Military Officer - July 2007 - (Page 59)

Herald Tribune recently reported there are 100,000 foreign ﬁrms operating in China. Among that number are 62 Wal-Marts (and counting). With exports to the U.S. growing by some 1,600 percent since the early 1990s, China is anything but a closed society. Along with the U.S., Japan, and the European Union, China already is one of the main pistons of the global economy. Its GDP is $2.3 trillion. And its economy has grown by almost 10 percent annually for 25 years, enabling the People’s Republic to move 300 million of its subjects out of poverty. The prospects for a comparable withering away of totalitarianism and ﬂowering of capitalism in North Korea seem beyond remote. This is a closed society, an economy smaller than that of virtually every state in the U.S., a country whose most lucrative exports are retroﬁtted Soviet-era missiles and counterfeit American $100 bills, a place where citizens are required to donate food rations to the armed forces, a nation with neither the will nor the means to join the world. inbred paranoia and distrust of all things beyond the demilitarized zone (DMZ) won’t help the situation. After all, the NKPA is perhaps the most paranoid, propagandized, and privileged part of North Korea. Why wouldn’t it try to sustain the regime and the revolution? Why wouldn’t it turn against its own countrymen in the north? Why wouldn’t it lash out against the south? The parallel here might be the civil war in Yugoslavia after the collapse of communism, the unraveling of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s defeat, or the Korean War itself, which was both a civil war and a war of uniﬁcation. T Explosion hat brings us to the nightmare scenario — an explosion of the North Korean state that sends shrapnel in every direction. North Korean defectors have warned that as the economic situation grows more desperate, war becomes the most likely option for the regime. Although it might be shorter than the Korean War, which lasted from 1950-53, the second Korean War would be just as bloody. The death toll from Korean War I should give us pause: 38,000 Americans, 103,000 South Koreans, 316,000 North Koreans, and 422,000 Chinese killed during three years of conventional warfare. And that doesn’t I Implosion t’s no wonder that defectors are streaming out of Kim’s emaciated country at an unprecedented rate. Between 2000 and 2004, as the British newspaper The Guardian has reported, there was a fourfold increase in defections. From 2004-06, as many as 10,000 defectors might have ﬂed to South Korea. To put this in perspective, before the 1990s, fewer than 10 North Koreans defected to South Korea annually. In February, CNN reported that 120 inmates had escaped into China from a concentration camp near the Chinese border. The same story included reports that North Korean border guards are ﬂeeing into China. Could this foreshadow the same sort of controlled, almost orderly collapse that felled the communist regimes of Eastern Europe? Probably not. After all, there is no North Korean Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa to channel the pent-up fury, no Korean pope to shout truth to power. North Koreans don’t have the will or the wherewithal — or quite simply the strength, given a daily 1,300-calorie diet that relies on grass as a staple — to rise up and tear down Kim’s government the way Romania’s revolutionaries toppled Nicolae Ceausescu. There is no nationalist virus ﬂoating around North Korea, such as the one spawned by the Baltics or Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, to infect this Stalinist state. And even if there is some germ of a freedom movement in North Korea, it’s hard to imagine the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) remaining garrisoned like the Red Army did in 1991, if Kim calls for help. Indeed, when the Kim dynasty ﬁnally falls — perhaps after the unexpected death of its Dear Leader — the With 1.2 million [trained men], he has the fourth-largest army in the world, spending a third of North Korea’s GDP to prepare for a war. include civilian dead — or those with non-fatal wounds. In 1951 alone, as Derek Leebaert writes in The Fifty-Year Wound (Little, Brown and Co., 2002), “American dead and wounded numbered 100,000.” It was so bloody and brutal that one newspaper aptly called Korea “World War 2.5.” More than half a century later, we have the specter of a mushroom cloud hanging over that war’s sequel. The optimists remind us that Pyongyang promised in February to shut down its nuclear program. The J U LY 2 0 0 7 MILITARY OFFICER 59

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Military Officer - July 2007 Contents From the Editor From the President Your Views MOAA Directory Rapid Fire Washington Scene Financial Forum Ask the Doctor Chapter Activities Cover Story: In Focus After the Kim Dynasty Animal House Paying Tribute MOAA Member Services Pages of History Faces of MOAA Information Exchange Advertising Index MOAA Scholarship Donors MOAA Calendar Sounding Taps Encore

Military Officer - July 2007

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