SwiftVets.com

[Paul R.]

There is another good thread going on this, http://www2.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=89030#89030,

However, it is an extremely important issue and illustrates Kerry's absurd take on foreign policy. So, I am taking the presumptuous action of reposting my comments here. If you want to boil it down to a soundbite, it might be: Kerry to madmen "Let's discuss this reasonably and fairly."

As for my longer "analysis" on N. Korea, my flaming liberal sister-in-law e-mailed me a criticism, by Nicholas Kristoff, of Bush's Korea policy, last April. I had been following the issue on several sites, probably the best being The Marmot: http://blog.marmot.cc/ ...(I don't always agree with The Marmot, but his is a great site for anyone interested in U.S. / Korean relations.)

Anyway, I wrote a rebuttal April 22 and never heard a word back! Some of you may find the discussion informative -- 1st, the article, 2nd my rebuttal. Sorry it's a bit long: I have no way to post a link for this.

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April 21, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Real Nuclear Danger
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the summer of 2001, there was a spike in Al Qaeda "chatter" and mounting evidence that a terror strike was imminent. But without precise details, it was difficult to get the attention of top policy makers or the public - until it was too late.

Now something similar is happening in North Korea.

North Korea is potentially more dangerous than the mess in Iraq. It probably has at least 1 to 3 nuclear weapons already, it is producing both plutonium and uranium, and it is on track to have close to 10 nuclear weapons by the end of this year.

Yet because President Bush's policy has failed in North Korea, Washington is determinedly looking the other way. When we next focus on North Korea, after the election, it could be a nuclear Wal-Mart.

North Korea not only has genuine nuclear weapons programs, but it is also the model of a rogue state: it gets its U.S. currency by printing it. That's right; it counterfeits excellent American $100 bills.

The latest disclosure, via David "Scoop" Sanger of The Times, is that the father of Pakistan's bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, claims that North Korea showed him three nuclear weapons in 1999. The Bush administration, after publicizing anything to do with Iraqi W.M.D., tried to keep that North Korean revelation secret.

Dr. Khan's report has not been confirmed. But this much is sure: The Bush administration has invaded a country on far less evidence.

Worse, North Korea is reprocessing enough plutonium to make an additional half-dozen weapons. It has also restarted one nuclear reactor and will soon replace the fuel rods there, producing enough plutonium for another weapon. All of that activity began during the Bush administration. North Korea is also continuing a uranium enrichment program that it covertly began in the Clinton years.

To his credit, Vice President Dick Cheney forthrightly raised concerns about North Korea's nuclear program during his trip to Beijing last week. But the administration still has no effective plan to deal with the crisis.

Soft-liners in the administration would like to negotiate a "grand bargain" with North Korea in which Kim Jong Il would accept C.V.I.D. - that's the latest hot term, standing for "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement." In exchange, the U.S. would present security assurances, and Asian countries would offer bribes of investment, energy and aid. Such a negotiated deal is the only hope, but to hard-liners, it sounds suspiciously Clintonian.

Meanwhile, the administration is playing a delaying game with six-party talks in China, and starting working-level talks in the next month through Joseph DeTrani, a former C.I.A. officer and China hand. The DeTrani channel will be an important step forward, but it's difficult to imagine a deal that both the Bush and Kim administrations could agree on - and in the meantime, North Korea keeps churning out nukes.

"The administration is just trying to kick this can down the road," said Jonathan Pollack of the Naval War College. "In a funny way, I think both we and the North Koreans are waiting for November."

Resolving this crisis is in the interests of virtually everybody on the planet, with two exceptions: President Bush and Mr. Kim. They may have nothing else in common, except that their fathers also ran their countries, but they do share an interest in delay.

Mr. Bush has his hands full with Iraq and doesn't want attention paid to the North Korean nuclear threat, which is substantially worsening on his watch. Mr. Kim figures that he may as well wait to see whether John Kerry is elected, and he'd also like to finish reprocessing the plutonium and enriching the uranium.

While the administration has steadily become more reasonable on North Korea, it still hasn't fully accepted the unpalatable truth: the only possible route out of this crisis is a grand bargain. Mr. Bush, who listened way too much to Mr. Cheney on the topic of Iraq, should reflect on something Mr. Cheney said on his China trip about negotiations over North Korea's nuclear programs: "Time is not necessarily on our side."

After my reports from Africa about ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, many readers have asked what they can do. I've put some possibilities on my blog, www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds, in Posting No. 344.

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Dear Karen,

Well, I agree that North Korea is a serious threat, which is one reason it was important to knock off Iraq. That might give Kim Jong-il some pause. (It worked quite well with Libya, showing that the Colonel is not completely crazy!) On the other hand, most of what Kim Jong-il does is generated by internal North Korean politics (in this case, mainly their need for cash - therefore the blackmail) and his intent to keep the North Korean people in the most unbelievable subjugation & misery that can be imagined. The real key is China - more on that, below.

The rest of the op-ed is baloney. If Kristoff is not late to this one, he sure does a good job of sounding so. He is apparently completely oblivious to the fact that the Norks blew off their agreement with Clinton practically from the day it was signed. Bill also pissed off the S. Koreans with his bilateral approach, but, of course, the S. Koreans don't really count, now, do they? (Does Kristoff ever mention that side of it?) Anyway, a "grand-bargain" that doesn't mean anything (and that's what it'd be in terms of restraining North Korea) is a sick lie that just serves to comfort those who can't stomach a lack of a short term or easy answer.* And, clearly, there is no such answer.

*It also perpetuates the horror in North Korea, but Kristoff doesn't seem to be concerned about the North Korean people, either.

Kristoff is apparently completely oblivious to the reasons behind the 6-party talks: The #1 reason being that Kim Jong-il can break agreements with the U.S. with impugnity. But, if the Chinese sign-on, the North Koreans will have a much tougher time getting away with it. (The Chinese would probably figure it out sooner, too.)

Kristoff also ignores the effect of giving Kim Jong-il "equal" negotiating status with the U.S. -- a huge mistake. (Think: "Popeye" and "spinach".) And he apparently has no regard for why the other 4 parties were eager to participate in these talks. Here's a quote from the Korea Times: color=blue]"At what point will Pyongyang's refusal to deal with Seoul as an equal on security issues run up against (South Korean) President Roh's and the Uri Party's insistence in a ``leading role’’ in settling the crisis, a position that Washington has now wisely accepted and openly promotes?" [/color]

The biggest problem with Kristoff's argument is that he essentially is saying that we should give in to nuclear blackmail. This is even worse than a full-scale war on the Korean peninsula. (Yes, I am quite aware that the N. Koreans can destroy, and I do mean in virtually nuclear fashion, less the radiation, destroy, Seoul with the conventional artillery they have aimed at it. The only way we could stop them is with our nukes.)

The truth is, while I'm not thrilled with North Korea accumulating nukes, once they get past 3 or 4, the blackmail threat is not that much greater. And the North Koreans may just be putting their own noose around their own necks, which might be exactly what Dubya & allies have in mind. Courtesy of the Marmot: ( http://marmot.blogs.com/ )**

I couldn't agree with Lee more that the North Korean nuclear program is linked more to North Korean decision making than it is to external factors like the "American threat" and that the crises Pyongyang starts play an important role politically within North Korea. What I don't get, however, is why the North Koreans should think that the possession of a nuclear arsenal would substantially help the regime counter a South Korean threat that, as Lee puts it, is more cultural and economic than it is military. Personally, I always assumed that the North Koreans were building those things with the goal of obtaining hard currency -- through blackmail -- which in turn would allow the regime to survive without it having to make radical economic reforms that might topple it. A quite rational decision, really, but it assumes that others will do their part and pay up. Now, Seoul seems quite complacent to pay Pyongyang's extortion, although in South Korea's defense, it does have other agendas in mind when it sends cash, aid and investment up North. The big money, however, is in Washington and Tokyo, and both of them seem less than enthusiastic to pay blackmail to North Korea. Which means that unless the South (and/or China) is particularly generous, I can't see Pyongyang turning a profit off what must have been an extremely expensive program. This is a problem, of course, because economic collapse is the single biggest threat to the stability of the North Korean regime, and unless it can convert its nukes into serious cash flow, the development of those warheads (and all the other things that come with them, like delivery systems) might constitute a bigger threat to Pyongyang than it does to anyone else. This is doubly the case if other states, like Japan and South Korea, responded to the North Korean nuclear threat by developing their own nuclear programs, in which case North Korea might be forced to develop credible deterrent capabilities to ward off a Japanese or South Korean first strike. Heck, as it stands now, an American first strike is a possibility North Korea's nuclear planners have to contend with. Which means, of course, that North Korea's possession of a nuclear arsenal would require Pyongyang to spend even more money and resources to protect it and make the threat it represents credible. That's money and resources North Korea would have to divert from resurrecting its economy. I have no reason to believe that North Korea's continued diversion of scarce economic resources to its military-industrial complex will yield better results than the same policies did for the Soviet Union. China, assuming that it's not willing to risk a North Korean collapse, will be forced to throw more and more money down the drain that is North Korea, which -- from a U.S. policy standpoint -- might not be such a bad thing, as long as the costs of maintaining a perpetual pain-in-the-a** client state outweigh North Korea's utility as a geopolitical tool in Chinese dealings with the United States.

Furthermore, I offer you this (again from The Marmot's blog of today):

According to the Jo Gap-je, the chief editor of the Chosun Ilbo's Monthly Chosun Magazine, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney apparently laid down the law to the Chinese during his visit to Beijing. More specifically, he is said to have told Chinese leaders, "If China cannot prevent North Korea from arming itself with nuclear weapons, the United States, too, cannot prevent Taiwan and Japan from arming themselves with nuclear weapons." Ouch! Anyway, Jo claims he got his info from an American intelligence source. He also mentioned that the Chinese owe the Americans; apparently, Beijing twice asked Washington -- once during the Reagan administration and once during Bush Sr.'s -- to put the squeeze on Taipei's nuclear weapons programs. Taiwan can produce nukes within a couple of months, and as a non-party to the NPT, it could do so without any international legal barriers whatsoever. Anyway, this apparently explains China's sudden request that Kim visit Beijing, and there's a possibility that Pyongyang -- now under intense Chinese pressure -- may soon make a "dramatic declaration" much like Libya's.

Anyway, I don't know what to make of this. Could be Bullcrap, but it might not be. I certainly hope it's true, because I had given up all hope that any American leader would explain things so frankly to China.

And then, this (from USA Today Online, today [5/22?] ):

"North Korea's state-run news agency on Thursday confirmed that Kim made a secretive trip to China on Monday through Wednesday, but carried no comments on the reported explosion.

China, which also confirmed Kim's visit, is North Korea's last major ally, and the countries' ruling communist parties boast of close ties. But while China's experiments with capitalism have transformed it into an economic dynamo, North Korea suffers chronic food shortages and depends on its larger neighbor for aid.

Kim met with President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders and agreed to "push ahead" with a peaceful resolution to the standoff over its nuclear weapons programs, the North's official KCNA news agency and central television network reported earlier Thursday.

The broadcast added that Kim said his government "will continue to be patient and flexible and actively participate in the process of six-nation talks and contribute to making progress at the talks."

The comments were likely to be encouraging to the United States and other countries, who want China to use its leverage as North Korea's leading supplier of food and energy aid to get the country to disarm."

The "answer" is that you lean on China to blackmail North Korea ("give up the nukes or starve.")

Then hang in there as long as it takes (maybe decades) until North Korea collapses (an ugly scenario, but not as bad as Seoul's destruction, a major war, or successful nuclear blackmail.)

It's an imperfect answer for an imperfect world, to be sure.

How do you deal with a dangerous, ruthless, vicious, evil dictator? You get a spine!!!

And, you don't panic, Mr. Kristoff.

Paul

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A final note - Kristoff himself confirms that N. Korea developed their 1st 3 nukes during the Clinton Administration. (You have to take the time frame into account.) This under what was supposedly a strict bilateral agreement with thorough and stringent inspections. Kerry may be a slick politician, but he is also a fool.
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Paul R.