The greater danger Iraq or North Korea?

It is my understanding of history and culture that the Korean people have an even greater opinion of themselves than Americans, so I would agree they pose a formidable threat, goldie.

Whether it is greater than Iraq will remain to be seen, but I would disagree to the negotiation as our only option theory.

Korea, even more so than Iraq, will respond to but one thing, a show of greater force.

Less than that, I am afraid, is not enough.

This is purely my guess but I think Washington sees (and has seen for sometime) North Korea as a long term threat but mostly just towards us and also assumes that China isn't going to let North Korea get to a point where they can't control them either. Plus, North Korea has very little influence by way of resources that are on interest to the West.

Iraq is seen as a destablizing force in an very volitile region with little or no couter-weight in their region and could, in theory at least, destabilize economies throughout the world if they manage to get the entire middle-east into a war.

From this morning's NY Times...
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/23/international/asia/23KORE.html

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"You have this huge contradiction. If the Iraqis do anything to impede inspections, the administration says it's cause for war. But when the North Koreans eject the inspectors and restart their nuclear program, they want us to believe that there's no crisis."

--Kurt Campbell, former Defense Department and Pentagon official

So is the difference a) oil; b) revenge; c) we picked someone out of the Axis of Evil we're pretty sure we can beat; d) other?

PDiddie -you've just posted what most of the rest of the world has been wondering about these past few months.

Just posted this elsewhere, but relevant here too...Friedman's column on "Is the war about oil?" http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/opinion/05FRIE.html

"I think I'm getting the picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make bombs as fast as possible, and President Bush says it's "a diplomatic issue". A "serious situation", but NOT a "crisis", according to Colin Powell.

Iraq hands over a 12,000-page account of its weapons production and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country, and - after they've found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals in 230 raids - President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America, has not disarmed and may have to be invaded.

So that's it, then."

From Robert Fisk's 'The double standards, dubious morality and duplicity of this fight against terror', which you can find here.

North Korea is not likely to invade anyone. They want bombs because they are scared of us. I don't think Sadaam is likely to invade anyone either but it's easier to argue that he is a threat because of the invasion of Kuwait.

I don't but the double standard talk. There is no standard of WMDs = war and this is all new territory.

Craven,

The DPRK is unlikely to intentionally initiate open warfare, because they realize that even with one of the world's largest armies they would lose in short order. However, they don't want the bomb because they are afraid of us either. The purpose of having a nuclear arsenal is to give substance to their threats at the negotiating table. They want the UN/US out of Korea so South Korea will be vulnerable to attack from the North. Kim believes that if we are off the penninsula and he attacks there again, we wouldn't be willing to take risk his use of the Bomb. This boyo has looked at Amrerican policies since the end of WWII, and concluded the American public will never risk taking casualties to protect an ally.

Saddam's arsenal performs a similar function, except he has already demonstrated his willingness to use ABC weapons on innocent civilians. North Korea is primarily a direct threat against ROK, but Iraq under Saddam is a clear and present danger to the entire region.

The outburst that they have a "right" to have bombs because we have bombs threatening them makes me think they are indeed worried about our bombs. Their insistence that we remove our tactical nukesfrom the penninsula (which we did) also suggests they felt threatened by them. I think they want the bomb for many reasons, one of which is that it really is a great detterent and rattles in one's sheath louder than does other toys.

I don't really think they want to attack South Korea. I think they want a non-agression treaty with us, finantial aid and immediate warming of relations all while they manage to save face and without having to make the first move.

I sincerly doubt he wants us off the penninsula so he can do something so stupid as attack the South. I think he wants to pull a China (introduce more capitalist zones etc) and is tired of the hostilities since nobody will do business with them until they manage to make friends with us.

Instead of frontal invasions, North Korea likes to foment "incidents' - aircraft bombings, commando incursions by submarines, border incidents, assassination attempts in other countries. They had a naval skirmash with the South Koreans this winter, but Seoul downplayed it.

I would expect to see something along these lines to occur during the next month or two as an expression of North Korean power and political determination.

danger
I would have liked the question to be which is the greater danger FOR THE UNITED STATES. If we are talking about danger for the world, I would nominate the United States among a number of countries.

I second the nomination, JL.

This is a bit long. However the link will not be available in a day or two.
Crisis Proportions
by Robert Lane Greene
On Sunday Secretary of State Colin Powell took to the airwaves to explain why the situation in North Korea, "grave" and "serious" though it may be, does not rise to the level of a crisis. Powell argued that while a country which just expelled weapons inspectors in anticipation of building a half-dozen nuclear bombs by summer may seem like an imminent threat to the naked eye, North Korea is actually considerably less threatening than, say, Iraq. "This is a country that's in desperate condition," Powell said of North Korea. "What are they going to do with another two or three more nuclear weapons when they're starving, when they have no energy, when they have no economy that's functioning?"

Um, plenty. What follows is a point-by-point comparison of the relative threats presented by Iraq and North Korea. Any honest reading suggests North Korea represents every bit the crisis Iraq does, if not more.
International terrorism:
Iraq once tried to assassinate George Bush senior. It harbored Abu Nidal, a Palestinian extremist, now dead. Its agents may have met, but probably didn't meet, 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta in Prague last year. The Bush administration has bent over backwards to show that Saddam has a hand in anti-American terror, to little avail.
North Korea unsuccessfully attacked South Korea's presidential palace in 1968 and successfully killed 17 cabinet members with a bomb in Burma in 1983. North Korean agents bombed Korean Air flight 858 in 1987 in a fit of annoyance about Seoul's hosting the 1988 Olympic games. One hundred fifteen civilians died. North Korea has kidnapped Japanese civilians, several of whom have died in captivity.
Territorial ambition:
Saddam wants to dominate the Middle East. His invasions of Iran and Kuwait and his belligerence toward Israel and Saudi Arabia make this plain.
Kim Il Sung started the Korean War in 1951, and though it may seem like ancient history, the North's desire to reunify Korea by force has never waned. American and South Korean military forces have repeatedly discovered tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Korea wide enough to support thousands of North Korean soldiers. Only America's explicit security guarantee has prevented a new start to the never-finished Korean War. North Korea test-launched a multi-stage missile over Japan in 1998 to show its island neighbor its teeth.
Humanitarian horror:

Saddam has gassed Kurds in Iraq, and his regime tortures political prisoners and murders anyone posing a threat to his rule. He has presided over the mass starvation of his countrymen through the U.N. sanctions regime without losing a moment's sleep. He is a monster, without doubt.

Harper's recently featured a harrowing account of torture and murder in North Korean prisons. And, like Saddam, Kim Jong Il has presided over his country's dilapidation and starvation. His insistence on Stalinist communism as the only possible form of economic development has prevented North Korean agriculture from feeding the country, or even coming close. Foreign aid workers estimate that between 500,000 and 3,000,000 North Koreans have died of famine since 1994, among a population of around 23 million. As a percentage of the population, the order of magnitude is similar to that of the terror-famines of Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Weapons of mass destruction:

Saddam probably has chemical and maybe biological agents, and is known to want a nuclear bomb, though there is no concrete public evidence that he is close.

Recent CIA intelligence reports suggest North Korea may already have two nuclear bombs. Whatever the actual status of its nuclear program, North Korea has declared its "right" to pursue a nuclear weapon and is taking highly public steps to make one. Which is to say, unlike Iraq, its nuclear threat capability does not have to be guessed at from patchy evidence--it is well known.
Proliferation threat:

Iraq would probably not hesitate to sell WMD to terrorists like Al Qaeda--though no Islamist himself, Saddam would be happy to help his enemy's enemies bloody us.

The recently interrupted weapons shipment to Yemen and the confirmed sharing of nuclear and missile technology with Pakistan demonstrate that North Korea, starved and isolated, will sell anything to anyone. If it were to develop nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, it would happily sell them, no questions asked, at clearance prices for desperately needed hard currency. Powell seems mystified that an impoverished country would somehow find the resources to pursue a weapons program. In fact the exact opposite logic applies: The North Koreans see nuclear weapons as their ticket out of poverty.
Of course, one could certainly conclude from this that the Iraqi threat warrants military action while the North Korean threat does not. After all, unlike Saddam, Kim has a million-odd troops and thousands of artillery weapons amassed about 30 miles from Seoul, a city we'd like very much to avoid seeing levelled. And North Korea may be an object lesson in why we should intervene against a nuclear threat sooner rather than later--before the existence of the weapons creates a deterrent and limits our options. But, if anything, both of these factors make the North Korean situation even more of a crisis than it would otherwise be. That the administration won't face up to this is both confusing and dangerous.

Au,

Fine analysis. I tend to agree that the DPRK is a greater immediate danger than is Iraq. Both situations pose a grave danger to world peace and stability. Militarily we can pevail in either, or both at the same time. Nation-building is harder, but one step at a time.

Last time I heard, the administration was against nation building -- which leaves the outcome of any conquest pretty much in the same state as Aghanistan.

Any high school kid can tell you that North Korea is a bigger threat than Iraq, but this administration has their eyes fixed on Saddam. When North Korea completes their nuke program, they're going to sell it to all the rogue states and Al Qaida. Then, we're really going to have a problem. c.i.

Along the lines of your conclusion, ci, here's a snippet and a link to the proliferation of WMD as outlined by the CIA:

As the United States is consumed with proliferation crises in Iraq and North Korea, other counties such as Libya, Syria and possibly Sudan are quietly trying to acquire or expand secret arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, the CIA has warned.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has also concluded that suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11 attacks on the United States, "has a more sophisticated biological weapons research program than previously discovered."

"Nuclear, chemical, biological, and ballistic missile-applicable technology and expertise continues to gradually disperse worldwide," the agency said in a report submitted to Congress last month and made public Tuesday.

Libya, Syria, possibly Sudan also seek WMD, CIA warns