Appeasement pays no dividends

This nation's national security experts cannot determine whether North Korea's Kim Jong-un is crazy like a fox or just crazy. That conundrum has paralyzed and rendered ineffective our attempts to deal with the mounting crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

In fact, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that his regime presents a clear and present danger to the vital interests of the United States.

History has taught us that appeasement not only does not work, it serves as an incitement to those who would harm us or our allies. It acts as a deadly accelerant. Thinking otherwise flies in the face of history.

On Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany, where he had signed the Munich Agreement that permitted Nazi Germany to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany, known as the Sudetenland. At 10 Downing St. that day, Chamberlain proclaimed, "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time."

When he heard of the Munich Settlement, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a two-word telegram to Chamberlain. It read, "Good man." Good man, indeed! Less than a year later, the Nazis invaded Poland, and World War II had begun. By the summer of 1940, the Wehrmacht had overrun most of Europe. England stood alone.

President Roosevelt, wary of the strong isolationist and anti-interventionist feeling in America, remained timid in the face of aggression. He would not endanger his plan to seek an unprecedented third term in 1940. It would take Pearl Harbor to stiffen America's resolve.

By August 1945, Germany had been defeated, but Japan, having been pushed back to its home islands, showed no signs of surrender.

President Harry Truman faced a terrible decision — use the atomic bomb or risk upward of 1 million casualties in an allied invasion of Japan. President Truman authorized the use of the bomb, and a month thereafter, Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

The lesson is obvious. Appeasement pays no dividends. The use of overwhelming force does. However, with respect to North Korea, this is a lesson the United States has refused to learn.

The American government has known for decades that North Korea is a militaristic, closed society that brutalizes its people and sells armaments, including missiles and missile technology, to the enemies of the United States. It has sold armaments to Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Yemen, to name a few. Armament sales are its principal source of hard currency.

North Korea successfully conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013. In 2007, it announced that it had nuclear weapons. In 2009, it expelled inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had stated that North Korea had become a full-fledged nuclear power. It is not a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. And about 10 days ago, our Defense Intelligence Agency reported that it had concluded with "moderate confidence" that North Korea was capable of launching a missile with a nuclear warhead.

In the face of this growing threat, America has dithered. Its ineffective efforts are tantamount to appeasement. We chase ourselves in a circle, having offered food and energy assistance to a pariah regime that gets those commodities from its principal ally, China. We have failed to convince China that it needs to bell the North Korean cat.

China hasn't been willing to take that action because it prefers a buffer between itself and South Korea, because it doesn't want to have to deal with millions of North Korean refugees streaming into China were it to disrupt the North's dependence on China's supply of oil and food, and because it has learned that America will not take the steps necessary to change the status quo ante. Even a village idiot can figure out that our foreign policy gives carte blanche to Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions and recklessness.

One only needs to look at Secretary of State John Kerry's recent talks in Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo to see the barrenness of our approach. In a joint news conference with the South Korean foreign minister, Kerry said, "We are all united in the fact that North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power."

Hello! It already is a nuclear power. This issue has nothing to do with "acceptance." It has to do with eliminating that nuclear power and the existential threat it poses.

In The Washington Post, David Ignatius reported that M.J. Chung, the controlling shareholder of Hyundai, urged the U.S. to redeploy the tactical nuclear weapons it removed from South Korea in 1991, and said the South should begin to develop nuclear weapons.

The way out of this madness is clear. Beijing needs to be told that either it replace Kim Jong-un and insist that the Korean Peninsula be denuclearized, or we will. My guess is that when Beijing hears that message, things will change for the better in Pyongyang, pronto.

If it doesn't, then we can send 500,000 American troops halfway around the world to fight a five-year ground war, incur 100,000 casualties, and spend $3 trillion to $5 trillion, or we can use nuclear weapons to get the job done in a couple of weeks. I wonder which choice President Truman would make?

      The Shadow's headed to Beijing, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

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Three crazy Kims are three too many

At the end of World War II, Josef Stalin needed to install a puppet leader in North Korea. He turned to Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD (Soviet secret police), for advice.

Beria recommended Kim Il-sung, who became North Korea's head of state from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. Thus began a dynasty of totalitarian tyrants that went on to include his son, Kim Jong-il, and now includes his 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un.

In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. When hostilities ceased three years later, the Korean Peninsula was cut in half at the 38th parallel. A Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separates the two hostile nations.

Since then, the two nations have gone in opposite directions. South Korea is free and has become a prosperous engine of commerce and enterprise. It is non-nuclear but relies upon the treaty arrangement it has with our nation to defend it, if attacked. The United States has about 30,000 troops in South Korea.

North Korea has been a hermetically sealed police state since its founding. It is impoverished and has endured terrible famines. At least 25 percent of its meager GDP is devoted to its military and nuclear ambitions. Its State Security Department has operated concentration camps since the 1950s that specialize in murder, torture, starvation, forced abortion, rape and medical experimentation. North Koreans are sent to the Gulag without benefit of trial.

The North Korean Army numbers 1.1 million with another 8.2 million in reserve. It is the fourth largest army in the world. North Korea has trained revolutionary and terrorist groups from more than 60 countries, including the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Its substantial export of armaments and missile technology is carried out by a front organization, the Korea Mining and Development Training Corp., which has sold missile technology to Iran.

North Korea has been actively developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems for years. The United States estimates that it possesses enough nuclear material for two to nine nuclear warheads.

Efforts by the U.S. to use diplomacy, sanctions, appeals to China, and food and energy assistance have all met with failure to convince North Korea to turn away from its military and nuclear ambitions. And now the rise of the untested Kim Jong-un has made a bad situation incomparably worse.

American foreign policy has failed to cope with North Korea's growing nuclear capability because it assumes a modicum of rational self-interest exists in Pyongyang. It doesn't. Kim is crazy. It runs in his family. And Kim doesn't have a Bushmaster with a high-capacity magazine. He's got nukes and an insatiable appetite for more. Think of him as Adam Lanza on radioactive steroids.

Pyongyang expelled the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2009. Kim has recently announced he will restart a plutonium/uranium refining reactor at Yongbyon. In February, he authorized the nation's third nuclear test. Now he's barred South Koreans from the only cooperative industrial complex in the North. In addition, he has declared a state of war with South Korea and vowed to launch nuclear missiles at the United States.

Most "experts" in the West discount all of this as bravado. If they are wrong, it's a gigantic and unpardonable miscalculation on our part.

Three-quarters of Kim's 1.1 million army and 10,000 artillery pieces are massed within 60 miles of the DMZ, less than 100 miles from Seoul. A war between these two nations would be savage. Seoul would be pulverized. Civilian casualties would be enormous. South Korea's economy would be plunged into darkness, and that darkness would infect the global marketplace from Asia to America within days.

But even if the experts are right and none of that happens, the continuation of the status quo only results in ever increasing numbers of nuclear weapons for Kim's regime, already the most militarized society on Earth. And the status quo increases the probability that nations like South Korea and Japan will feel compelled to go nuclear, too.

If that happens, expect Vietnam to follow suit. That's an outcome that not only the United States opposes, so would China. That commonality of interest offers the best way out of this growing crisis.

President Barack Obama should send Jon Huntsman, his former U.S. ambassador to Beijing, on a secret mission to China. Huntsman speaks Mandarin, and he and the leaders in Beijing know and respect one another. The message that Huntsman should carry to Beijing is simple. Neither county's interest is served if South Korea, Japan and Vietnam join the nuclear club. Neither country's interest is served if Kim attacks the South. Neither country's interest is served if Kim continues his obsession to acquire nuclear weapons.

Huntsman must press China to force the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear weapons program and remove Kim. There is no doubt that China can do that if it wishes. Finally, Huntsman's message must enable Beijing to read between the lines and understand that if they don't act, America will.

Our action, if necessary, should be pre-emptive and massive. It should destroy the entirety of Kim's nuclear infrastructure and his military machine. The strike should make use of enough tactical nuclear weapons to assure success. Their use would have an additional salutary effect — in Tehran!

The Shadow's brushing up on his Mandarin, but Goldman can be reached at: EmailMe

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Our executive culture of sloth

LeRoy Goldman
The Shadow Knows

Published: Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

The entire executive branch is vastly overstaffed. Its accumulated dead weight induces monumental inefficiency. It stifles creativity and competence, and wastes billions of dollars.

Let's look at just one specific example of this outrage, the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is the second largest government agency. It owns and operates a vast medical care system that includes 171 medical centers, 350 outpatient clinics and 150 nursing homes.

More than 280,000 persons are employed by the department, and the president's budget for it this year is $140 billion. That budget is mainly divided into two major categories — mandatory spending of $75 billion for disability, pension and education benefits, and $64 billion for the operation of its medical care system. Its secretary is retired four-star Gen. Eric Shinseki.

The department has been under increasing criticism and scrutiny for several years because of its growing backlog of disability, pension and education claims. There are more than 900,000 such claims, and 600,000 of them are backlogged. The average wait for benefits is now approaching a year. In Los Angeles and New York City, first-time filers now are having to wait more than 600 days.

The rising flood of claimants comes as no surprise. More than 1 million veterans have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade. In addition, Vietnam veterans have recently become eligible for disability based upon exposure to Agent Orange.

The backlog is caused by the fact that the department has failed in its attempts to process the claims electronically. Ninety-seven percent of the claims are on paper. Aaron Glantz of the Center for Investigative Reporting has obtained documents that show the expenditure of half a billion dollars in the failed attempt to computerize the claims process over the past four years. Glantz said, "There's a complete dysfunctionality; there's bad management at most of their regional offices."

At a recent hearing before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, testimony revealed that promises the VA and the Department of Defense had made to merge all troops' medical records into a single electronic system had not been kept due to bureaucratic infighting. Committee Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., urged the VA to fire problematic employees rather than transfer them from one regional office to another. He called that "a bureaucratic shell game."

Shinseki now promises progress by the end of 2015. Why would you believe that? It's on his watch that the problem exploded and the bureaucrats were allowed to dither.

And how about the medical care side of the VA? About two-thirds of the department's 280,000 employees are involved in medical care. It's a system that has long been troubled.

In 2009, 10,000 veterans were notified that they needed to be tested for hepatitis B and C and HIV because of improper cleaning of endoscopic devices at multiple VA hospitals. The improper procedures had occurred several years prior to their notification.

In a follow-up report by the VA's Inspector General's Office, it became clear that fewer than half of the VA facilities selected for surprise inspections had proper training or guidelines for colonoscopies. Investigators found that valves were missing from the devices and the devices' tubing was not cleaned between patients.

Shinseki told Congress that he would take disciplinary action.

In 2010, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined a VA hospital in Philadelphia for committing an unprecedented number of radiation errors in treating prostate cancer patients. The number of errors was large and occurred over a six-year period from 2002 to 2008.

A couple of months ago, it was disclosed that a VA hospital in western New York may well have been responsible for exposing at least 700 diabetic patients to hepatitis B and C and HIV by reusing insulin pens on many patients. What this amounts to is the highly risky practice of needle sharing. The practice had been going on since 2010. Shinseki was asked by Congress to get to the bottom of the issue.

Why do we need the VA medical care system? We don't. Polls show that the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is when the government owns the hospitals, and the doctors and nurses work for the government.

That's your VA system! Let's get rid of it and give our veterans a VA card that will enable them to get treated in the hospital of their choice by the doctor of their choice.

And don't think for a moment that firing Shinseki will fix these problems. Shinseki, and every other Cabinet secretary, doesn't run his department, and he wastes little time trying. He and the rest of the Cabinet secretaries know something you don't. It can't be done. So they don't waste their time trying. When bad things happen and the press gets wind of it, they simply say they'll look into it and wait for it to blow over.

These executive branch departments are too big and too insulated. Their culture of sloth and incompetence is too deeply ingrained to be remediable.

The only way to cope with this problem is for Congress to rewrite the rule book for the organization and staffing of the executive branch in such a way that it becomes possible to systematically weed out hundreds of thousands of employees who have nothing productive to do.

No president or Cabinet secretary will do it. To the contrary, they keep telling us how dedicated, hardworking and loyal the executive branch is. It's a lie we can't afford.

The Shadow's filing a VA disability claim, but Goldman can be reached at:  EmailMe

Please Visit:  Citizens Against Politics As Usual

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