WASHINGTON - The United States is playing the terrorist card for all it is
worth in a strategy of brinksmanship over North Korea's avoidance of any clear
plan for verification of whatever it has done - or is doing - to get rid of its
nuclear weapons program.
The failure of the US to take North Korea off the State Department's list of
nations sponsoring terrorism represents a last-gasp effort by Washington's
hard-liners to force North Korea's hand. Now the question is how far the US is
really prepared to go before the confrontation on the Korean peninsula again
reaches crisis levels.
Undoubtedly the White House decision to put off delisting North Korea
represents a victory of the hard-liners led by Vice President
Dick Cheney. They viewed the move by President George W Bush in June to give
Congress the 45-day notice required by law for removal of the North from the
list as not just a reversal of US policy but a sign of serious weakness in the
face of the enemy.
Hard-liners can at least take partial credit for the newly initiated strategy
of going day to day in a waiting game to see if North Korea comes through with
some semblance of a verification plan.
All North Korea has to do is sign off on an agreement, and Bush, now that the
45-day waiting period mandated by law is behind him, can make good on the
promise that he seemed to have made in June. That was after North Korea made a
show of providing the long-awaited list of its nuclear inventory and disabling
its facilities at the Yongbyon complex with a pyrotechnic flourish in the form
of the explosion of the cooling tower for the benefit of TV news watchers.
Who would have imagined at the time that Bush's promise to take North Korea off
the blacklist - and also lift economic sanctions - was an exercise in rhetoric
of little real meaning other than utility as a negotiating tactic? The White
House now is making clear what was left unsaid in June - that it is using the
terrorist label as a club over the head of an intransigent regime that's not at
all likely to come to terms.
Or, as White House spokesman Tony Fratto put it, the way to get delisted is to
agree to "a rigorous verification regime and a verification protocol" - and
until that happens "delisting can't go forward".
So where does that leave Christopher Hill, the long-time chief US nuclear
negotiator and assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, who
gave the impression he and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, were
getting pretty cozy on the protocol after the North came through with a
declaration on its nuclear inventory.
Hill, after a gabfest in Singapore last month in which a hasty handshake
between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and North Korean Foreign
Minister Pak Ui-chun was headline-grabbing news, said that "There was a
consensus around the table". Hill also told the press that "everybody has
obligations that need to be met" and "the issue right now is to put together a
verification protocol for the North Korean declaration".
North Korea was encouraged enough to put out a comment about talks having been
held in "a good atmosphere" - in contrast to the rapid deterioration of
relations with South Korea after North Korean guards shot a South Korean woman
seen wandering outside the fence behind which visitors are confined at the
Mount Kumkang tourist zone.
The usually voluble Hill has been largely silent since his replacement as chief
nuclear envoy by Sung Kim, former chief of the Korea desk at the State
Department, whom Hill had groomed to succeed him. Kim, on his way to Beijing
this week to discuss "a strong verification regime" with the Chinese, is not
likely to get very far. Disappointment seemed preordained when a State
Department official said there was no plan for him to sit down with the North
Koreans. President Bush appointed Kim as the US ambassador to the six-way
nuclear talks on July 31 and has requested the senate's approval.
Rice, before leaving Singapore, dropped hints of trouble ahead.
There were questions, said Rice, about the veracity of North Korea's claim to
have processed just 37 kilograms of plutonium, considerably less than the 50
kilograms estimated by US analysts. At the time, North Korea still wasn't
acknowledging its program for developing warheads with enriched uranium or
talking about its role in the Syrian nuclear facility that Israeli warplanes
bombed nearly one year ago.
Could it be that Rice, who had been national security adviser in Bush's first
term when he had pronounced North Korea a member of an "axis of evil" extending
to Iran and Iraq, had been listening to the querulous lament of John Bolton,
once the leader of the hard-liners.?
"I think Bush believes what Condi is telling him, that they're going to
persuade the North to give up nuclear weapons," Bolton had said in June when
the president seemed to have acquiesced on the terrorist delisting. "I don't
think that's going to happen. I think we've been taken to the cleaners."
Well, not quite, not yet, the White House and State Department are saying in
unison. But how long will they be able to put on such a show of agreement on
the need for firmness, if not toughness?
The answer depends in part on the US's desire to get along with South Korea,
moving inexorably, it seems, into ever deeper confrontation with both North
Korea and pro-North activists in South Korea.
The White House is so relieved to see a conservative, Lee Myung-bak, as
president of South Korea that no one in the US administration wants to appear
critical of his tough line.
South Korea has had an easy excuse for rejecting requests by leftist groups to
visit the North on missions that would have had the enthusiastic approval of
Lee's left-leaning predecessors, Kim Dae-jung, who set the policy of
reconciliation with the North beginning in 1998, and Roh Moo-hyun, who
perpetuated the same policy. South Korean officials simply say it's not "safe"
to go to the North ever since the killing of the tourist at Mount Kumkang.
Lee has also been looking for revenge against the state-owned TV networks whose
reports whipped up leftist-led demonstrations against his decision to remove
barriers on the import of US beef. He's dismissed the head of Korea
Broadcasting System and elicited an apology from Munhwa Broadcasting
Corporation (MBC) for a report on mad cow disease that was largely responsible
for bringing tens of thousands of people to the streets. MBC issued the apology
on orders from the Korea Communications Commission after resisting a court
order to do so.
With North Korea assailing Lee for hanging "on the coattails of the US" the
sense is that caving in to North Korea by removing it from the terrorist list
in return for only flimsy assurances of "verification" would embarrass Lee and
weaken his position at a critical period.
The US is also concerned about Japan's longstanding objections to removal of
North Korea from the terrorist list. Word that Bush was delaying action was
first reported by Japan's Kyodo News Service and then confirmed by the White
House.
Japan has been asking the US to put off any such move until North Korea reveals
the fate of Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents from Japan more than 25
years ago. Japan contends that Pyongyang is holding more than the 13 abductees
it has already acknowledged.
Japanese officials say North Korea has agreed to set up a "reinvestigation
committee" to look into the fates of all of the alleged kidnapping cases. Japan
is promising rewards in the form of charter flights and visits.
In the meantime, the Japanese see US refusal to delist North Korea as a
terrorist state as a trump card that will help them in their negotiations - and
show the US as a reliable ally at a time when Japanese officials are openly
expressing doubts .
Journalist Donald Kirk has been covering Korea - and the confrontation of
forces in Northeast Asia - for more than 30 years.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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
