Washington Shows Its Teeth to Pyongyang

The American aircraft carrier “George Washington,” a nuclear-powered war machine weighing more than 97,000 tons, set sail yesterday from the Japanese naval base where it was moored, toward the Korean peninsula. The White House decided to uphold a military commitment that has lasted more than half a century and collaborate actively with South Korea to show its teeth to the North Korean regime.

On Tuesday, the Communist dictatorship committed a provocation until now unprecedented on its long list of acts of hooliganism, bombing a military base and a small fishing village located on the island of Yeonpyeng, a few kilometers off its shores.

In addition to the fallen soldiers on Tuesday, two new bodies were discovered yesterday, charred amidst the debris of the bombing. They were identified as construction workers, about 60 years old, and they have become the first civilian victims of the conflict in years. As a precautionary measure, residents of Yeonpyeng and other neighboring islands were evacuated and sent to the mainland city of Incheon, approximately 50 kilometers from Seoul.

The United States, which has never left South Korea since the war in the 1950s, maintains about 30,000 soldiers in the country. Even in the capital, Seoul, the Marines occupy entire neighborhoods. The defense of democratic Korea depends entirely on the Pentagon, to such a point that, in the event that hostilities are unleashed, the American command would automatically take control of the situation, coordinating with the South Korean soldiers. In fact, in June of this year President Lee Myung-bak, worried about the growing aggression of its Communist “brother,” extended U.S. control in times of war for three more years, until 2015.

In this context, and after speaking on the phone with Lee Myung-Bak, Barack Obama said yesterday that the threat of Pyongyang “needs to be treated.” The deterrent presence of aircraft carriers will form the backdrop to four days of military maneuvers that will begin on Sunday and, according to the U.S. command in Seoul, had been planned for some time. It is not clear, however, whether sending the “George Washington” was part of the original plan.

The great uncertainty is how Kim Jong II’s army will react. According to analysts, the maneuvers will increase the tension, but it was necessary to do something after Tuesday’s provocation. For the U.S. it is a delicate situation, since the last thing Washington needs right now is a war in the Yellow Sea against the most militarized country in the world, which may have nuclear weapons and maintains an army of about a million well-armed soldiers, even with obsolete technology. Thus, when he expressed his support to Seoul, Obama called for calm. “I am not going to speculate on military actions at this point. This is just one more provocative incident in a series that we’ve seen over the last several months.”

In reality, the provocations have not occurred just in the last several months: North Korean Communism has a crushing record of terrorist missions, attacks and military projects. In 1968 and 1974, its agents attempted to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung Hee. During the second attempt, they killed his wife. In 1983, they planted a bomb during a presidential visit to Burma that killed four South Korean cabinet ministers. Two years later, they made an attempt on a Korean Airlines plane, killing 115 passengers.

Since the 1990s and until yesterday, the battles have taken place primarily at sea: submarine infiltrations, exchanges of fire, sunken boats, etc. The last major attack, one of the most serious in the history of the conflict, took place on March 26 of this year when a North Korean torpedo sent the corvette “Cheonan” to the bottom of the sea, killing 46 South Korean sailors. It was not the first provocation nor the last.