Back to the hard line on North
Korea By Donald Kirk
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - The full-dress
White House display on Thursday of evidence of
North Korea's role in Syria's nuclear program adds
another member to the "axis of evil" that
President George W Bush described in his state of
the union speech of January 2002 in which he
linked North Korea to Iran and Iraq.
Now
it's North
Korea and Syria - via perhaps Iran and Pakistan -
in a program through which the White House claims North Korea
provided not only the nuclear technology and
materiel but also the missiles for delivering
warheads to targets hundreds of miles away.
The White House, which spoke after being
briefed by the US Central Intelligence Agency,
said the secret work on a nuclear
reactor with Syria was "a
dangerous and potentially destabilizing
development for the world".
The fact that
Israel last September bombed the plant in Syria
where North Korea is said to have been building a
reactor similar to its own five-megawatt reactor
at the Yongbyon complex north of Pyongyang adds
yet another dimension to the confrontation over
North Korea's nuclear program.
The
ferocity with which Israel responded to the threat
posed by a nuclear weapons program in the hands of
one of its worst enemies contrasts with the
reluctance of the US to attack North Korea's
nuclear facilities over years of off-again,
on-again efforts to get the North to abandon the
program.
Although the US has repeatedly
assured North Korea it has no intention of staging
a "preemptive strike", as often alleged in
statements from Pyongyang, Israel has set a
precedent that hawkish US strategists may not want
to overlook.
In fact, the timing of the US
announcement suggests a move by administration
hawks, led by President George W Bush and Vice
President Richard Cheney, to hold North Korea to
account after the State Department appeared
inclined to let the North off with a face-saving
memorandum that simply acknowledged
"understanding" of US concerns.
The
announcement came almost immediately after a State
Department team had returned from negotiations in
Pyongyang in which US mid-level diplomats sought
to persuade North Korea to sign off on the memo as
a prelude to the US dropping North Korea from the
State Department's list of terrorist countries and
lifting economic sanctions.
The team had
arrived in Seoul and was giving briefings at the
American Embassy and meeting with South Korean
officials even as the White House was gearing up
to offer videotaped evidence of the plant in Syria
along with an elaborate statement describing what
was allegedly going on.
The State
Department team, led by Sung Kim, chief of the
State Department's Korea desk and number two
behind US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill on the
nuclear issue, clearly won over the North Koreans
with soft-line reassurances of a compromise deal.
The evidence lies not in anything Kim said
when he got to Seoul, but in a surprisingly
appreciative comment from a North Korean Foreign
Ministry spokesman. As quoted by Pyongyang's Korea
Central News Agency, the spokesman said "technical
matters" were "winding up for implementation of
the October 3 agreement". That was a reference
to the deal reached at six-party talks last
October in which North Korea agreed to disclose
all its nuclear activities by the end of last
year. North Korea has failed since then to come up
with the list while denying the Syrian program and
also anything to do with a program for developing
nukes with enriched uranium.
The North
Korean spokesman elaborated on that comment in
pleasant verbiage that contrasted totally with the
usual windy rhetoric from Pyongyang, saying
negotiations proceeded in a "sincere and
constructive manner" and "progress was made
there".
Since North Korea has shown no
inclination to acknowledge either its uranium
program or support for Syria's nuclear activities,
those remarks suggest that Kim during his trip
worked out a formula for North Korea's nuclear
envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, to nod in understanding of
what the US has claimed while actually admitting
nothing.
The fact that the White House
rather than the State Department outlined the
nuclear connection between Syria and North Korea
indicated a rift between White House and State
Department officials on confronting North Korea at
this juncture.
One great question that
emerged is whether Bush and South Korea's
President Lee Myung-bak agreed on the need for
disclosure of North Korea's relationship to the
Syrian program when they met last week at the US
presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.
Lee has upset North Korea since his
inauguration two months ago by adopting a tough
"pragmatic" policy that contrasts with the
Sunshine policy initiated by Kim Dae-jung, when
Kim was inaugurated 10 years ago in February 1998.
Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, upset the US
administration by advancing on the Sunshine
policy, lavishing food and fertilizer on the North
while demanding very little in return.
Lee, succeeding Roh, has called for
"reciprocity" of whatever the North does as well
as "verification" of any deal with the North. In
return, North Korea's media have targeted Lee as a
"traitor", "imposter" and "sycophant", among other
gems.
Lee made plain to Bush that he was
not excited about the compromise worked out by
envoys Hill and Kim Kye-kwan when they met
recently in Singapore. He got across his doubts by
warning against a "temporary achievement" that
would do little in the long run, and Bush
responded that the US would be sure North Korea
was indeed coming clean on its activities and
giving them up before concluding a real deal.
Lee appeared so delighted about the
cordiality and courtesies extended by Bush at Camp
David that it seems likely his happiness also
reflected an understanding for the White House to
publicize the Syrian program in a final bid for
North Korean acknowledgement.
The White
House briefing has two clear precedents.
One was the US Treasury Department's
decision in September 2005 to ban all institutions
doing business with US institutions from also
doing business with Banco Delta Asia, the obscure
Macau bank through which North Korea was said to
be passing stacks of US$100 bills, called
"supernotes", allegedly counterfeited on a
Swiss-made press in Pyongyang.
The
Treasury announcement came just days after the
six-nation statement of September 19, 2005, in
which the US, China, Japan, Russia and the two
Koreas all agreed in principle on the North's
abandoning its nukes in return for huge doses of
aid. North Korea after the blacklisting refused to
consider more six-party talks until the removal of
Banco Delta Asia from the blacklist and the
transfer from the bank of about $25 million in
North Korean funds in an elaborate deal worked out
by Hill.
The other precedent was the US
charge, made in October 2002, that North Korea was
developing nukes with highly enriched uranium in a
program entirely separate from that at Yongbyon.
The reactor at Yongbyon, from which plutonium was
produced for warheads, was shut down in 1994 after
conclusion of the Geneva framework agreement under
which the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) posted permanent inspectors at Yongbyon to
make sure the locks on the reactor facility were
tightly sealed.
The US charge about highly
enriched uranium detonated the chain reaction in
which IAEA inspectors were expelled at the end of
2002 and North Korea in early 2003 resumed
producing warheads with plutonium at their core.
North Korea by now has between six and 12 of them,
according to US intelligence estimates.
The US eventually backed off from the
uranium claim, dropping the label "highly enriched
uranium program" and calling it a "uranium
enrichment program", a revision that meant the
program was in a rudimentary non-production stage.
The sense is that North Korea has done
much to develop nukes with uranium after importing
from Pakistan a number of aluminum tubes that the
US charges were for centrifuges, but that North
Korea says were for industrial use.
Kim
Dae-jung, in a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School,
where he was a fellow in the early 1980s while
exiled from South Korea, predicted that President
Lee would eventually soften his stand toward North
Korea.
He saw a parallel between Lee's
strongly worded remarks and the outlook of Bush
during his first term. "President Bush adopted the
Sunshine policy," said Kim. "After six years,
President Bush realized this was not working and
negotiations began between the US and North
Korea."
Similarly, he observed, "President
Lee is also making some changes. I realize he was
arguing with my policy," said Kim, "but I think he
will come to accept it."
The White House
said it was still dealing with North Korea's
Syrian adventure "through the six-party framework"
and was "working with our partners to achieve the
verifiable denuclearization of the Korean
Peninsula" - the strong approach advocated by
President Lee.
The timing of the White
House briefing on the Syrian program raised the
stakes. A South Korean spokesman said his
government was "not surprised", and North Korea
had to reveal its entire nuclear inventory and go
along with a formula for verification - words not
likely to please North Korea's Kim Jong-il.
Kim Dae-jung, however, said Bush had
decided to enter six-party negotiations "since the
US cannot wage another war". As a result of Bush's
change in policy, he said, "the prospects seem
quite bright".
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years.
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