Korean Crisis Threatens War

North Korea has attacked an island near the demilitarized zone in South Korean territory, killing two and wounding as many as a dozen more.

Though the skirmish is small in itself, it comes on top of months of escalating tensions on the divided peninsula.  In recent months, the North and South have clashed several times at sea, including the sinking by North Korea of a South Korean patrol ship.  And an American nuclear scientist has recently testified that he was shown a new North Korean nuclear enrichment facility, indicating that the North may be restarting and expanding its nuclear weapons program.

South Korea has for years absorbed repeated provocations from the North without serious retaliation.  But no government can absorb direct attacks without responding for long without being taken down by its political rivals for weakness in the face of foreign threat.

Moreover, North Korea has a pattern of using external attacks to paper over internal power struggles.  The recent elevation of supreme leader Kim Jong Il’s son to heir apparent has provoked a succession struggle in the North, making war with the South tempting to many in the North’s senior leadership.

The U.S. deterrent force also isn’t as powerful as it once was.  The U.S. maintains a “tripwire” force along the demilitarized zone in the hopes that the knowledge that any large attack on the South would bring the U.S. into the conflict would be enough to deter the North.  But the North’s leaders are not known for their rational calculations of alternatives in the best of times.  And it is the nature of a dictatorial society to lie to itself, telling the leader only what he wants to hear.  Debilitated by a stroke anyway, Kim Jong Il may believe that the U.S. being tied down in Afghanistan gives him an opening to attack the South.

It has always been difficult to see an end to the decades-long stalemate in Korea without a war.  The paranoid and reclusive regime in the North presides over an economic and social basketcase where as much as 1/5 of the population is vulnerable to famine but which maintains a massive (though technologically obsolete) military force just a few miles away from South Korea’s sprawling urban capital.  With a massive chemical arsenal backed by at least a few atomic weapons, war between North and South will not be the antiseptic, minimal-casualties affair that Americans have come to expect.