Page 2 of 3 CHINA AND THE
US PART 8: Bush's bellicose policy on
N Korea By Henry C K
Liu
evidence that North Korea had acquired
centrifuges that could be used for processing
highly enriched uranium necessary for building
nuclear weapons. North Korean officials surprised
their US counterparts by conceding, citing US
failure to honor its commitment made by Clinton as
justification. The unsettling revelation came just
as the Bush administration was gearing up for an
invasion of Iraq.
This hypothetical North
Korean threat was technically not
an
imminent danger. Processing
uranium is a tedious task and experts were in
general agreement that North Korea was years away
from producing bomb material from these
centrifuges. Besides, there was no evidence that
the centrifuges were actually being used for that
purpose and no tell-tale emissions had been
detected.
But the North Koreans had a
shorter route to nuclear-weapon material: a
stockpile of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade
earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon,
which the Clinton administration had managed to
keep under International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) control with the 1994 Agreed Framework.
These rods could be processed into plutonium for
use in nuclear weapons in a matter of months.
Common sense would dictate that the Bush
administration, notwithstanding moralistic hubris,
needed to do everything possible to keep the fuel
rods locked up; but common sense was not part of
the neo-con mentality, which insisted on "moral
clarity" by refusing to "reward bad behavior" with
bilateral negotiation with the evil regime of
North Korea, notwithstanding that the "bad
behavior" had been triggered by the US default on
its earlier agreement.
In response, North
Korea expelled IAEA inspectors on December 31,
2002, broke the locks on the fuel rods, trucked
them to a nearby reprocessing facility, and
converted them into bomb-grade plutonium while the
Bush team was preoccupied with preparing to invade
Iraq on March 20, 2003. Bush had made the case to
Congress, the US public and skeptical allies for
war against Iraq on the premise that Saddam
Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons, which was
exposed as untrue while North Korea was
unnecessarily goaded by Bush's "moral clarity"
from a non-proliferation mode into actually
developing nuclear bombs. The Bush "moral clarity"
approach to "evil" North Korea did produced a
regime change: it reduced the non-proliferation
regime to the equivalent of a futile campaign to
promote virginity to a pregnant woman.
US
"moral clarity" intransigence eventually led to
the North Korean nuclear test on October 9, 2006.
Thereafter, North Korea had to be dealt with as a
de facto nuclear-weapon state, evil or not. There
is no historical precedent of any nuclear-weapon
state ever giving up its nuclear status once it
has acquired it. History has yet to find a way to
put the nuclear genie back into the bottle once it
has been released.
While China maintains a
steadfast policy of not interfering in the
domestic affairs of other nations, it commands
considerable diplomatic leverage in influencing
the policies and behavior of North Korea, its
closest ally, to maintain a nuclear-free Korean
Peninsula, which is desired by both North and
South Korea and all neighboring nations. But the
limits of such leverage have been greatly
curtailed by counterproductive and provocative US
unilateral policy on North Korea.
The
unilateral and provocative approach by the Bush
administration was typical of naive neo-con
geopolitical fantasy, moralistic
self-righteousness, dismissal of legitimate
mindsets of decision-makers of other cultures,
disrespect for national sovereignty, blind hubris
based on anti-egalitarian US triumphalism,
contempt for multilateral diplomacy and, above
all, a knee-jerk partisan penchant to reverse
Clinton policies.
More than a year after
the issuance of the DPRK-US Joint Communique of
2000 by Clinton and North Korean leader Kim
Jong-il, no progress on its implementation was
undertaken by the new Bush administration.
Washington and Pyongyang drifted further apart
over the unresolved Clinton deal, and no follow-up
talks were planned. Bush administration officials
refused to engage in direct bilateral talks with
their North Korean counterparts. The impasse
eventually led to the North Korean
ballistic-missile tests on July 4, 2006.
While secretary of state Powell's
effectiveness in diplomacy suffered from Bush's
unilateralism, South Korean president Kim Dae-jung
was publicly humiliated by Bush's insulting
treatment of him during his March 7, 2001, state
visit to Washington. Kim was a new kind of South
Korean leader, a democratic activist who had spent
years in prison for his political beliefs, a
defiant characteristic that made US conservatives
uneasy, despite their claim of enhancing democracy
around the world, since US appreciation for
political dissidents had been exclusively limited
to those inside communist countries. Kim had
unsuccessfully run on a democracy platform for
president several times until he narrowly won on a
promise to follow a "Sunshine Policy" of opening
up relations with the North after the 1997 Asian
financial crisis. Kim, a politician who took
democracy seriously, was definitely not the US
neo-cons' favorite puppet to head a client state.
Again on February 20, 2002, while on a
return state visit to South Korea, Bush repeated
his moralistic denunciation of North Korea in a
news conference in Seoul. Selig Harrison,
journalist and author of Korean Endgame: A
Strategy for Reunification and US
Disengagement, commented the same day on the
US Public Broadcasting Service's News Hour:
"What he [Bush] should be doing is trying to open
up dialogue with North Korea. And although he says
he is, if you look at what he is saying and what
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