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SPEAKING
FREELY
US-DPRK: Time for real
non-aggression
By Kim Myong Chol
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
All
available indications are that after Pyongyang's
official Korean News Agency (KNA) dismissed an offer by
US President George W Bush last month of a written
non-aggression guarantee, Kim Jong-il, the supreme
leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK), ordered his Foreign Ministry to back away from
making such an outright rejection before the specifics
of the Bush offer were known.
Kim apparently
told the ministry that it was premature to turn down the
October 20 US offer outright, and advised them to
express enough interest in it to encourage Bush to come
up with details of his proposal. In this way, just days
after the KNA snubbed the Bush offer, the Foreign
Ministry on October 25 announced that Pyongyang was in
fact ready to consider the US proposal of a multilateral
guarantee not to attack North Korea.
The bottom
line of the Foreign Ministry statement was a simple
question of whether the Bush administration was
committed to two principles, co-existence and
simultaneous action. If the Americans show respect for
the two principles, what matters is not form but
substance. Living together for love is much better than
marriage without love.
In other words, North
Korea wants to see whether the Bush offer was driven by
intent to put to rest more than 50 years of hostility
between the DPRK and the US and enable the two enemies
to co-exist. North Korea is expected to be given a clear
answer on the specifics of the Bush proposal at the next
round of the six-party talks or through bilateral
contacts.
Some people appear apt to write off
the North Korean response as a tactical bid to play the
same old game and play for time. They are wide of the
mark. If that sort of characterization applies to anyone
in the current nuclear standoff, Bush and company are in
that category.
Playing for time goes nowhere, as
was the case with the Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq.
Bush Junior did what Bush Senior stopped short of.
Whatever the final outcome of the Iraq war, one thing is
clear: Saddam was unable to prevent US forces from
occupying Iraq, the cradle of one of the oldest
civilizations in the world.
North Korea expects
that yet-to-be-published details of the Bush offer will
satisfy Pyongyang's security concerns. What the North
Koreans are about is putting in place an institutional
device to put to rest the technical state of war that
has ruled the Korean Peninsula for more than 50 years
after the Korean War truce.
The North Koreans do
not remember asking the Americans not to attack. Nor do
they remember asking for a US guarantee of regime
survival. They remember asking the Americans to agree to
bring about a long-elusive close to the state of war and
the policy of hostility.
Without a peace treaty
to end the state of war, the fragile armistice leaves a
tiny, impoverished North Korea pitted against the
world's most awesome nuclear giant, turning the Land of
Morning Calm into one of the most dangerous flashpoints
in the world. Unless the world's lone superpower
formally ends the state of hostility with North Korea,
no US pledge not to attack will bring lasting peace to
the Korean Peninsula.
Absence of diplomatic
relations and the continuing state of war will leave
North Korea with no other option than to maintain and
strengthen its nuclear deterrence. Adamant US refusal to
put to rest the state of war and the policy of hostility
will force the hand of the North Koreans by convincing
the hardliners in the Pyongyang leadership that the US
policy aim is to gain time and strike the country after
denuclearizing it.
It is important to note that
North Korea does not feel its national security
threatened by any of the four countries in the region,
Russia, China, South Korea or Japan. There is no denying
that the mounting tensions on the Korean Peninsula
result from the US refusal to replace the fragile
armistice with a lasting peace treaty.
Very,
very few in the rest of the world can imagine how scared
the North Koreans have been for the past half-century
since the ceasefire in the Korean War. They have lived
fearfully under the nuclear sword of Damocles, kept
hanging by successive US governments, and they will
continue to do so unless the Bush administration agrees
to abandon the state of belligerency.
Very few
can share the dread, anger and frustration of the North
Korean people, who have been singled out as an "axis of
evil" state and a potential target of nuclear preemption
and branded as a rogue state by the world's most
powerful nation. The Bush administration's threats have
only served to rally North Koreans behind Kim Jong-il in
a determined life-and-death resistance.
The US
invasion of Iraq and the subsequent dethronement of the
Saddam Hussein regime was a sobering wake-up call to
North Korean policy planners. The Bush administration
scandalously disregarded the international community's
opposition to the unilateral action against Iraq. While
Japan enthusiastically supported the Bush
administration's decision to militarily strike Iraq,
both Russia and China determinedly objected to the war.
Germany and France joined those two countries in urging
the Bush administration not to launch the war. Their
combined opposition failed to deter the United States
from striking Iraq and dismantling its government.
To all intents and purposes, the US-led war
against Iraq was an undisguised act of aggression
against a sovereign state that had done nothing to
justify such outlaw behavior by the United States. The
Bush administration has every reason to stand in the
dock before the International Criminal Court for war
crimes. But no country has any degree of moral integrity
to raise the issue.
Once it has become
unmistakably clear to the Kim Jong-il government that
the Bush administration will not agree to co-exist with
the DPRK by refusing to terminate the state of war with
North Korea and establish full diplomatic relations,
North Korea will have no alternative but to detonate
thermonuclear devices in a series of nuclear tests. Once
North Korea tests nuclear devices, there will be no
turning back the clock.
Should Bush bow to
neo-conservative pressure not to agree to co-existence
with North Korea and decide to launch a military
invasion of the tiny country, that would be a US choice.
The North Koreans would readily take up the nuclear
gauntlet. There is no need to fire thousands of
nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs) to put the torch to New York and other
metropolitan areas of the US mainland. A small number
would do the job.
Alternatively, if Bush has
what it takes to be a global leader, he will take a wise
course of action to lead North Korea to see little sense
in keeping a nuclear arsenal.
Kim Myong
Chol, PhD, is author of a simultaneous bestseller in
Pyongyang and Seoul and executive director of the Center
for Korean-American Peace.
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
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