Untitled Document

15 April 2004

The Other Shoe

Paul Wolfowitz was out in Korea last year, taking a look around for his Boos, Don Rumsfled. Paul is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defense, the number two official, and a very smart guy.

Some think he hs been a little preoccupied with Iraq, and has been since the first Gulf War. He was the Policy chief in the Pentagon back then. We won that encounter and liberated Kuwait just like we said we would. Then we stopped and negotiated with Saddam. Paul would have had a lot to do with that, not that he made the decision. His job was to come up with a Policy that fit what the President and Secretary Cheney wanted to do.

We were working in the Alert Center in the Pentagon and we were tired. I used to see Paul every day during the Air War, in the little conference room where the heavyweights took their briefing on how the war was going. I was one of the talking dogs who presented things, so I can say that I at least saw the people that were making the decisions.

But the abrupt ending was something I didn't see coming. We assumed it was "on to Baghdad," or something. But instead we spent a month taking everything apart that we had constructed to support the war and we went back to work on other things, like dismantling the Cold War intelligence structure that had served us pretty well.

The 9/11 Panel this week is having a lot of fun with that, and how we damaged the system that was supposed to warn us that something awful was going to happen.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I knew it was coming and almost everyone I knew felt the same way. I think I still took a couple days off that August, just like the President and the Director of CIA.

They are wire-brushing Mr. Tenet this morning for his testimony before the panel. My son called last night to ask me what I thought about it. I told him I hadn't seen it, since I was working in a vault all day and we did not have the TV on. He asked if I had met the DCI and I said I had been with him in a strange eddy of calm as the first tower came down in New York. He was watching the tube and had the same gray look that I did.

I like him a lot, I told my son. You can trust him. But some things are just so big and so complicated that it is impossible to make much of an impact on them. Even the DCI.

Much less me. "That is why I retired when I did" I told my son. "I couldn't fix anything that was so plainly wrong after the War on Terrorism started. Not a damned thing."

This morning the news is telling me there is some video of the thugs murdering an Italian hostage that is so bad that even al Jazeera won't show it. The Italian Government seems resolute, at least in the hours after the story broke. They have had their history with terrorists. Maybe they will stay the course like the President told us to do the other night in that awful press conference.

I am just not that sure I know where the course leads.

Paul Wolfowitz probably knows, but I haven't heard him say anything on the subject lately. He was one of the lead architects of the policy that led us to finish things with Baghdad. But he and the SECDEF have been busy on other things, too.

Last week Paul made some pretty amazing statements on restructuring the U.S. presence in Korea. It struck me pretty hard, as a grizzled old veteran of the Eighth Army that has been on the Peninsula since the Armistice with the North was signed in 1953.

You could say the other shoe fell yesterday. There had been talk of a major policy review about our presence in Korea. I have been waiting for the other shoe to fall. Last week it did. According to Paul, the U.S. will pull most of the Second Infantry Division off the line on the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea later this year.

It makes a lot of sense. The North has some wicked multiple rocket launchers dug into deep tunnels in the hills on the Kaeson-Munson axis, the main invasion road to Seoul. They can wheel them out from behind the blast doors in a minute and start pounded the troops on the line. It makes perfect sense to pull our guys back south, out of range, and ready to respond from a strategic reserve position.

But the withdrawal means the United States will no longer have combat troops anywhere on the DMZ except at Panmunjom, where a joint U.S.-Korean battalion patrols the treaty village in an uneasy relationship with the North Koreans in what they call the Joint Security Area, or JSA.

The Americans will no longer guard the border, or go on ambush patrol in the DMZ, or plant mines, or listen to the North Koreans tunnel in the rock below their feet, extending the tunnels behind the lines where they might pop out in strength.

The first time I went up to the DMZ was in 1980. We toured the JSA and got to walk on the North Korean side of the conference table in the little hut where they hold the Armistice talks. Then we went over to the two outposts that look down on the JSA and the Bridge of No Return, a little concrete slab that joins the Koreas, and was the only land crossing between the two.

The Outposts are called Ouellette and Collier. They are named for kids who died bravely in the forgotten war on the Peninsula. They have been occupied by Americans from the 2nd ID at Camp Red Cloud for 51 years. From there, on a clear day you can see the gigantic Kim Il Song statue in the city of Munsan, up the road. From here you could also see where the North Koreans hacked the two American officers to death when they took a work party down to trim a tree that was obstructing the view of the bridge.

The tree was just a stump when I saw it, and it wasn't going to obstruct anything ever again. The kids from Collier and Ouellette went down the next day, armed to the teeth, and this time the Northerners just stood back and watched.

It was one of those moments that could have gone either way.

They have always called the U.S. troops guarding border a strategic "tripwire," because they would be quickly overwhelmed when the Koreans came south again. They are on the wrong side of the Imjin River, and the position is indefensible. But their deaths were presumed to be sufficient outrage to justify the resumption of full-scale war. It was unsettling to be up there. I prefer more flexibility in my movements.

That is a policy assumption, of course, and subject to revision. Details on the timing of Ouellette's turnover and the eventual troop level at Panmunjom are still being decided in consultation with South Korea, or so says US Forces Korea.

But the decision has been made and the troops will be off the line this year.

The Defense Department is reviewing our military posture as part of a global realignment. The DECDEF wants greater flexibility and more emphasis on technology. Earlier this year Paul announced that we are going to shut down the sprawling Yongsan Garrison in downtown Seoul.

I used to live on South Post there. It was a nice location, convenient to anything in the city. We are also going to close half of its bases in South Korea and return them to the Republic by 2011.

I am hoping that the policy decision is a good one, and that moving the trip-wire somewhere way to the south is still effective. I would hate to think of a miscalculation that would cause us to go back, a third of fourth shoe fallin from somewhere. But I suppose this war is over, and the Department wants to free up some of the troops.

There is apparently a need for them elsewhere.