April 2, 2003	Wednesday	Muharram 29, 1424

SINGAPORE: With expanding legions of the US army deployed to Iraq, the issue stands stark as to whether the United States could manage two wars at once if North Korea ventures beyond riling the world with its nuclear ambitions.

From a military point of view, the United States could probably manage if conflict engulfed the Korean peninsula, but the political costs might be too heavy to bear, analysts say.

Thus, Washington may have little option but to stand aside while North Korea develops nuclear arms or to swallow the bitter pill of giving in to Pyongyang’s demands and sit down for talks.

The United States has already devoted additional troops to keep an eye on communist North Korea whose open desire to create a nuclear arsenal, snub to nuclear non-proliferation and to UN inspectors and flurry of missile tests are fraying the nerves of its neighbours.

“Were there to be the case of an accident, the Americans could be overstretched in terms of how to run a campaign if they were wanting to use the same capabilities displayed in Iraq,” said Derek Woolner, director of the Defence Analysis Programme at the Australian Defence Studies Centre in Canberra.

Few analysts expect the North Korean crisis to test the US position that it can fight and win one war while conducting and containing another at the same time.

“If you look at the issues of North Korea and Iraq, then North Korea has been seen as the greater threat because of its greater capacity to inflict harm through weapons of mass destruction,” said Marcus Noland, a North Korea expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“The counter-argument is that deterrence seems to work on the Korean peninsula,” he said. “There has been no large-scale war in 50 years and no international act of terror in 15... The argument is that there is less need for war because deterrence works.”

However, Pyongyang and its reclusive leaders — bracketed with Iraq and Iran in what US President George W. Bush called an “axis of evil” — may feel under pressure to press forward with a nuclear arms programme to deter a US attack.

PREVENTION AND DETERRENCE: “The real issue is can the United States prevent North Korea from getting nuclear weapons, and I don’t see how it can,” said Alan Dupont, fellow at the Strategic and Defence Study Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“The conclusion North Korea has drawn from US actions in Iraq is that, one — if you allow inspectors into your country what happens is the US uses this as an excuse for military action,” said Dupont.

“And, two — the only way to deter the US is to acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.

A nuclear-armed North Korea may not, therefore, be far off and would bring instability to the region by stirring anxiety in South Korea, possibly sparking a race by Japan and Taiwan to catch up with Pyongyang in self-defence and as a consequence creating concern in China.

All that draws attention to whether US military capabilities can meet global commitments.

“The Pentagon has long said that the force structure is designed so as to be able to respond to two simultaneous major contingencies,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired US colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University.

“Even before the Iraq war, some analysts have questioned whether US forces were sufficient for these two wars,” he said. “It seems to me that as Iraq absorbs ever more forces that question looms all the larger.”—Reuters