Next
week's meeting on North Korea
might surprise us
By
Jonathan
Power
August 22, 2003
LONDON - One should always read the small print.
William Perry's alert was in the left hand bottom corner
of page 4 or the right hand bottom corner of page 6,
depending on the paper you read. On July 16th the former
U.S. Secretary of Defence warned us that the situation
with North Korea "was manageable six months ago if we did
the right things….But we haven't done the right
things" and he concluded that the U.S. could be at war as
early as this year.
Do we blame ourselves or do we blame our editors for
being so insouciant about a war that the Pentagon
warned Bill Clinton could take the lives of 52,000
American soldiers and god knows how many South Korean
lives? Or do we simply blame Kim Jong Il and his vile
regime in North Korea for building up an army of over 1
million men, pre-positioning artillery that could bombard
Seoul with such ease the city could be smashed and which
has in reserve nuclear weapons to deliver on both the
South and the American troops if things should get really
ugly. Or do we, perhaps, blame the Republicans?
From the beginning this crisis has been laced with the
Machiavellian and the bizarre - starting when in 1994 the
CIA reported to President Bill Clinton that North Korea
was up to mischief, placing spent nuclear fuel rods in a
cooling pond to prepare to produce plutonium for the
manufacture of nuclear bombs. When that news surfaced in
the press former National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft and former CIA director Robert Gates said the
U.S. should hurry to bomb the North Korean reprocessing
plant which, if done quickly before the cooling rods were
transferred to it, would minimize the risk of radioactive
fallout. But this seemed to ignore the import of Gate's
then recent public claim that the North probably already
had one or two bombs, which presumably it could use to
take revenge, if its intentions were as malevolent as
Scowcroft and Gates suggested.
Then Henry Kissinger entered the debate advocating the
immediate introduction of tough sanctions and unspecified
"military action". His timetable miraculously allowed
time - a short three months while the rods cooled - for
both a conference of the nuclear-haves and sanctions.
Military action should occur, he said, only if Pyongyang
refueled its reactor or started to reprocess the
plutonium from the cooled rods. But he did not fully
consider Scowcroft and Gate's point about the danger of
an aerial bombardment on reprocessing facilities, as
opposed to the ponds. Nor did he appear to worry that
North Korea might use the two bombs he said he believed
it had to repulse an American ground attack.
It was into this self-deluding, intellectual
atmosphere that former President Jimmy Carter stepped and
made his brave visit to Kim Il Sung, the father of the
North's present president, and negotiated a nuclear
freeze which in the end became an official deal - a trade
off with the North promising not to make use of this
source of plutonium to manufacture nuclear weapons and in
return Japan, South Korea and the U.S. agreed to build
two non-plutonium producing, light water reactors to
provide for the North's electricity needs. The U.S. also
promised to end its trade boycott and move towards
diplomatic recognition, provide economic aid and help
find alterative supplies of energy for the short
term.
Back home in Washington the Republicans refused to
down tools. They used their majority in Congress to
convince the North Koreans that the deal on the American
side would eventually be unraveled. There were constant
attempts to minimize the commitments the U.S. had
solemnly made. There were a number of times when the
promised oil deliveries and food supplies were slowed.
There was the successful attempt in Congress to break the
promise of ending sanctions, delaying this until 1999
when they were finally but only partially lifted. There
was the blockage on talking about ways to help the North
receive outside electricity supplies from the South to
tide it over until the new reactors were built. Not least
there was the slowdown on the building of the new
reactors, with the prospect of them not being finished
this year, but five years behind schedule in 2008.
All these delaying tactics were then subsumed into the
active hostility of the new Bush Administration which
leant on South Korea to slow down its policy of political
reconciliation and prohibited it from honouring a promise
to send electricity to the North. And it gave the
constant impression that it was in such a confrontational
mood that it might well give up on further negotiations
with the North.
Are we surprised then that the North Koreans have
broken their side of the bargain? Are we surprised that
we are facing the real possibility of war, one that could
be nuclear?
Perhaps we are surprised that the Bush Administration
is now gearing up for serious negotiations next week in
Beijing with the North Koreans. We had better not be
surprised if they come up with more or less the same deal
that Carter negotiated nearly a decade ago. For
reasonable human beings who want to avoid the devastation
of all out war there is in fact no other way. And
everyone including Congressional Republicans this time
must support it.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
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