SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 23 — An artillery exchange earlier today between North and South Korea along a disputed border is threatening to ignite a new military conflict.

If you listen to the South Korean and U.S. media, the story goes that North Korea opened fire on Yeonpyeon Island without provocation, shelling a military base. South Korean Marines then fired back at North Korean positions. Two South Korean Marines were killed and 18, including three civilians,
were injured. There is no report on the number of North Koreans killed or injured.

The same line is also being advanced by both South Korean and U.S. officials. South Korea’s rightwing president, Lee Myung-bak, threatened missile strikes to stop “further provocations.” Washington called North Korea “belligerent” and has decided to send the USS George Washington to the area of the Yellow Sea where the exchange took place.

However, the facts that have emerged in the time since the first news broke tell a fundamentally different story. Within hours of the attack, South Korea’s Deputy Minister of Defense acknowledged that their military fired shots from neighboring Paeknyeongdo Island in the direction of North Korea. This was part of the annual Hoguk military exercises, staged jointly by South Korea and the U.S. However, Washington had backed out of the war games, which included simulations of amphibious landings, earlier this month.

North Korea had warned the South in the hours before the artillery exchange that it “would not just sit back if the South fired shots into North Korean territorial waters.”

The exchange took place across what the U.S. and South Korea call the Northern Limit Line, allegedly the border between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea. The U.S. unilaterally imposed this border after the armistice ending the Korean War of 1950-53. North Korea has never accepted the border.

Given these facts, it is not hard to see who provoked whom. After deploying 70,000 troops in a military exercise that will be firing artillery shells in the direction of North Korea over a disputed border area and simulating armed amphibious landings akin to the 1950 Incheon landing during the Korean
War that reversed the tide of the conflict, it is reasonable to conclude that the Pyongyang regime believed it was acting in self-defense.

In doing so, however, it appears that North Korea has taken the provocative bait laid out for it by the rightwing regime in Seoul. The South Korean ruling classes are taking every opportunity to turn this relatively minor border skirmish into the basis for a massive retaliation and opening of a new war.

It also appears that they have the support of the ruling classes in the U.S. and Japan. Both have ruled out resuming six-party talks, composed of representatives from the two Korean states, the U.S. Japan, China and Russia. The latter two support resuming talks.

More than anything else, this intensifying belligerence by Washington, Tokyo and Seoul threatens to escalate the current tension between North and South Korea, which will inevitably draw in China and Russia too.

Washington again appears ready to use South Korea to fight a proxy war against China and Russia, by way of North Korea, just as they did for three years beginning in 1950.

The timing for all of this is not accidental. North Korea is currently going through a “transition” between current leader Kim Jong-Il and his son, Kim Jong-Eun, with rumors of the elder Kim being sick or dead.

With North Korea’s regime in relative disorganization, compared to the norm, Washington and Seoul appear ready to see how far they can push toward a new war.