Woolsey’s Next War

Former C.I.A. director James Woolsey, an early advocate of war with Iraq, now wants to prepare for war with North Korea. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he called for immediate preparations for a joint U.S.-South Korean air and land attack against North Korea. He promised a decisive victory in 30 to 60 days.

Mr. Woolsey and co-author Thomas G. McInerney, a retired three-star Air Force lieutenant general who is a Fox News military analyst, scoffed at the value of projected six-party diplomatic talks with North Korea. Instead, they urged prompt efforts to persuade China to withhold fuel and food “to press hard, and immediately, a change in regime.”

Active war preparations, they maintained, would help pressure China to act. If that didn’t succeed, war would be the next move. And that wouldn’t mean just a surgical strike to destroy Yongbyon, North Korea’s plant for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Massive air power would also be used to protect South Korea from counterattack by sealing the caves housing artillery pieces aimed at Seoul and other points. Marine forces would be prepared to seize Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and other key cities. Two additional U.S. Army divisions might be need to help the South Korean army invade the North.

The authors recognized that U.S. armed forces are already heavily engaged in the Middle East. But for the projected war against North Korea they would rely on a call-up of additional Reserve and National Guard units, as well as regular units that have been relieved from duty in Iraq.

Sound fanciful? Yes, but so did Mr. Woolsey’s red-faced demand for war with Iraq at a meeting in Washington with visiting German officials shortly after the campaign in Afghanistan. He and a network of other neo-conservatives in key spots in the Pentagon, State Department and White House began pressing for war against Iraq immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On talk shows and op-ed pages of major newspapers, they were able to persuade many Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and that Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were an imminent security threat to the United States – both speculations yet to be proven and subject to increasing skepticism even within the administration.

Mr. Woolsey and his colleagues won over the Bush administration and much of the American public on the war against Iraq. Now they are pressing for war with North Korea. Let’s hope that cooler heads prevail.