The proffered
deal
with North korea
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
January 14, 2007
LONDON - “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” said
President George W. Bush. Waving his finger in the air, he shouted, “I’ve
got a visceral reaction to this guy.” Hardly words that easily roll
off the tongue. They must have been well rehearsed by a man who easily
stumbles over long words and foreign sounding names and presumably therefore
they were less than spontaneous. The supposition must be that this was
a well-considered policy statement.
Five years have now rolled by since they were uttered
and although Bush these days thinks more soberly, at least out loud, about
how to deal with North Korea’s reclusive leader, policy for too
long has been as crudely shaped as earlier was the megaphoned vocabulary.
If the newly announced “deal” is truly a deal we have arrived
there by the most roundabout of routes
The American negotiator, Christopher Hill, has bravely struggled with
his corseted brief. Clearly he has established a personal rapport with
North Korea’s chief negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan. Left to their own
devices one gets the impression they could have made a good deal months,
if not years, back that preserved the important interests of both sides
- strategic security and a promise of the shelving of Washington’s
policy of regime change for North Korea and real movement towards a nuclear
bomb-free North Korea for the U.S..
Yet, although a deal has now been announced it could still fall apart
- torpedoed by the issue that has bedevilled the negotiations since they
began in 2005, how much subsidised energy the West should supply in return
for North Korea sacrificing its plutonium-based and enriched uranium-based
nuclear industry.
Clearly, Hill is under the tightest instructions not
to compromise on the U.S. refusal to return to the status quo ante - when
America was quite happy to be part of the international effort to build
two state-of-the-art light water nuclear reactors (that do not produce
waste suitable for bomb making) to meet North Korea’s electricity
needs and, while they were being built, supply it with enough fuel oil
to keep industry moving. So there is no promise to complete the half built
nuclear reactors. The U.S. is keeping that in reserve until a further
round of negotiations succeed in persuading the North to dismantle its
nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, one should expect some last minute North Korean
brinkmanship over the quantity of fuel oil being promised.
The status quo ante was the deal the U.S. negotiated during Bill Clinton’s
first term and it was brokered in a piece of daring diplomacy by former
president Jimmy Carter and Kim’s late father. It was the deal that
a Republican-led Congress continuously sabotaged over the years, forcing
the Clinton Administration to dishonour its promises and break key parts
of the agreement. It should have surprised nobody that when Bush with
his “visceral reaction” undermined the Clinton legacy and
indeed sabotaged the inclinations of his own State Department, the North
Koreans considered themselves sorely provoked and steamed ahead to test
a nuclear device, spitting hard in the eye of Washington and all its works.
If George Bush over Iraq has gone against the received wisdom of the Republican
ancien regime of his father, with North Korea he followed in their footsteps.
It was Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates who advocated an act of war with
North Korea back in 1994 when U.S. intelligence revealed that North Korea
had removed spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor, placed them in a cooling
pond and perhaps was about to reprocess the used uranium to provide plutonium
for up to six nuclear weapons. Scowcroft and Gates demanded that Clinton
order the U.S. to bomb the reprocessing plant.
It was a nonsensical idea if Gates’ earlier
pronouncement was correct - that North Korea already possessed two nuclear
bombs. The North would surely have retaliated with a war that would cost
50,000 American lives (so the Pentagon told Clinton) resisting an invasion
of South Korea. Indeed, the North in that belligerent mood might have
used one of its nuclear weapons on the South. As the Republicans tripped
over themselves, trying to square an impossible circle, Carter made his
dash to Pyongyang and showed what careful, persistent but open-minded
diplomacy could do.
For Bush and the Republican hierarchy to clinch the proffered deal today
would be the mother of all volte-faces.
We should remember Chester Crocker - Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary
of state for Africa - who had the near impossible job of untangling the
visceral Republican hostility to any deal that might give Angola with
its Marxist liberation movement and its Cuban backers the peace deal its
desperate war torn population craved for. Rather than cave in, Washington
encouraged white-led South Africa to move in and fight the Cubans.
Only when the Cuban air force bested the South Africans
was Crocker able to persuade his masters in Washington that there was
a deal long on the table that could be consummated. Angola is now developing
at a fast pace of knots. But we should never forget how Crocker had to
“take the road less travelled by” and how many died during
the unnecessary detour.
George W. Bush and the Republican Party made a similar
mistake North Korea. But finally, as with Reagan and Angola, a swift application
of harsh reality - in this case North Korea’s bomb test - seems
to have brought them down to earth.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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