November 01, 2003

I've Changed My Mind about Iraq

It wasn't the most repressive regime on earth. That distinction belongs to North Korea. I really don't have much to say about this, because the offender has WMD, and one of the largest and most formidable armies on earth. If we can barely tolerate a fatality rate of two to three US soldiers a week in Iraq, we'd have a tough time coping with the results of a fight with N. Korea, even if we took out the WMD. So, it's probably true that the road to Pyongyang goes through Beijing.

As Andrew Nathan's and Rober Ross' book The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress make awfully clear, China is obsessed with its security, and considers N. Korea a critical buffer. But a concerted effort to publicize what's going on in the gulags might concern the Chinese enough about the liability of a friend like N. Korea calling attention to their own transgressions that they'd press their vassal to behave better. Though, as Glenn Reyolds observes, S. Korea doesn't seem very concerned. And if that's the case it's difficult to imagine a semi-random finger point now and then from the "international community" doing much. This is one of those "complex" problems that just won't surrender to slogans. A real determination on the part of a broadening "coalition of the willing" to turn Iraq into a modern liberal state might change the context of world affairs enough that the ball will start rolling somewhere else, and once a few balls start rolling down that slope to liberal democracy it'll be hard to keep that fig leaf situated on N. Korea's "privates." But the point is that what we are doing in Iraq is really the best, and possibly the only, strategy for changing what's going on in places like N. Korea and Burma. (I'd use the more contemporary name, Myanmar, but Michael Moore can't pronounce it.)

Posted by Demosophist at November 1, 2003 08:33 AM | TrackBack
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