Rich lessons in North Korea's playbook
By Kim Myong Chol
"In my mind it's like stepping on a scorpion. The scorpion will sting you as it
dies, but it will still sting. If we should blunder and back North Korea into a
corner where they felt like the only option they had was to lash out, there
would be hundreds of thousands of casualties in the Seoul area."
- Admiral Joseph Prueher, commander-in-chief of the US Pacific
Command, December 4, 1997.
TOKYO - It looks as if Barrack Obama has been provided with wrong advice on
dealing with North Korea, despite the fact that he rode a massive wave of voter
discontent with the disastrous policy of George W Bush's two terms to become
the president of the
United States, promising change to its domestic and foreign policy.
Financial sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) as
pursued by Obama are a carbon copy of those imposed by Bush and will most
likely serve to validate Plan B of the Kim Jong-il administration to go it
alone as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state, upholding the military-first
policy and allowing it to grow into a mighty and prosperous country without
seeking better relations with the US.
Five standoffs between the DPRK and the US The New York Times noted on
July 6, 2006, that "dealing with North Korea has frustrated every president
since [Harry S] Truman", the US president from 1945 to 1953.
North Korea stands unique in the world in two respects. One is that it emerged
triumphant from the 1950-53 Korean War, dealing the nuclear-armed US its first
military debacle. The other is that North Korea has won all five major
showdowns with the US since that war.
As it turned out, each crisis was in no way a result of North Korean
brinkmanship, as mistakenly portrayed in the West, but created by the US
administration as it sought to exercise brinkmanship in a bid to bluff North
Korea into submission.
Before the present Barack Obama administration, seven US administrations
directly dealt with North Korea. Of them, five found themselves close to a
general war with North Korea and two quietly dealt with Pyongyang. The five
were of Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and George W
Bush, and the two were of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.
The North Korean counterpart that dealt with all the seven US presidents was
none other than Kim Jong-il, a canny fox who is described as "a veteran
practitioner of the 'Art of War'" by Dr Anne Wu, a scholar at Harvard's Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs.
The most striking common fact of the five near-war crises is that the DPRK kept
the nuclear-armed US at bay. No military attack was launched on North Korea. Of
the five, only the George W Bush administration brought the matter before the
UN Security Council.
The first US showdown with North Korea was over the capture of the armed
American electronic intelligence ship USS Pueblo with its 83 crewmen by
North Korea's navy on January 23, 1968, when it was engaged in hostile acts
deep inside the territorial waters of North Korea. The Democratic
administration of Johnson rushed a huge air-naval force comprising 600
warplanes and six aircraft carriers to the Korea Peninsula region.
The crisis was defused as the US backed down by ordering its armada withdrawn
and accepting the 3-A (admit, assure, apologize) demand from the DPRK. Johnson
disliked the risk of fighting two wars - in Korea and Vietnam.
The New York Times on July 19, 2005, praised the way Johnson had handled the Pueblo
crisis:
But the story of the Pueblo's capture also offers a hint
of how to proceed. Initially, many Americans favored a hard line. The chairman
of the House Armed Services Committee, for example, urged dropping a nuclear
bomb on one North Korean city.
President Lyndon Johnson resisted, noting that bombing North Korea would not
bring our hostages home. So the US tried full-bore diplomacy. It was
frustrating, slow and not wholly successful, but in the end was the best of a
bunch of bad alternatives.
It's time for us to learn from the Pueblo again ... Engagement may be
arduous, frustrating and often unsatisfying, but it's the only option we have
left.
The second US confrontation with North Korea was over
the downing of US spy plane EC-121 with 31 crewmen aboard on April 15, 1969, by
a North Korean Air Force interceptor when it violated North Korean airspace.
The Republican administration of Nixon ordered four carriers into Korean
waters.
Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger were left alone in
insisting on a military reprisal as defense secretary Melvin Laird, state
secretary William Rogers, Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, all questioned the wisdom of the proposed operations, citing an
assessment of possible heavy American losses.
In his memoirs, Nixon recalled: "The North Koreans were well armed, and if we
choose Option One [involving a military strike against a North Korean airfield]
we would have to be prepared to suffer further losses and to confront the
possibility of reopening the fighting in Korea," referring to the Korean War
that ended in 1953.
Time magazine reported on April 25, 1969, on the broad non-partisan support for
Nixon's eventual approach to the EC-121 shootdown incident:
The weak
can be rash. The powerful must be restrained ... Again the US found it prudent
not to strike back, and this time 31 Americans were dead. There was anger and
embarrassment in the Pentagon at this new humiliation ... the predominant
reaction in Congress and across the US was to smother outrage with common-sense
restraint. In this, the nation took its cue from Richard Nixon.
Nixon's handling of the crisis won praise from diverse quarters. Hubert
Humphrey lauded the president's restraint; Senator Barry Goldwater reluctantly
went along, saying he personally favored taking "an eye for an eye", but
conceding that the US cannot afford to fight wars simultaneously in Vietnam and
Korea.
The third standoff with North Korea was over the August
18, 1976, Poplar Tree incident at Panmunjom, a village on the de facto border
between North and South Korea. Two West Point graduates were axed to death here
by North Korean soldiers. The Republican administration of Ford undertook
Operation Paul Bunyan, involving the use of a chainsaw to fell the tree with a
massive escort of helicopters, F-4s and B-52s.
The crisis was settled when Ford suppressed Kissinger's demand to bomb North
Korea and accepted the North Korean expression of regret and signed a
DPRK-proposed agreement on September 7, 1976, to demarcate into two zones the
joint security area at Panmunjom, disregarding South Korean objections.
These three standoffs pitted a conventional-armed DPRK against the US.
Less than 20 years elapsed before the next crisis. This intervening period saw
three administrations - of Carter, Reagan and George H W Bush.
Carter unsuccessfully tried to withdraw US troops from South Korea. Reagan, who
had called the USSR an "evil empire" and initiated the Star Wars project, made
a cool reaction to the 3am call on the reported nuclear program in North Korea
and held diplomatic contacts in Beijing with North Korea in 1988.
Papa Bush, who saw the demise of the Soviet Union and overwhelmed Iraq in the
1991 Gulf War with high-tech weapons, did not move to intimidate North Korea.
He took two positive steps: one was the September 27, 1991, announcement of the
plan to withdraw tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea and the other the
January 6, 1992, cancelation of the Team Spirit joint war maneuvers with South
Korea.
These policy decisions taken by Bush produced the desired results. North Korea
concluded an agreement with South Korea on inter-Korean reconciliation,
non-aggression, exchange and cooperation. The DPRK signed a safeguards
agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on January 30 and
ratified it on April 5, 1992, allowing IAEA to conduct five rounds of
inspections of the Yongbyon nuclear site from May to December.
The fourth standoff with North Korea in 1993-94 differed fundamentally from the
previous three as it was over the Yongbyon nuclear facilities.
First, the crisis resulted from US interference in the national security policy
of the DPRK. No US spy ship or plane encroached on the territorial waters or
airspace of North Korea. No US military assets were captured or destroyed.
Second, the crisis carried risks of a war between between nuclear powers.
Pitted against the sole superpower was a suspect nuclear power which had
completed a 20-year-long project to build a national porcupine fortress.
Third, the Clinton administration followed a different approach by appeasing
and bribing North Korea to gain time and bet on its collapse and ended up
striking out the October 21, 1964, Geneva agreement.
The Clinton administration refused to deploy an additional combat force to the
area, partly in the face of the May 29, 1963, test-firing of two
inter-continental ballistic missiles by North Korea, one into the sea off
Hawaii and the other off Guam, and partly seeing that predecessors had failed
in applying military pressure on North Korea.
The US did not bring the successful 1998 satellite launch before the UN
Security Council.
The fifth crisis with North Korea from 2001 to 2008 was attributable to the
blatant bid of the Bush administration to blackmail North Korea into submission
as it refused to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off.
Bush's policy was ABC (anything but Clinton) and it spun intelligence that
North Korea was in material breach of a nuclear agreement, triggering a nuclear
crisis. Bush branded North Korea as part of an "axis of evil", along with Iraq
and Iran, and singled it out for nuclear exemption and abandoned the Agreed
Framework, uttering, "I loathe Kim Jong-il."
But the Bush administration failed to follow through its military option, as
Professor Joseph Nye at Harvard's Kennedy School of Administration observed in
the March 12, 2003, Los Angeles Times:
The decision to focus on Iraq
rather than North Korea shows that deterrence works, but in this case what it
shows is North Korea's ability to deter the United States.
The
Bush administration shifted to a multilateral approach to the DPRK and brought
the nuclear test and missile tests in 2006 by North Korea before the world
body.
Despite the 2006 Security Council sanctions imposed on North Korea, Bush
hammered out the February 13, 2007, nuclear agreement to establish diplomatic
relations with the DPRK, remove the designation of the DPRK as a state sponsor
of terrorism, and advance the process of terminating application of the Trading
with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK.
Bush removed North Korea from the terrorism list but defaulted on the other
obligations, leaving the nuclear issue in the hands of the Obama
administration.
The ongoing sixth DPRK-US chicken game appears to be too risky for an
inexperienced, young Obama. Kim Jong-il is "playing a well-practiced game of
who blinks first" from the DPRK's position of strength as a nuclear-weapons
state.
Most probably, Obama may have hoped to start off on the right foot, but a hard
fact of life is that his administration has started off on the wrong foot with
the DPRK administration of Kim Jong-il, the most illustrious of the peerless
national heroes ever born in Korea's history of 5,000 years that has had the US
"yielding to North Korea too often", as ambassador Winston Lord wrote in the
Washington Post on April 26, 2008.
All indications are that Obama will end up another Bush, choosing between two
options: one is to be the first to blink and the other to go to war with a
nuclear-weapons state in another wrong war with the wrong enemy, putting into
jeopardy the US mainland as well as South Korea and Japan.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Theodore Postol and David
Wright, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in the June 29,
2009, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that North Korean missiles may likely "have
the capability to reach the continental United States with a payload of one ton
or more".
Kim Myong Chol is author of a number of books and papers in Korean,
Japanese and English on North Korea, including Kim Jong-il's Strategy
for Reunification. 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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