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Bush
has his hands full in Korea
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON - As the first dawn broke in 2003, Americans woke up to another
round of media headlines about a nuclear crisis in North Korea and the
desperate attempts by the Bush administration to seek a diplomatic settlement
that wouldn't complicate its war plans for the Middle East.
The main story line, which was on the front pages of every major newspaper and
discussed in endless detail on 24-hour cable news channels, revolved around
whether or not the United States is capable of handling two military crises at
once and if Kim Jong-il's North Korea is a more dangerous threat than Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. Those are indeed pressing questions, but only if one accepts
the premise that military action is called for in either case. Looked at from
the perspective of an Asia that has settled some of its most intractable
problems both peacefully and creatively, there are better lines of inquiry.
First, how will the administration of President George W Bush respond to the
diplomatic initiative by South Korea, which is sending aides to Washington this
week with a compromise plan that would require Pyongyang to terminate its
nuclear program in return for written US guarantees of North Korean
sovereignty? Second, how will Bush handle the growing interest by US allies, as
well as China and Russia, in a rapprochement between Washington and Pyongyang
that could pave the way for broader regional economic cooperation?
Things couldn't get much worse. In October, the North Korean government of Kim
Jong-il shocked Bush's special envoy to Pyongyang, assistant secretary of state
James Kelly, by admitting that they had indeed started a uranium-enrichment
program. That sent the administration - and the media - into paroxysms of
anger. Unnamed officials declared that the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which
North Korea agreed to end its nuclear program in exchange for a pair of
US-designed light-water reactors and the lifting of economic sanctions, was
dead, and that a new crisis was at hand.
But what Kelly and other officials didn't say was what Pyongyang apparently
added to its shocking admission. According to most accounts, the North Koreans
also told the US visitors that they would end their effort to enrich uranium,
abide by existing safeguards on plutonium-based weapons and accept new
inspection measures; in return they asked for a pledge by the Bush
administration not to stage a preemptive attack, sign a peace agreement ending
the Korean War and normalize diplomatic and economic relations (according to
one Chinese account, the North only said it had a right to enrich uranium but
didn't admit to anything).
Kelly, however, reportedly replied that Pyongyang would have to shut down its
program before further discussions could take place. Over the next few weeks,
US officials let it be known that that policy would remain in place no matter
what Pyongyang did, and leaned on South Korea and other allies to stop shipping
fuel oil to Pyongyang. Predictably, the North took action, restarting a small
reactor at Yongbyon that could produce enough plutonium for five or six atomic
weapons within a year, and expelling United Nations weapons inspectors who had
been monitoring Yongbyon since 1994. And voila - a fresh crisis.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, anger mounted at the behavior of US troops in the
country and the acquittal by a US military tribunal of two soldiers who
accidentally crushed to death a pair of Korean schoolgirls during military
maneuvers last June. As the US posture toward North Korea heightened, many
South Koreans turned out for demonstrations coupling their criticism of the US
troop presence with their fears of increased tensions with the North. That
paved the way for the election of Roh Moo-hyun, who wants a more equal
relationship between the United States and South Korea, prompting media reports
about a growing rift between Washington and Seoul. "South Korea has become one
of the Bush administration's biggest foreign-policy problems," the New York
Times declared in a front-page article last Thursday. The next day, both the
ABC and NBC television networks led their evening news broadcasts with stories
about the growing anti-Americanism in South Korea.
With the US preparing for war with Iraq, Bush is playing down the situation in
Korea as a "diplomatic showdown" rather than a military crisis. On December 29,
a few days after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made some threatening
remarks about the United States' ability to fight a two-front war with Iraq and
North Korea, the administration dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell -
widely recognized as the moderate foil to the Pentagon militants - to no fewer
than five Sunday talk shows to lay out the administration line. The US, Powell
patiently explained, was working with China, Russia, South Korea and Japan to
pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear program but would refuse
direct negotiations that might "appease" North Korean misbehavior. "We want to
make sure that the whole world recognizes what's going on, and it is not just a
US-North Korea issue," Powell told NBC's Meet the Press.
But with South Korea clearly on the side of engagement, the administration was
forced to back down a bit from its hardline stance. It is clear from comments
made over the past few days that Bush and his inner circle have rejected the
idea that military action is necessary to force Kim Jong-il to end his
nuclear-weapons program and that some form of negotiations is in order.
Following Roh's lead, however, will be a hard pill to swallow. That is
particularly true for the Pentagon, which views South Koreans as junior
partners in an uneasy alliance. "It's like teaching a child how to ride a
bike," one Pentagon official told the New York Times on the weekend about US
relations with Seoul. Last week, a Korea specialist "with ties to many members
of President Bush's foreign-policy team" told the Times that "our first
priority is to get Roh and Kim [Dae-jung, the outgoing South Korean president]
to stop saying that the United States approach will not work. If we don't do
that, the divide will get worse."
A growing chorus of lawmakers, including Senators Richard Lugar and Joseph
Biden, the leading Republican and Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee,
support the idea of a negotiated settlement and believe that direct talks with
Pyongyang are critical. On the weekend, North Carolina Democrat John Edwards,
who just announced his candidacy for president, denounced Bush's North Korea
policy as a failure and urged the president to dispatch Powell to Asia "to show
that we really are engaged on this issue and we care about what's going on".
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services
Committee, also urged direct talks. "That does not imply capitulation," he
said. "It does not imply concessions. It just simply means face to face we are
going to discuss the differences ... in order to avoid miscalculation" (the
Pentagon would be wise to heed Levin's warning that "These are our allies, we
ought to be dealing with them as allies and not as junior partners"). On the
other side, Republican John McCain on Sunday called Kim Jong-il a "sociopath"
and argued that negotiations after his admission of a uranium program would
lead other countries to take the nuclear path. "Allowing North Korea to gain
some sort of leverage or agreement that would be beneficial to them," he said,
"will be a lesson to all other nations: Do the same thing."
It's less clear how Bush and company will respond to the pressure from Russia
and China. While both countries are clear about their desire for a nuclear-free
Korea, they are both working hard to persuade Washington that negotiating with
Pyongyang is necessary for regional stability and economic growth. Presidents
Vladimir Putin and Jiang Zemin underscored that point after a December meeting
devoted almost entirely to Korea by saying that their governments stressed "the
extreme importance of normalizing relations between the United States and the
DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] on the basis of continued
observation of earlier reached agreements, including the framework agreement of
1994".
On the last weekend in December, with Roh sending aides to Moscow and Beijing,
officials from those countries increased their pressures for Bush change
direction. "The rigid US policy towards [North Korea] will only exacerbate
tensions between the two sides," the state-owned China Daily declared. It urged
the United States first to "give up its superpower mentality and sanction
policy, and then treat [North Korea] as an equal sovereign state". Aleksander
Losyukov, Russia deputy foreign minister, urged Washington and Pyongyang to
search for resolution in a "calm and constructive way", but added that "threats
and sanctions are counterproductive". That puts the ball squarely in the Bush
court, where it belongs.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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