We might be surprised by meeting on North Korea

Taiwan News 22 Aug 2003

2003-08-22 / Taiwan News, Contributing Writer / By Jonathan Power
One should always read the small print.

William Perry's alert was in the left hand bottom corner of page four or the right hand bottom corner of page six, depending on the paper you read.

On July 16th, the former United States Secretary of defense 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," Perry added, 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 one 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 in 1994 when 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 Kissinger 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. agreeing 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 go along. 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 George W. Bush Administration which leaned on South Korea to slow down its policy of political reconciliation and prohibited it from honoring a promise to send electricity to the North. And the Bush team 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 infact no other way. And everyone -- including Congressional Republicans -- this time must support it.

Jonathan Power is a London-based columnist and a frequent contributor to the Taiwan News.