China’s puppet North Korea’s yet unchecked attacks on U.S.-occupied South Korea make direct military conflict among rival global imperialists ever more likely. Flaunting a growing nuclear arsenal, the North’s fake “communist” dictatorial monarchy reportedly torpedoed a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors (see box). Late last month, North Korean artillery shells killed two marines and two civilians on one of the South’s militarized islands.
Obama responded to the March sinking rather meekly, calling for no more than an “international investigation.” This time around, however, Obama has sent a U.S. Navy carrier group into the Yellow Sea, which North Korea threatens to make a “sea of fire,” if U.S. vessels violate its waters.
The imperialists’ sharpening Korean impasse highlights the interplay between the actual and the potential, a key category in communist analysis. At present, hostilities remain at a relatively low level. But, given the forces the rival bosses can deploy and the peninsula’s strategic importance to them, an all-out conflagration threatened by both sides could explode at any time.
Hostile Words, Sporadic Killing Today, Korean Holocaust Tomorrow?
So far, the Washington-Seoul axis has limited itself to rhetoric and mere shows of force. And the phony “People’s” Republic of Korea, backed by the phony “People’s” Republic of China, while reportedly guilty of 50 murders, doesn’t even come close to U.S. killing rates. U.S. rulers have the blood of millions of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Yemenis on their hands.
In the increasingly likely case of conflict in the Koreas, however, the body count could skyrocket beyond the U.S.-led Mid-East carnage. The North — per population the most militarized country on earth — has over a million active-duty soldiers. If the U.S. were so mobilized, it proportionately would have 12 million.
The outnumbered South-U.S. alliance, with fewer than 700,000 troops, including 25,000 GIs, could resort to the Pentagon’s nuclear trump card. North Korea has a handful of warheads and China a hundred or so, but the U.S. has about 10,000. Along with A-bombs, Obama & Co. also wield the most lethal “conventional” weaponry ever devised, a good deal of it currently afloat on the USS George Washington in the Yellow Sea.
Leading U.S. Rockefeller Bloc Deems N. Korea’s ‘Demise’ Worth Workers’ Lives
The dominant Rockefeller-led imperialist faction of U.S. capitalists understands that taking out North Korea entails possible global war with China. Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. rulers’ top foreign policy think-tank, issued a report entitled “Military Escalation in Korea.” Boasting “generous” bankrolling from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the study said:
“Renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula and potential U.S. and ROK [Republic of (South) Korea] military intervention into North Korea would clearly pose more serious risks to relations with China, including even the possibility of direct clash.”
But discounting the cost in workers’ lives, the CFR demands North Korea’s ultimate annihilation. Amid hollow public diplomacy and the rattling of still unbloodied U.S. sabers, “the United States can privately reiterate to the leadership in Pyongyang and Beijing that any initiation of major hostilities will inevitably bring about the demise of North Korea” — obviously as unconcerned with the mass murder of Asian workers here as in the 1945 A-Bomb racist massacre of 250,000 working-class families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The CFR, well aware of the bloodshed Obama’s Korean war games may trigger, urges U.S. and allied top brass to prepare for Vietnam-style fighting, in addition to nuclear Armageddon: “U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command must be especially sensitive to potential U.S. and South Korean military operations that may inadvertently goad or intimidate North Korea. Joint planning to manage a range of contingencies besides full-scale war should be upgraded.”
Will U.S. Lure North Korea, China to Invade South?
CFR planners suggest a Korean “sucker-punch” strategy like the one Bush, Sr. used in Gulf War I: rather than invade the enemy’s territory, lure him into yours. In 1990, U.S. ambassador April Glaspie assured Saddam Hussein that the U.S. would not hinder Iraq’s forays into Kuwait, and then launched all-out air and ground war against Saddam’s outmanned invading forces.
“Short of unambiguous indications of the North’s preparation for full-scale offensive operations, the United States and ROK could deliberately stand down their forward-deployed forces and desist from activities that might trigger further escalation. However, rear-area defensive preparations could be initiated to hedge against the North’s failure to reciprocate.” Why on earth, except to ensnare emboldened northern invaders, would the South let down its border guard while beefing up its interior defenses?
Tensions are heightening because China can no more tolerate the prospect of a pro-U.S. reunited Korea than the U.S. can endure a pro-China one. Beijing’s bosses will not brook U.S. troops with land-based access to Korea’s border with China’s mainland, the world’s manufacturing center. However, U.S. bosses will do all they can to prevent China from robbing the U.S. Navy of control of East Asia’s sea lanes, the increasingly important focus of global trade in goods and energy.
Given all this warmongering on both sides, they undoubtedly would try to avoid destroying all those GM, Nike, Ford and other U.S. factories in an all-out war involving North and South Korea, China and the U.S. But our communist Party cannot predict what will happen there. We can only warn that sharpening competition among beleaguered capitalist nations makes open warfare possible and plausible.
One thing is certain, though. Unlike the Korean War of 1950-53, this is not an ideological struggle between the promise of workers’ power versus western capitalism. Grave political errors, including nationalism, retention of the capitalist wage system and elite party-member privilege, restored capitalism in once pro-worker China, North Korea and Russia. In 2010, both belligerents wholeheartedly support and practice the worker-destroying profit system.
Progressive Labor Party’s long-term goal is revolution that eliminates the imperialists’ profit-driven and racist war-making and establishes true working-class rule. We are attempting to plant the seeds of that future communist society in our Party’s struggles in the shops, unions, schools, churches and communities and among GIs, as recorded in the pages of CHALLENGE, as well as in the growth of a new international communist movement spread by our Party on five continents.
Box
War in Korea A Tragedy for All Workers
The U.S. bosses’ media has largely depicted the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong as the home of helpless victims attacked by a terrorist North Korean regime. In reality half the island’s population is uniformed soldiers manning an artillery fire-base targeting North Korea.
The latest artillery exchange, the first in over 30 years, is only the latest incident in a series of escalations on the Korean peninsula that has been largely precipitated by U.S. and South Korean aggression and posturing. In November 2009, the South Korean military sunk a North Korean naval vessel. Now the U.S. and South Korea used the sinking of a South Korean warship to again ratchet up tensions on the peninsula.
The U.S. and South Korea have refused to allow independent investigators to examine the wreckage. A group of Russian scientists who were allowed to examine a few small pieces of the wreckage raised serious doubts about the official torpedo story, suggesting that the ship might have been sunk accidentally by a South Korean mine. The report set off a diplomatic firestorm between Russia and South Korea.
Currently the U.S. and South Korea are engaged in massive war-gaming in nearby waters, “games” run regularly designed to purposely antagonize the North. The latter warned that any violation of its waters during the war game would be perceived as an attack on the North. After several shells fell on its side, the North shelled Yeonpyeong.
Imperialism the Real Reason Behind Escalation
The Korean War 1950 — 53 caused 4,000,000 casualties and reduced North and South Korea to rubble. The Korean peninsula has been and is a vitally important piece in the U.S. imperial strategy that allows for quick-strike capability against China and Russia. A cooling of tensions between North and South Korea is a disaster scenario for the U.S. which needs the imminent threat of war to justify the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers stationed in a massive complex of bases and airfields all over South Korea.
China has long sought to exert direct influence over the Korean peninsula and eventually evict the U.S. forces there. It has built a puppet “government-in-exile” to be installed should the North collapse as well as building a legal claim that historically Korea is a part of China.
North Korea is Not Iraq
Trapped between two competing imperialist powers, the Korean peninsula is being pushed dangerously towards war. Escalation would be a tragedy for workers everywhere. Rather than a low-intensity conflict killing a million people over a decade of fighting, as in Iraq, such a war would be a genocidal disaster. A 1992 U.S. War Department assessment, re-affirmed in 2003, estimates that one million people would die in the first 24 hours alone in a full-scale war.
Since 1958, it has been official U.S. policy that nuclear weapons would be used in any war between North and South Korea. After the U.S. transferred its nuclear arsenal in 1999 off the Korean peninsula to nuclear submarines off the Korean coast, the South Korean Defense Minister has again asked that these weapons be deployed throughout South Korea.
The increasing tensions in Korea reflect the increasing inter-imperialist rivalries driving the world towards war.