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COMMENTARY
January 4, 2003
Kiting in Korea
I have had another week to inquire into and think about the question that is privately vexing the Bush administration: What to do about North Korea? (Its public position is nonchalance.) The advice from South Korea mainland China and most of the rest of the world is the usual clich?. "You should negotiate." It is perhaps the most simplistic advice available to man which is why it is offered so freely. In this case it is especially rich: for the U.S. got into this situation in the first place by negotiation. And the problem now is that the North Koreans unilaterally abrogated the treaty that resulted. To argue that the U.S. should therefore simply negotiate a new one is to say that international treaties should be meaningless. Therefore why make them? The world for the most part sees things differently. It prefers words to facts and pretence to credible behaviour. It instinctively understands that you should work to save your enemy's face even as he is plotting to kill you and in the hope he may change his mind. When there is no alternative not a bad strategy. There may not be an alternative in the case of North Korea. The consensus view within the Pentagon I think is that no "first strike" on the nuclear complex at Yongbyon and other targets identified by U.S. satellite could safely extinguish the country's existing nuclear capacity let alone the unnumbered and unlocatable other horrible weapons the regime has up its sleeve. For North Korea has been developing and trading for chemical and biological weapons over many years. Moreover the great majority of North Korea's soldiers are strung along the northern approaches to the DMZ -- the better part of a million men who spend their lives rehearsing how to cross over. There may just may be a technological solution to this problem in the near future -- to the problem of neutralizing an enemy's strike capacity without risking millions of lives -- between one and three years down the road. I am not at liberty to go into it; and besides it is of no use until it is ready. In the meanwhile the craziness of the North Korean regime is reflected in the craziness of its circumstances. The country has devoted its entire existence of more than half a century to building massive destructive military power and nothing else. As George W. Bush said about Kim Jong-il in the President's most winningly hokey way in Texas he has "no heart for somebody who starves his folks" which is as good a description as any of how his enemy maintains his focus. The only people the Pyongyang regime is interested in feeding are those who may serve the war machine; but increasingly without foreign aid plus arms sales not even these people can be fed. The regime needs help to stay afloat. It has calculated on the basis of past experience that the way to extract this help from the United States is by threatening the U.S. allies in its neighbourhood -- South Korea and Japan. Its request for a "non-aggression pact" with the United States alone must be seen for the paradox it presents: for oddly enough North Korea trusts the United States more than any of its neighbours (which also include China and Russia). The problem is now. And the solution for now is gradually becoming self-evident as the Bush administration's State Department and its other wings engage in fevered conversations with their opposite numbers in Beijing Moscow Tokyo and of course Seoul. The answer is to give North Korea what it really wants: the help it is trying to extort -- in return for what the U.S. and the West really want: non-proliferation. What I expect to happen after the proper face-saving pause on all sides is direct negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea that will scandalize every "conservative" in the States just at the moment when they are busy congratulating Mr. Bush for finally proceeding with the necessary in Iraq. The U.S. will come to the table saying (and I am translating in advance from diplomatic Newspeak): "The nuclear weapons aren't the real point since you have them already. We are willing to live with your existing weapons as a starting position. We will also be willing to restart our fuel shipments to you and provide additional foreign aid for your economic development in line with South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" together with the non-aggression pact you demand in return for one and only one non-negotiable concession. You must stop trading in genocidal weaponry with Pakistan Iran and the rest of the Middle East. And you must allow us to see that you have stopped this trading by letting us spot-check the shipments that come and go including those through China. We would also appreciate your help in tracing where previous shipments went and of what they consisted." Behind this would be a recognition that North Korea is not a threat to the U.S. or to the West. That threat -- a willingness to actually attack the Pentagon and Manhattan -- comes from fanatical "Islamism" and the regimes that succour it not from Pyongyang's ludicrous "juche" ideology -- a flag which no one salutes outside North Korea itself. The aggressive stance is a desperate bid for survival rather than any practical aspiration to hegemony. The politburo in Pyongyang may be crazy but it is too pre-occupied with immediate survival to even think about offence. Even the conquest of the South is beyond its practical aspirations. It might be able to annihilate the South in an act of murder-suicide but it could not possibly conquer and then govern the South. How will the U.S. then ensure that North Korea doesn't pull the same trick as before unilaterally ripping up the agreement and telling U.S. or U.N. inspectors to go fly? My guess and here I'm thinking my way further out on a limb is that the answer to this may prove to be a tactical withdrawal of the U.S. military presence in South Korea possibly even written into the non-aggression pact. For once this is removed American freedom of action is substantially enhanced and the Americans are no longer held hostage by both North and South Korea. The U.S. would no longer require South Korean permission to act militarily in any crisis; and the North Koreans would no longer be in a position to threaten South Korea as a U.S. proxy. For part of any workable agreement between North Korea and the United States must be the spelling out of the consequences to the former should they again unilaterally abrogate a "non-aggression pact". They must understand that if they do that in future the U.S. will have no choice but to attack. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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