Back of the Envelope

Well, all the hawks on Iraq are feeling mighty depressed this week. The Democrats won Congress, and in response, Bush fired Rumsfeld, and seems to be replacing him, and much of the rest of his inner circule, with a bunch of realpolitik, deal-making-with-Middle-Eastern-despots Bush 41 guys. And now the Democrats are planning to vote for withdrawal the moment they're sworn in. Mark Steyn's particularly pessimistic, saying that the American Moment is over, and we'll soon be joining Europe in the long slide into irrelevancy.

They may be right. Then again, they may not. One thing I've always admired about Bush is his ability to stick with his guns. The firing of Rumsfeld was far from his greatest moment (the day after the election, just a couple of weeks after saying Rumsfeld would stay), but the same crowd that's now condemning how it was done were calling from Rumsfeld's resignation just a week ago (before the election, not after). The bottom line, though, is that Rumsfeld had to go. Now, I liked Rumsfeld. However, he couldn't have survived this Congress, which is going to start the year looking for a head (Democrats have been promising impeachment hearings for years now), and Rumsfeld would have spent the next two years testifying before Congress. That is less important, though, than the fact that he wasn't getting the job done in Iraq. That may not be a fair criticism--it may be that, if given free reign, he could have done it. However, more than once he's stood in the way of getting things done in the manner the president wanted them done. He's been one of the most vociferous opponents of more troops, arguing most strongly for the need to let the Iraqis handle things, when at the end of the day, the Iraqis have proven themselves incapable of doing so. Now, ultimately, the Iraqis will have to take over, but for now the brunt of the work needs to be done by US forces, and the Iraqi forces will have to operate under US supervision, and Rumsfeld wasn't managing that. So I think there's good reason to believe that replacing Rumsfeld is a step in the right direction.

As for Congress forcing us to withdraw from Iraq--I don't think that's likely. The Democratic leadership is planning for the Senate to vote on a nonbinding resolution calling for withdrawal from Iraq in 2007. The last time this was brought up for a vote it was defeated overwhelmingly. But the mood of the electorate has changed, and the large number of Senators who follow the polls rather than their own consciences may be enough to turn the vote around, despite the exit polls saying that 70% of the voters were voting against corruption, not against the war. In the end, though, it's a nonbinding resolution, not a law, which means it's little more than a statement of opinion. And if it were a law, even if there are enough votes to pass it, there aren't enough votes to override a Presidential veto. Of more immediate concern is the House, which may cut funding for the war effort. That would be politically risky, though. Even if most people want us out of Iraq (which isn't proven), they don't want to cut off funding to our troops while they're still there.

So the bottom line is not what Congress wants, or what his advisors are saying, but rather what Bush wants. From everything I've seen, Bush still intends to win this war. Until that changes, I won't give up hope just yet.

I find this sort of news encouraging (via Captain's Quarters):

For three years, the Bush administration has waged a campaign to choke off North Korea's access to the world's financial system, where U.S. officials say the nation launders money from criminal enterprises to fuel its trade in missile technology and its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.

That effort has started to pay off.

U.S. pressure forced Macao this year to freeze North Korean assets in one of its banks, then foiled North Korea's panicky attempts to find friendly bankers in Vietnam, Mongolia, Singapore and Europe. And after North Korea's Oct. 9 nuclear test, China ordered some of its major banks to cease financial transactions with the country.

The cash crunch appears to have played a key role in North Korea's decision Tuesday to return to six-nation talks over its nuclear ambitions. North Korean officials said that as part of the talks, they wanted to raise the issue of lifting financial sanctions.

"They're not coming back because they want to give up nuclear weapons," said David L. Asher, the U.S. State Department's point man on North Korea until last year. "They are feeling the financial pressure and the cutoff from the international financial system, so they are trying to make nice."

The article goes on to explain that as long as Russia and China refuse to cooperate (more than they've done here), the effort will never be fully successful. Still, it's good to see that the US is involved in doing more than waving carrots in front of North Korea and hoping they'll cooperate. It's been obvious for years that North Korea's greatest weakness is it's economy--it has somehow managed to create one of the world's least successful command economies, for which there is no lack of competition. Its people are starving, it can't produce enough electricity to power even its capital city after dark, and its attempts at ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons have proven incompetent (thankfully). I'm beginning to think that the great fear, war on the Korean peninsula, is overrated, since if the rest of their society is anything to go by, their army is largely for show. But that shouldn't be necessary. If enough pressure is applied to their economy, North Korea will collapse, and it looks like the Bush administration is making every effort to do that behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, while China and Russia want to rein in North Korea, neither of them want it to collapse. First, because a collapsing North Korea will cause trouble on their borders, with a possible war, millions of refugees, and potentially nuclear weapons. Second, because a collapsed North Korea will look like a victory for the US, and greater esteem for the US is against their national interest. Third, because the ultimate fate of a collapsed North Korea is reunion with South Korea, which moves it outside of China's sphere of influence.

China sees itself as a burgeoning superpower, but it faces the difficulty that relatively few nations accept its leadership. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have strong economies, and benefit from a strong relation with the US. In fact, they depend on the US for protection, and therein lies our leverage with China. If North Korea does develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, then there's every reason to believe that we will arm our allies within range of those weapons. A nuclear armed South Korea and Japan are bad for China, a nuclear armed Taiwan is a nightmare. One thing China still dreams about is reuniting the tiny island with the mainland, by conquest if necessary, and nuclear weapons take conquest off the table. That is why they're applying as much pressure as they can to North Korea, trying to get it to back off its nuclear weapons development without breaking the country.