|
LOS ANGELES -- Two-front wars are so much easier to lose. That’s
why the latest terrorist atrocity in Indonesia makes it all the
more imperative and urgent to settle the roiling North Korean problem
as
quickly as possible and get it out of the way.
Terror Attack Syndrome, TAS, as it were, is now the No. 1 violent
threat to us all. Nothing else is as imminently dangerous. Iran
and Syria, after the West’s invasion of Iraq, are lying low;
China is not going to start a nuclear war; the menacing Soviet Union
is gone. No one has heard from Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi in
years. Cuba’s Fidel Castro is a shell of his former shell.
Yet, despite all the security efforts, expenditures and puffy war-on-terror
rhetoric, tenacious and evil terror teams remain alive and active.
Last week (Aug.5) in Indonesia -- the world’s most populous
Muslim nation -- more than a dozen died and more than a hundred
were injured when a car bomb exploded in a fashionable section of
Jakarta. The target was a hotel identified with American clientele.
The job was done by a wicked group linked to Al Qaeda -- Jemaah
Islamiah, notorious baddies in Southeast Asian circles but little
known in the United States. This is the same lot that killed more
than 200 people -- mostly Australians and English -- last
October in Bali.
Indonesia -- recovering nicely from the Asian financial crisis and
working through the early, bumpy stages of its new democracy --
deserves much better than this. But no country is immune, as Megawati
Sukarnoputri, Indonesia’s president, is now fully aware. A
true, functioning, stable democracy in huge Indonesia would be a
historic defeat for terrorists.
There must be a colossal worldwide coalition against TAS, accompanied
by the supportive sentiments of the peaceful Muslim world, requiring
the highest level of focus and patience. Distraction is the terrorists’
ally: The enormity of the challenge is such that nothing must be
allowed to fuzz-up the focus. President George W. Bush can tie North
Korea into some imaginary ‘‘axis of evil,’’
but it is too feeble a nation -- though heavily armed, possibly
nuclear and usually unpredictable -- to pose a wide-ranging, globe-throttling
threat.
A singular American strike on North Korea (forget help from Great
Britain, as Prime Minister Tony Blair is politically weakened) would
be a strike against that very willing coalition. Besides diverting
Washington’s
attention, it would traumatize China, whose cooperation with South
Korea and the United States on the Korean issue has become dramatically
helpful. And it would upset Japan, which needs to rethink its military
posture in an atmosphere of calm reflection, not with its public
diving into bomb shelters out of fear of incoming North Korean missiles.
China has come forward with a helpful negotiating format involving
a number of parties which with Pyongyang initially had said it would
not play; but the latter changed its mind. In response, the Bush
administration needs to make China look good with Pyongyang by unilaterally
and formally forswearing a military intention, and letting the honorable
and respected Secretary of State Colin Powell bring home a
major diplomatic victory before he leaves office (bet the house
against his remaining for a second Bush term). A negotiated solution
on the Korean peninsula is not rocket science; but without it, real
rockets, of old Soviet science, may indeed fly.
Poisonous right-wing elements in Seoul (not to mention Washington)
are conspiring against peace. They are making much of those under-the-table
payments to the North from the South’s Hyundai chaebol (horror
of horrors!) that greased the way for former President Kim Dae-jung’s
historic summit in Pyongyang three years ago. This led to his Nobel
Peace Prize. Last week (Aug. 4) a top Hyundai tycoon facing criminal
prosecution over the payments jumped from a 12-story office. Only
the worst South Korean domestic politics can turn a Nobel prize
into a human tragedy.
Are the opponents of peace truly prepared to tell the Korean people
that such payments are unprecedented in international diplomacy?
On what planet are they living? If money is the mother’s milk
of domestic politics, it is no less so in international politics.
Properly used (for example, to get a vicious dictator to retire
in some sunny clime), it can indeed become the milk of human kindness.
The Korean tension is directly related to the worldwide fight against
terrorism because the U.S. leadership -- with its exceptional technology,
deep 9/11 psychic wounds and burning-Bush commitment-- is prompted
to consider a two-front war. But the fact is, it could well lose,
at least in the short run, at least one of them.
To contain worldwide terrorism it is essential to cage the hawks
in Seoul. Those in South Korea who want to sabotage the mitigation
of North Korean tension are the enemies of the war on terror. They
would applaud a two-front international crisis and that would play
into the hands of the Jemaah Islamiahs of the world. That would
be distinctly unhelpful.
|
|
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. |
