphony orchestra and whatever over there, and then maybe we can open up a Walmart in Pyongyang, and we can start working things out.
Well, that's grown-up behavior.
Somebody sent me a great joke, Scott.
I've got to share it with you.
It's a series of pictures, and it shows the basketball star talking to, you know, in his weird outfit, talking to Kim Jong-un with his weird haircut.
And then the next frame, it shows Kim Jong-un turning to one of his aides, a general, saying, you mean that's not President Obama?
It's a very cute joke.
Yes, that is obviously a member of ping-pong diplomacy, started that taunt with Red China.
But there are people who don't want that taunt.
And I come back to it that North Korea is considered a primary military technology supplier, particularly missiles to Pakistan, but even more so to Iran, to Syria, and the neocons in Washington want this regime overthrown because it threatens to ship strategic weapons to the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I'm kind of amazed that their rockets are even that good, right?
I mean, I was joking around or talking with John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy and Focus, and I said, yeah, but, John, you know, they actually reach outer space, right?
They put the satellite up there for a minute.
That's kind of their Sputnik moment.
Holy crap, maybe they're on the march like in that movie Red Dawn, the remake.
And he said, yeah, well, that was pretty much their entire GDP for a decade, winning that damn rocket.
And there's just not much behind that.
I mean, it seems like, I don't know, whatever missiles they're shipping to Syria or whatever, how awesome could they be?
How many of them are there?
They're glorified scuds and reverse-engineered, and probably some of them work.
They're inaccurate.
They have a very bad reliability rate.
But these are more psychological weapons than actually battlefield weapons.
Everybody gets hysterical over these missiles, but they're so inaccurate.
They're of very little use without nuclear warheads.
But they're still there, and it makes, for example, foes of Israel to think that they've got some kind of power because they've got some cheesy North Korean missiles that don't work.
I forgot who it was that I'm plagiarizing, but I remember reading somewhere about how a scud is just basically a station wagon with a rocket on the back.
It's like hurling a baseball or something like that.
Well, I compare it to a trebuchet.
A trebuchet is a medieval device with a big pile of rocks at one end and a sling at the other, and it hurls a boulder.
That's about how good it was.
Yeah.
Well, I think we all remember from the Gulf War they succeeded, the Iraqis, the first Gulf War they succeeded in hitting American targets in Saudi Arabia, what, twice?
That's right.
But, you know, you've got to think, too, I've got great respect for the Koreans, and the North Koreans are still Koreans.
The Koreans are very smart, and they're very hardworking, and they're exceptionally determined people.
South Korea was a desert, practically, at the end of the first Korean War, and the Koreans built up their country.
Korea in 1955 was poorer than black Africa was, if you can imagine that.
And in the ensuing years, the Koreans created out of nothing.
They built their whole country to become the 11th industrial power on Earth, very modern.
They're amazing.
They're much more ahead of us when it comes to computer electronics and online stuff.
But the North Koreans are of the same stock.
It's just that we can't dismiss them entirely as bumbling communist fanatics.
They may, in fact, develop some good things.
They do make tanks.
They've made some pretty good modern artillery pieces, and they're very determined.
Yeah, they just don't have prices, so their economy really sucks.
Well, that's right, but at least they're not running their country on Chinese loans.
Maybe they are, like we are.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Americans got to be real careful when we're pointing the finger red baiting around the world these days.
That's right.
Oh, man.
All right.
Thanks so much for your time, Eric.
It's great to talk to you, as always.
Pleasure as always, Scott.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis so you spell it right.
EricMargulies.com.
You can also find him all the time at LewRockwell.com.
The latest piece here is War Risk Rises Sharply in Korea.
And, oh, also his books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
That's it for the show today.
See you tomorrow.
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