North Korea, Iraq main enemies: Pentagon

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

NEW YORK, JULY 29. Even as the Bush administration is going about studying the parameters of the start of serious talks with North Korea, the Pentagon is maintaining that Pyongyang - along with Iraq - continue to be the main threats to the United States.

``Wars might happen tomorrow in Korea and Iraq'', the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, has said. The number two man in the Pentagon has also singled out North Korea as the bigger of the two threats given that Iraq had been defeated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

From a near term point of view, West Asia continues to be a flashpoint. ``Iraq is still a potent force. If the United States weren't there, Saddam Hussein could be in Riyadh tomorrow'', Mr. Wolfowitz remarked in a television interview.

The fact that the top Pentagon official continues to talk about North Korea and Iraq as being the principle threats to the U.S. should not be a major surprise for the Bush administration from the very beginning has made no bones of the fact that it was going to be more circumspect when it came to North Korea as opposed to the overtures of the Clinton administration.

And Iraq has been meriting attention as well with the President, Mr. George W. Bush, himself saying that Mr. Saddam Hussein continues to be a ``menace''. The Pentagon, for instance, is looking at the options over last week's incident in the no-fly zone. An American spy plane was nearly hit by an Iraqi missile. The U.S. Defence Department said that it reserved the right to respond at a time and place of its choosing.

North Korea will continue to merit the highest level of attention and for a number of reasons. Pyongyang is one of the chief suspects in the proliferation game besides seen as one of the countries in the ``rouge state'' category that could attack the United States and its interests overseas. The Bush administration is pushing its Missile Defence Plan, the central theme of which being that the country is vulnerable to attack from rouge states in the international system.

The Pentagon brass hats and civilians have a tough time selling the National Missile Plan on Capitol Hill; and the process has become much more difficult given that the Democrats are now in ``control'' of the Senate with the defection of a Republican recently. The Democrats are convinced that walking away from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which forbids building missile defence system will have high costs.

One argument of the Democrats is that unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty would lead to a debilitating arms race with Russia and China. But apparently, some Democrats are softening their stance in view of the last week's summit meeting between Mr. Bush and his Russian counterpart, Mr. Vladimir Putin, and the agreement to start negotiations on a wide range of issues pertaining to arms control.

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Section  : International
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