Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

North Korea War Turns Heg

A war with North Korea would expose the US hegemon’s lies that have been made, destroying it as a superpower
Lind 7 (Michael, New America Foundation, May/June 2007, The National Interest, http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2007/beyond_american_hegemony_5381)KFC

"Rogue state" is a term of emotional propaganda, not sober analysis. The rogue-state rationale is employed when American leaders wish to rally support for a policy whose actual purpose -- increasing or reinforcing American military hegemony in its European, Asian or Middle Eastern sphere of influence -- cannot be explained to the public. Instead, the American public is told that this or that rogue state -- North Korea, Iran or Iraq -- is a direct threat to the American people and the American homeland, as it will be able to lob missiles at the United States or to give terrorists nuclear bombs or other WMD for use on American soil. In the case of North Korea, for example, U.S. policy is motivated largely, although not solely, by the fear that if Japan loses confidence in America’s willingness to protect it, Japan may obtain its own nuclear deterrent and renationalize its foreign policy, emerging from the status of a semi-sovereign U.S. protectorate to that of an independent military great power once again. But no president can tell the American public that the United States must be willing to lose 50,000 or more American lives in a war with North Korea for fear that Japan will get nuclear weapons to defend itself. Therefore the public is told instead that North Korea might give nuclear weapons to non-state actors to use to destroy New York, Washington and other American cities, or that North Korean missiles can strike targets in North America. If Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons, its purpose almost certainly would be defensive -- to deter the United States, Israel or any other state from attacking it. The American public would not support a preventive war against Iran on the lunatic theory that it would cheaper to attack Iran before it gets nuclear weapons than to attack Iran after it gets them. Therefore, neoconservative hawks seek to persuade the public that Iran, like North Korea, might either bombard Kansas or give nuclear weapons to Islamist terrorists, or that Iran’s viciously anti-Semitic leadership might use nuclear weapons against Israel. (Annihilating Israeli Arabs and Palestinians alongside Israeli Jews would seem to be an odd way to promote the Palestinian cause -- but then, Iran’s leaders, like the leaders of any country that opposes the United States, are said to be "insane.") In the Balkans, a major strategic goal of the Kosovo war was reassuring Germany so it would not develop a defense policy independent of the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance. But Milosevic’s Yugoslavia could not be accused of developing WMD, so it had to be accused of something else if the American public were to support the war. In fact it was guilty of a war crime -- ethnic cleansing. But the Clinton Administration and supporters of intervention talked about "genocide", a much more serious charge. Needless to say, criminal as it is, ethnic cleansing -- using terror to frighten an ethnic group into leaving a country -- is the opposite of genocide, the extermination of an ethnic group, which requires that they be trapped, not expelled. When the Nazis settled on the Final Solution, they took measures to prevent Jews from escaping Europe. The point is not to argue that ethnic cleansing should not be discouraged and punished by the international community, or that proliferation is not a problem or that the regimes called rogue states are not threats to their neighbors and world order. The point is rather that these phenomena have been used as public rationales for recent wars and threatened wars whose real purpose was either the reassurance of regional allies like Germany and Japan or the dissuasion of potential enemies like Russia and China (Kosovo, North Korea), or the removal of regimes that threatened America’s military freedom of action as the post-Cold War hegemon of the Middle East (the Iraq War). The genocide in Rwanda was real, but the United States did not intervene because -- unlike America’s would-be permanent protectorates in Europe, Asia and the Middle East -- Africa contains no great powers or critical power resources, and therefore is marginal to the U.S. hegemony strategy. Pakistan fits the definition of a rogue state, but it is a U.S. ally -- and as long as it remains friendly to the United States, it can be permitted to retain nuclear weapons.

North Korea War Turns Soft Power

Mishandling a failed nation like North Korea during military times kills US soft power – Bush and the invasion of Iraq
Steinberg 8 (James B., dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs ,The Washington Quarterly 31(2), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/washington_quarterly/v031/31.2steinberg.html)KFC

To understand what went wrong, it is important to recall how the United States got here in the first place. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and his advisers offered conventional "realist" foreign policy bromides: focus on core national security interests and great powers and avoid overextending U.S. military forces or undertaking nation building.3 Yet, many of the officials who would come to play key roles in the Bush administration long harbored a more revolutionary agenda. By their assessment, U.S. power had eroded dramatically over the 1990s. The United States had failed to respond effectively to challenges from rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and the terrorists whom they supported. This weakness emboldened the United States' enemies to confront it directly.4 The United States could only be safe by forcefully taking on these dangerous states through militarily led regime change that would pave the way for pro-American, democratic governments. As the 1990s wore on, Iraq came to play an ever more central role as the leading "action item" in executing the new strategy. Removing Saddam Hussein not only offered an opportunity to demonstrate that the United States had returned from its holiday from history, but also seemed to be an attractive opening move in the project of democratic transformation. Iraq was the ideal candidate for three reasons. First, Saddam's continued defiance was the most visible symbol of U.S. weakness. Second, Iraq was seen as having a nascent secular, middle-class culture ready to take its place among the world's democracies once the obstacle of Saddam and the Ba'ath Party was swept away, a view urged by an articulate, well-connected Iraqi exile community. Third, the progressive deterioration of Iraq's military after a decade of sanctions made the Iraqi army a tempting target—a "cakewalk."5 When the terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001, the proponents of the new strategy thus had a ready-made U.S. response. For most of the world, "Iraq" was a startling non sequitur to "what shall we do now?" asked in response to an attack executed by al Qaeda from its sanctuary in Afghanistan. For Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his like-minded colleagues, however, it was the natural conclusion to their theory of how to restore U.S. leadership. The shock of 9/11 was an opportunity to liberate the United States from the shackles of alliance relations and international law to pursue a long-cherished strategy that, until that moment, had been stymied by a domestic political environment that was blind to the gathering dangers.6 [End Page 156] Alas, things did not work out in any of the ways that their strategy implied. Instead of intimidating North Korea, Kim Jong-il went on to test his long-range missiles and nuclear bomb. Instead of deterring Iran, the intervention dramatically shifted the power balance in the Persian Gulf by installing an Iran-friendly government in Baghdad and reinforcing the domestic strength of the hard-liners in Tehran while making it more difficult for Tehran's Sunni rivals to identify publicly with the United States.