SPEAKING
FREELY The case for Pyongyang's missile
tests By Kim Myong-chol
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On July 5, North
Korea exercised its legitimate sovereign right to
conduct routine missile tests in self-defense
against possible preemptive strikes from the US.
It is also a counter-action taken against the June
25-July 23 multilateral Rimpac naval exercises
staged near Hawaii.
However, the range of
the nuclear-capable medium-range ballistic
missiles test-fired was shortened in such a way
that they might neither fall down in Japanese
territorial waters, nor fly over Japan
nor
splash down near the continental United States. A
notice for mariners was issued.
Defense
analyst William Arkin noted in the Washington Post
that North Korea's missile program is hardly a
threat to the US and not worth getting exercised
over. The New York Times noted that North Korea
has every legal right to test an intercontinental
ballistic missile. In his op-ed published in the
San Francisco Chronicle, Dean A Wilkening, senior
research scholar at Stanford University, agrees
that North Korea has a sovereign right to do so.
Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute stresses
in a recent essay that North Korea has the same
sovereign right as any other state to conduct
missile tests. In his July 11 New York Times
op-ed, Nicholas Kristof notes that North Korea did
not violate any international law by test-firing
an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
As a matter of fact, the Americans,
Russians and the Chinese routinely carry out
full-range tests of ICBMs. India and Pakistan,
more often than not, test-fire medium-range
missiles. No international attempt has ever been
made to ram a resolution through the United
Nations Security Council condemning any of those
missile-firing countries.
The Korea Times
quoted South Korean President Roh Moon-hyun as
denying that North Korea's missile tests are a
matter for UN sanctions. Appearing on Chris
Matthews' show on the US news channel MSNBC,
British Broadcasting Corp Washington correspondent
Katty Kay observed that US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice lost her argument with
administration hawks who are deliberately
undermining the disarmament of North Korea. It is
obvious that the US aims to make North Korea
another Iraq and engineer a regime change.
The US, Japan and other sponsors of the
July 15 resolution forced the UN to condemn North
Korea for exercising its sovereignty in material
breach of Article 2, Paragraph 7 of its charter.
There could be no more reckless and provocative
act of threatening the peace and security of
Northeast Asia and the rest of the world. The
resolution constitutes an unmistakable
contravention of Chapter VII of the charter.
Those sponsors of the UN resolution also
find themselves in flagrant violation of the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that grants a
signatory the legal right to to withdraw from the
NPT. They also disobey the September 19, 2005,
joint statement of the six-party talks held in
Beijing in which the US commits itself to respect
the sovereignty of North Korea.
Another
most destabilizing thing about the sponsors is
their attempt to generate a new threat to the
peace and security of Northeast Asia by proposing
a blockade of North Korea in material breach of
Article 15 of the Korean Armistice Agreement, an
act that could lead to resumption of hostilities
in Korea. Such a breach of the truce accord should
be resolutely dealt with under Chapter VII of the
charter.
This said, Kim Jong-il, chairman
of the North Korea National Defense Commission,
has three lessons to remember. First, the US and
other big powers have a long-standing way of
abusing the authority of the UN to lend a
semblance of legality to their blatant breaches of
international law. Second, it is senseless to
expect the US to show respect for any bilateral or
multilateral agreement it concludes. Third, there
is no big-power ally to turn to for help in
defending the sovereignty and security of North
Korea, as was eloquently demonstrated by the
dismal failure of big powers to deter the US from
invading Iraq in violation of international law.
No UN member has made a public demand to bring US
President George W Bush and British Prime Minister
Tony Blair before an international tribunal.
The bottom line is that Kim Jong-il is
totally right to uphold Koguryo's tamul
(founding policy of standing up to a big power,
preserving national self-confidence, developing
new more effective weapons and restoring the lost
land of Kochosun) spirit-inspired army-first
policy and build up a nuclear deterrent -
thermonuclear weapons - equipped with
intercontinental means of delivery. The
tamul spirit requires Kim to ignore
US-initiated protests and continue with routine
military exercises involving test-firing missiles,
long-range, medium-range and short-range, in the
interests of North Korea's security.
The
tamul-inspired army-first policy has been
the underlying principle of North Korea, which has
successfully enabled Kim to keep the Korean
Peninsula out of a second Korean war for the past
50 years and keep North Korea from becoming
another Iraq, despite the fact that the divided
country has teetered on the edge of war on many
occasions as a result of US provocations.
It is abundantly clear that the the UN
resolution has backfired for three reasons,
serving the strategic goal of Kim to confuse and
create mutual suspicions among enemy forces.
First, it has in effect sounded the death
knell for the six-party talks and their September
19 joint statement despite the huge political
capital the Bush administration has invested for
the past more than six years, releasing the
nuclear wolf into the wild instead of keeping it
in the cage.
Second, as Philip Bowring
writes in the International Herald Tribune, the UN
resolution has more rhetoric than substance. The
North Koreans can afford to disregard it.
Third, the Boston Globe notes that the
relations among the principal Asian allies of the
US are coming unraveled.
North Korea
spelled out its total rejection of the resolution
in the comment made by its ambassador to the UN,
Pak Gil-yon, on Saturday and the statement issued
by the Foreign Ministry the following day. North
Korea warns that it is not at all constrained by
the resolution as it accelerates the
nuclear-weapons program and missile tests in a bid
to build a far more powerful thermonuclear
arsenal.
North Korea fundamentally differs
from Iraq in three respects: the supreme leader,
the political and moral unity of the population
behind the supreme leader, and the armed forces
armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.
In the first place, North Korea's supreme
leader is a scion of the legendary Kim Il-sung,
the Koguryo tamul spirit incarnate and
veteran practitioner of Sun Tzu's The Art of
War, that is, Kim Jong-il, whom the New York
Times credits with repeatedly outfoxing George
Bush.
Writing in the Korea Herald, Anne
Wu, fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center
for Science and International Relations, observes:
Kim Jong-il is a veteran
practitioner of The Art of War. He
masters the essence of "bringing the enemy to
the field of battle, not being brought there by
him" by seizing the initiative of the talks and
leading others to his agenda. As long as
Pyongyang remained resistant, others had to
wait, adjust, and finally sweeten their offers.
Kim also grasps well the principle of
"using the extraordinary to win".
Unpredictability provides Kim an upper hand in
taking advantage of the consistent patterns of
the other parties and playing with their
inherent differences.
By escalating
the diplomatic and military tensions with North
Korea, the Americans may wind up playing into the
hands of Kim Jong-il before they realize it. Kim
has a greater taste for brinkmanship than the
Bushites.
Second, Kim Jong-il, his
associates and people are all proud descendants of
a nation that routed the forces of Sui and Tang
Dynasty China. The Korean people and the Korean
People's Army are highly disciplined and well
motivated, willing candidates for martyrdom.
True to the Koguryo tradition of beating
the mighty, North Korea was the first country in
the world to defeat the US forces in the 1950-53
Korean War. Subsequently, Pyongyang forced the US
to back down in four subsequent major military
showdowns - in the 1968 capture of the spy ship
USS Pueblo, the 1969 downing of the EC-121 spy
plane, the 1976 Poplar Tree incident, and the
1993-94 nuclear standoff.
The present
fifth showdown of the series with the Americans is
another point which distinguishes North Korea from
Iraq. Most important, the current showdown is a
nuclear showdown with a tiny but full-fledged and
determined nuclear-weapons state pitted against
the nuclear superpower.
It is a matter of
time before Kim Jong-il will lead North Korea to
emerge as the third-most-powerful nuclear-weapons
state, just after the US and Russia and ahead of
China. The whole of the continental United States
is already within the effective range of a North
Korean fleet of more than 100 ICBMs, each carrying
multiple nuclear warheads.
No longer will
Kim Jong-il feel any restraint in conducting
long-overdue nuclear-detonation tests and
full-range test-firing of long-range missiles into
the Pacific. They are all necessary validation
tests of nuclear weapons and their means of
delivery.
The Bush administration is left
with three options to deal with the emergence of
the third-most-powerful nuclear-weapons state. The
first is to ignore North Korea, the second to
launch a preemptive war, and the third to settle
for a peace treaty that reflects a policy of "live
and let live" with North Korea.
By
ignoring North Korea for another year will Bush
strike the US people as a failed, incompetent
president who has done nothing to prevent it from
becoming a nuclear power before he leaves the
White House. The US cannot afford to ignore the
country that long, while seeing it fast developing
into a major nuclear-weapons state, although there
is little the US can practically do about it.
Then comes the second alternative. In
exasperation, the US may resort to shooting it out
with North Korea. But the military option will
prove a nightmare for the US. The Americans may
fire nuclear missiles at North Korea whenever they
choose. It is also true that North Korea is
capable of promptly launching retaliatory nuclear
strikes from mobile sites on New York, Washington
and other major metropolitan areas. With New York
reduced to a towering inferno, the US will be no
longer exist as it was.
If the first two
options look too unsavory, the third option of a
diplomatic solution by way of a peace treaty is
the best approach available. The peace-treaty
approach calls for Bush to follow former president
Richard Nixon's playbook and get aboard Air Force
One on a trip to Pyongyang for a summit meeting
with the supreme leader of the country, Kim
Jong-il, warmly accept North Korea as a new friend
of the US and a regular member of the nuclear
club, and strike out a peace treaty with him to
end their state of war.
Kim
Myong-chol is author of a number of books and
papers in Korean, Japanese and English on North
Korea. He is executive director of the Center for
Korean-American Peace. He has a PhD from the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea's Academy of
Social Sciences and is often called an
"unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North
Korea.
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Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
