SPEAK LOUDLY AND RATTLE A BIG SABER

Lessons From Iraq Include How to Scare North Korean Leader (THOM SHANKER, 5/12/03, NY Times)

American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, went into seclusion during the final buildup to the war in Iraq because he feared that he too might be the target of attack. That judgment has led the Pentagon to consider new ways to hold him and his inner circle at risk as a way of bolstering deterrence on the peninsula, officials say.

Mr. Kim vanished from public view for 50 days starting in mid-February, a time when the Pentagon also moved bombers into the Korean area of operations. Now, the military's ability to mount precision attacks on leadership targets in Iraq is being examined to see how it might apply in a tense standoff with North Korea, perhaps influencing North Korea's behavior without ever firing a shot.

A senior Defense Department official said that lessons from the attacks against Saddam Hussein of Iraq, including short-notice air strikes on suspected hideouts in the opening and closing days of the war, are shaping discussions of how best to re-arrange the American military presence in South Korea and nearby in the Pacific.

The goal would be to assemble in the Korean region the same kind of detailed intelligence on high-priority targets--including the location of the adversary's leadership--and the ability to strike almost instantaneously with precision weapons should the need arise.

"Truly, if I'm Kim Jong Il, I wake up tomorrow morning and I'm thinking, `Have the Americans arrayed themselves on the peninsula now, post-Iraq, the way they arrayed themselves in Iraq, rather than the way they were pre-Iraq?' " the senior Defense Department official said.

"And the idea is to make the North Koreans realize that we are arrayed, we are deployed, we are committed in Korea with the types of resources and types of capabilities that we brought to Iraq," he added. "And we think that doing that will make our deterrence there much more credible and much stronger."

We're seeing the USS Lincoln being deployed to the East Asian Pacific next... Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 4:09 PM