[USFK Forums] American Strategist Offers Scenarios for Kim Jong-il's Removal [Yonhap]

[C. Y. Lee]

[Uploaded by C. Y. Lee, Monday, November 7, 2005] The article carried by The Korea Times is uploaded as follows:
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American Military Strategist Offers Scenarios for Kim Jong-il’s Removal

The Korea Times, Monday, November 07, 2005

WASHINGTON (Yonhap) _ A U.S. military strategist, claiming it is urgent to remove North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, offers three scenarios that at worst would mean a direct threat of war and the flaunting of occupation plans.

In his new book "Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating," published late last month, Thomas Barnett argues the United States must stabilize Asia in order to free its military resources for more urgent tasks in the Middle East. Stabilizing Asia requires "putting a leash" on Taiwan, forging partnerships with China and India, and ousting Kim Jong-il, Barnett says. He also predicts Kim's ouster could come as early as 2010 through a U.S.-China partnership.

An author and security guru, Barnett received wide acclaim with his 2004 book, "The Pentagon's New Map," which the U.S. Department of Defense found so compelling and insightful that it invited him to advise and brief senior appointees and officers.

He was invited back to Washington last month for a closed-door speech to some 500 military officers and defense officials at the National Defense University to unveil his latest book, and was back again last week to speak to even bigger crowds from both military and civilian sectors.

An expert on the former Soviet Union, he was a professor of strategy at the Naval War College prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. His new book talks about the "New Core" powers that include Korea, China, India, Russia and Brazil. It gives the name "the Gap" for nations left outside of globalization, notably ones in the Middle East.

It offers three scenarios for ousting Kim Jong-il, which he categorizes as "Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." The "good" scenario is to offer Kim asylum in another country, while the "bad" scenario is to snatch him like Panama's Manuel Noriega and put him on trial like Slobodan Milosevic.

The "ugly" version is to show Kim the Pentagon neocons' war and post-war occupation plans, says Barnett. The U.S. would need the help of South Korea, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Russia to remove Kim, and ensuring China's participation means willingness to make serious concessions on the U.S. part, writes the author.

"If we want to pull the East's New Core powers into a long-term alliance devoted to shrinking the Gap, we should forge that partnership with a war worth winning, or perhaps just a regional rogue worth toppling," he says. "This blueprint for action already includes preemptively declaring a permanent truce in the Taiwan Straits, which is the quid we offer for Beijing's quo for the solution set that really matters in East Asia today: the reunification of Korea following Kim Jong Il's removal from power."

"The opening bids aren't easy, but it's something we need to do if we are ever going to shift military resources from East Asia toward the Gap," he writes. The most important strategic security goal for the U.S. in the next decade is to create an Asian equivalent of NATO, Barnett claims.

"What we really need to offer Beijing on the far side is something truly useful to replace him (Kim) and that something is an Asian NATO," he says. And stabilization in the East is a prerequisite for stability elsewhere, he argues.

"If Bush is truly committed to transforming the Middle East and shrinking that much of the Gap in one fell swoop, he should do everything in his power to secure the East during his watch, because serious instability there or ... actual war is the one great extra-regional scenario that could push the U.S. military out of the Gulf in a dangerous way that's ultimately destabilizing for globalization's long-term prospects," he says.

ldm@yna.co.kr 11-07-2005 20:31