May 12, 2003

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SANE

By Tom Plate

For those who would fight North Korea, the mood is to give negotiations a chance

© 2003 Asia Pacific Media Network

CAMP SMITH, PEARL HARBOR, OAHU ISLAND, Hawaii -- They laugh at their own macho Marines -- for being so ridiculously macho.

They joke it wasn't really the Commander in Chief that made that awesome Tom Cruise landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln flight deck earlier this month -- but some Hollywood body double. And if you could poll them, you would not find a lot of gung-ho for conflict with North Korea right now. The sentiment seems to be, isn't one major war enough work for the year?

Is this a Puff-the-Magic-Dragon campus peacenik sit-in scene at the University of Hawaii? No, it's the muted-drums-of-war scene at red-blooded military base Camp Smith, perched 600 feet above Pearl Harbor, the headquarters for the commander (the CINC) of the Pacific (thus, CINCPAC). Some of our military's best and brightest are stationed here. A good thing, too: For if President George W. Bush orders action against North Korea, these men and women would get the job.

And to do the president's bidding, they'd start packing in about the time it takes to surf a south-shore wave. Some people abroad (and at home) paint our military men and women with a simplistic ideological brush, depicting them as either brain-dead super-patriots (by the right) or as utterly vicious militarists (by the left).

They're neither. "The thing to understand about the military mentality," explains a top military "ops" (operations) officer, "is that they're pragmatists. Give them a job, they figure out how to do it, and then they do it." To them, Iraq was not a crusade (sorry, anti-American Muslim radicals with conspiracy theories). It was just a "job."

The next job, of course, might well be North Korea. And the Tommy Franks of that operation could be Tom Fargo. He is the four-star admiral and former submarine commander who runs this place. Even so, many of Fargo's people are rooting for negotiations to work in Korea as much as any sleepless South Korean in range of North Korean mortars and missiles. From the standpoint of someone who may be ordered to do the job, North Korea is to Iraq as Godzilla is to a fat carp goldfish swimming in a hotel pond.

Don't confuse the residents of Camp Smith -- who hail from such places as Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri -- with those Americans who have no interest in world affairs. Fargo's wife -- a Midwest version of Lucille Ball who's so funny she could probably get the North Koreans to laugh themselves to death -- comes from Florida.

"What do you make of the new South Korean president?" asked Sarah Fargo. She and everyone else here ask the question because Wednesday's (May 14) crucial meeting between Roh Moo Hyun, the newly elected head of South Korea, and Bush could well determine whether her husband and his Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines will go to war.

Don't worry, she was told. Roh, 56, is solid and sensible -- no anti-American radical or Korean warmonger. The boss' wife was visibly relieved. Relatively few Americans know it, but about two years ago a similar Seoul-Washington summit in the White House ended in diplomatic disaster. Bush, then freshly in office, and Korean President Kim Dae Jung, then about 76, did not hit it off, to put it mildly. The result was renewed tension on the peninsula, an upsurge in defiance and nuclear activity from the North and a monstrous threat to peace.

Better chemistry can be expected between the now more seasoned Bush and the more contemporary Roh. Indeed, they owe it to the world to seal the Seoul-Washington relationship into an alliance for peace. Open warfare on the Korean peninsula would endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Koreans -- and who knows how many of the nearly 40,000 U.S. military personnel already stationed there?

A top commander at Pearl, who requires anonymity, was asked if he thought war was inevitable. He is well versed in the psychotic ways of the North Koreans, the extreme emotions of the South Koreans and the constant need of domestic arms manufacturers to satiate greedy stockholders. "It's negotiable, absolutely," he said. "But of course we're ready for the job if reason fails."

Nicely put. For wars are the enemy of all reason. They shorten lives, create single moms and deprive heartland cities of vibrant young people. Such truths are overwhelming at a place like this. There's no lack of patriotism here, to be sure; but there's also no lack of sanity. As they joke, America's war quota ought to be sated for the time being. Let's now give peace a chance.

The above weekly column has just appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser, The South China Morning Post and The Straits Times of Singapore. The author, Tom Plate, is a regular columnist at these three papers. The column also appears in other world newspapers, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Japan Times and The Korea Times. Email him at: tplate@ucla.edu.

For publication and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson (john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International.

Previous Columns:

The Singapore Sling of a Precedent-Setting Deal (May 7, 2003)

When Politics Can Be Injurious to People's Health (May 5, 2003)

A New Global Force to be Reckoned With (April 28, 2003)

Why War in Korea is Less Probable Now (April 21, 2003)

China: A Nation Behaving Badly (April 14, 2003)

© 2003 Asia Pacific Media Network