Page 1 of
3 CHINA AND THE
US PART 8: Bush's bellicose policy on
N Korea By Henry C K Liu
(To see the previous installments in
this series, please use the links at the bottom of
this article.)
A few days before US
President George W Bush took office on January 20,
2001, Samuel R "Sandy" Berger, the Bill Clinton
administration's outgoing national security
adviser, and his team crossed the Potomac River to
the northern Virginia home of retired four-star
general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff
Colin Powell, the popular
military leader who framed the Powell Doctrine of
going to war only with overwhelming force in the
successful 1990-91 war against Iraq. Ten years
after that first Iraq war, Bush named Powell
secretary of state in his incoming administration,
a choice widely viewed and praised as a signal
that the new president would follow a moderate,
multilateralist foreign policy backed by a prudent
military strategy.
The Clinton team
briefed Powell for two hours on the status of the
North Korea talks in the midst of which
Condoleezza Rice, the new national security
adviser, arrived from meetings with the
president-elect in Texas. Several participants
later reported that Powell at first listened to
the Clinton approach of rapprochement with North
Korea with open enthusiasm and thought it a good
bipartisan basis for further progress, an attitude
firmly disabused by Rice as soon as she joined the
briefing, on the authority of the president-elect.
On March 7, 2001, barely a month into
Bush's new term, South Korean president Kim
Dae-jung made a working visit to Washington in
hope of keeping the Clinton policy on North Korea
on track under the new US administration. On the
eve of the Kim visit, Powell told reporters that
the Bush administration would build on the Clinton
momentum on North Korea. The White House instantly
rebuked Powell, with Bush making it clear that his
administration would do no such thing. Powell had
to retreat and publicly admit that he had leaned
"too forward in my skis". This would be the first
of many instances when Powell would find himself
out of step with the rest of the Bush team as the
lone multilateral moderate in a solid
neo-conservative gang of unilateral hardliners.
The nuclear crisis in North
Korea The new crisis over the October 9,
2006, North Korean nuclear test began unfolding
six years back, as soon as Bush entered the White
House, and flared into public view a year later
right after Bush's first State of the Union speech
on January 29, 2002, four months after the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and three
months after the commencement of the US-led
invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban as the
opening salvo of the expectedly long "war on
terrorism" through selective regime changes around
the world.
In his speech, Bush labeled
North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil" and
declared that "by seeking weapons of mass
destruction, these regimes pose a grave and
growing danger". It was an unmistakable invocation
of the image of a righteous struggle against the
evil Axis Powers of World War II, with an
implication that the "war on terrorism" would
involve moves to change these evil regimes by
force and to punish all those who support them. By
declaring the doctrine of "those who are not with
us and against us", Bush served notice that the
"war on terrorism" could well evolve into World
War III.
A US State Department Annual
Report on Terrorism released on May 21, 2002,
again listed North Korea along with six others as
"terrorism-sponsoring nations", claiming that
"North Korea did not take substantial steps to
cooperate in efforts to combat terrorism". Three
days later, on May 24, a North Korean Foreign
Ministry spokesman denounced the State Department
report: "It is a trite method employed by the US
for the pursuance of its 'big-stick policy' to
label those countries disobedient to it as
'terrorists' ... The report is deliberately
choreographed by the US [itself] censured and
ridiculed by the public for being a kingpin of
international terrorism."
Again on May 27
the official Korean Central News Agency dismissed
the US charge as "a foolish ruse to tarnish the
international prestige of the DPRK [Democratic
People's Republic of Korea], isolate and stifle it
at any cost".
Pointing to the efforts
Pyongyang had made to combat terrorism, the KCNA
said:
Proceeding from the principled stand
on combating terrorism after the September 11,
2001, incident alone, the DPRK signed and
acceded to the "International Convention for the
Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism" and
the "International Convention Against the Taking
of Hostages" and it is taking active part in the
efforts of the international community to
eradicate international terrorism as evidenced
by its close cooperation with the United Nations
Security Council regarding legal and
administrative steps it deemed necessary for
combating terrorism ...
Lurking behind
the US fallacy is a foolish attempt to justify
Bush's remarks about the "axis of evil" censured
worldwide ... [Donald] Rumsfeld, US defense
secretary, recently told [a] sheer lie that
"North Korea is offering weapons of mass
destruction to terrorists" ...
It is
nonsensical that the US is imprudently talking
about "cooperation with the DPRK in
anti-terrorism" after ditching the DPRK-US Joint
Statement (released on October 6, 2000 [jointly
with the Clinton administration], in New York)
that clarifies the political willingness to
remove the DPRK from a US list of "sponsors of
terrorism".
On October 4, 2002, US
State Department officials flew to Pyongyang, and
confronted Foreign Ministry officials with
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
