Page 2 of
2 SPEAKING
FREELY Bush waves a
white flag By Kim Myong-chol
("unofficial" spokesman of Kim Jong-il and North
Korea)
Korea to settle the moral scores
with the enemy) has gone a long way toward causing
a dramatic climbdown in the North Korea policy of
the Bush administration, as The Guardian reported
in its February 8 edition:
This would take Washington back
almost to the situation that existed before US
officials sparked the
current confrontation by
accusing North Korea of secretly enriching
uranium. Pyongyang, meanwhile, has moved forward
by conducting an atomic-bomb test and declaring
itself a full-fledged member of the nuclear club
... Said South Korea's former foreign minister
Han Seung-Joo, "The US and South Korea will play
this up as a big success. But they are going
back to where they were before. The US has
talked tough without achieving anything. They
have reached a new status quo in which North
Korea is a nuclear-weapons state" ...
"If the negotiations end up with the US
providing aid and North Korea merely freezing
its reactor, that would be a huge victory for
Pyongyang," said Zhang Liankui, a professor of
international studies in the Central Party
School in Beijing.
In short, Kim Jong-il is
Korea's David with a nuclear sling, knocking
down the American Goliath. In a December 31,
2006, editorial, the Washington Post noted that
the North Korean leader's "bet that its
neighbors will tolerate its nuclear weapons
appears to be paying off". The January 23
Guardian quoted John Swenson-Wright, an expert
on the region at the British Royal Institute of
International Affairs at Chatham House, as
observing, "Finally the US seems to be burying
its opposition to bilateral discussions ... I'm
more inclined to say that the Americans blinked
first."
Bush is far from the first US
president to be outfoxed by North Korea. Let us
look at the five rounds.
The first
showdown pitted the DPRK against the US over the
1968 North Korean capture of the spy ship USS
Pueblo, but the Democratic administration of
Lyndon Johnson signed a written apology and
withdrew its aircraft-carrier battle groups from
Korean waters.
The second round
developed over the North Korean downing of a US
EC-121 spy plane with more than 30 people
aboard. The Republican administration of Richard
Nixon ordered into action 7th Fleet forces,
including four aircraft carriers, but retreated
as defense secretary Melvin Laird warned that
the US forces would suffer terrible losses.
The third showdown involved the 1976
North Korean axing to death of two American
soldiers as they tried to cut down a poplar tree
planted by the North Koreans at the Panmunjom
joint security area. What the Republican
administration of president Gerald Ford did was
mobilize B-52s and other warplanes.
The
fourth round was a 1993-94 nuclear standoff with
the administration of president Bill Clinton.
The fifth round is the current standoff with the
Bush administration. These two rounds differ
fundamentally in nature from the previous three
as the DPRK demonstrated its long-range,
deep-strike capability and detonated a nuclear
device. Officials of the US Central Intelligence
Agency testified that the DPRK's nuclear
missiles can strike every target within the
mainland USA.
In May 1993 two ballistic
missiles were fired from the DPRK, flying over
the Japanese archipelago, one splashing down off
Honolulu and the other off Anderson Air Force
Base in Guam, as described by Republican
Congressman Mark Kirk in an April 27, 2001,
Associated Press story. Kirk, then a US Navy
duty officer at the Pentagon, remembered "being
drenched in sweat" at the possibility of "losing
a couple of million Americans".
We can
easily imagine how much fear of a catastrophic
war with North Korea shaped the policy of the
Clinton and Bush administrations. The Washington
Post reported on December 13, 1994: "The US-led
diplomatic campaign to thwart North Korea's
nuclear ambitions has been guided by an
overriding fear that the consequences of even a
mono-nuclear war there would be catastrophic,
according to senior officials and government
documents."
The missile testing led to
the October 21, 1994, signing in Geneva of the
Agreed Framework. Assistant defense secretary
Ashton Carter said in the April 10, 1994,
Washington Post that the last thing the
Americans should do was to engage a
nuclear-armed North Korea.
The August
1998 placing of a satellite in orbit again
confirmed the long-range deep-strike capability
of the DPRK, prompting the Clinton
administration to release a report by defense
secretary William Perry in October 1999. The
Perry Report says: "United States policy must,
therefore, deal with the North Korean government
as it is, not as we might wish it to be."
The Perry process led Australia, Canada,
Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and other
European states to establish diplomatic
relations with the DPRK. This prompted the South
Korean government to hold the June 2000
Pyongyang summit with the DPRK government. Those
European states were undeterred by the DPRK's
nuclear-weapons and missile programs.
The fifth showdown between the DPRK and
the US began as the Bush administration
succeeded the Clinton administration in 2001.
Bush condemned Clinton's North Korea policy as
weak-kneed, singled North Korea as one of the
prime targets for nuclear preemption, branded it
as one of the "axis of evil" states, framed up
the enriched-uranium affair to justify
jettisoning the Agreed Framework, halting
fuel-oil supply to North Korea and suspending
work on the construction of two light-water
reactors in Kumho.
What distinguishes
the Bush administration from previous US
administrations in North Korea policy is it is
long on rhetoric and short on muscle-flexing.
Bush and company did not assemble a massive
military force in and near Korea to pressure it
into giving up its nuclear-weapons program,
although it had a very good pretext to do so. It
has ended up recognizing the DPRK as a
nuclear-weapons state.
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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