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COMMENTARY
February 16, 2002
Eastern windows
President George Bush leaves this weekend for Japan Korea China. He was in Shanghai shortly after the terror strikes on the U.S. for a pre-planned economic summit but this trip is a much bigger test. In the shadow of his "axis of evil" speech Mr. Bush must now confront the foreign ally he most inconvenienced by the strength of the phrase: the South Korean president Kim Dae-jung. The first Tokyo leg of the tour will be much the easiest. Junichiro Koizumi the populist and still quite popular prime minister of Japan is looking for ways to enhance both his country's and his own image on the world stage by taking a more dramatic position in the war against terror. Getting whatever Mr. Bush might want from him should prove as it has for most of Mr. Koizumi's domestic applicants to be like taking candy from a baby. Mr. Koizumi is a leader who seems to live and die for photo opportunities -- his hair is all the rage in Shibuya-ku and girls scream for him as they once did for the Beatles -- though he is running a country that has come to resemble Enron in its auditing standards. And China is proving easier to get along with than anyone in the Bush administration had expected in the wake of "9/11". Appearances may be deceptive for the Middle Kingdom is playing its foreign policy for very low stakes in light of an impending succession as the comparatively unknown Hu Jintao prepares to take over from the retiring Jiang Zemin. Trouble is most likely to be found in Korea. While President Kim is now a lame duck and much fallen from the height he once enjoyed in polls and prestige (though the truth is he was always an easier sell abroad) the Koreans themselves feel deeply uneasy. All hope for the rapprochement that seemed to be signalled from the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-il is being progressively abandoned. The emotional family reunion scenes that began in August 2000 are now played out and the North Koreans have failed to deliver on any other promise. President Kim is left looking like a man who's been had. Big speech alert: on Wednesday Mr. Bush will accompany President Kim to the "DMZ" and the railway station of Dorasan. It is the last stop in South Korea on the line that did once and will some day again connect Seoul with Pyongyang. Re-opening the line has been the South Korean president's pet project since he came to power the symbol for his "Sunshine Policy" of detente between the two Koreas modelled on that between the two Germanies in the last generation of the Cold War. But while the South has in this case relaid track rebuilt the station and even reinforced the foundations at its end of the river bridge that marks the boundary the North hasn't lifted a single pick-axe on the project it agreed to in June 2000. President Kim Dae-jung's proffered handshake has come to resemble one hand clapping. As his term expires he is desperate to show something that has grown under all his "Sunshine" -- beyond those much-hyped and short-lived family reunions; and northern investments by a couple of the chaibols (South Korean trading conglomerates) in which they quickly lost their shirts to the communist bureaucracy. I would expect President Bush to use the occasion to recall President Reagan's famous visit to Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachov tear down this wall!" But as President Kim Jong-il, fix this bridge! wouldn't sound nearly as effective I expect he'll use some other key line to focus attention on a certain irresistible fact of life. Germany was not re-united by the final triumph of detente; the Berlin Wall came down because the Deutsche Demokratik Republik did and then the Bundesrepublik Deutschland took it over. The South Koreans are rightly terrified of how such a thing might come about in their own little peninsula. For even if North Korea were to collapse as peacefully as the Evil Empire the fallout would be astounding. In Seoul many months ago I was struck by the ostrich-like refusal of everyone I spoke with in government to even guess what the cost might be to South Korea's dynamic economy when or if it must pick up all the pieces. In Germany the cost of absorbing the East cracked the deutschmark and domesticated a painful social stratification between poor "Ossies" and rich "Wessies". In Korea the South would overnight find itself charged with the care and feeding of 22 million desperate northerners. Later after the thrill of liberation had worn off the northerners' resentment at their own hapless dependancy could put a damper over Korean enterprise. The domestic political implications are equally huge for after 56 years of communism the northerners are a lot more than two generations behind the democratized southerners. In the words of a Korean journalist who got a glimpse of the North in a recent exchange: "These people have returned to the stone age." The people have been stone-aged but not the psychopaths who rule them. Only when Choson Minjujuui In'min Konghwaguk finally falls will we be able to make accurate calculations of how many millions (yes millions) were starved and murdered. But in the midst of this slave-camp-cum-mental-asylum a minority has been able to live in reasonable comfort and occasional luxury by running the camp. They even have a functioning nuclear reactor (although electricity from it has never come onstream) thanks largely to a technological give-away by President Clinton in return for an agreement to admit weapons inspectors as effective as the one that was signed by Saddam Hussein. That President Bush has not yet cancelled the programme is a mark of his deference to Kim Dae-jung for it would be the stake through the heart of the "Sunshine Policy". How does this ruling class support itself and support a ground army among the largest in the world given its almost complete destruction of agriculture as well as anything resembling "civil society"? Partly by appropriating to itself the bulk of foreign food aid much of it coming directly from the South. Partly from the kindly ministrations of its one remaining strategic sponsor the People's Republic of China. But for real hard currency the North Korean slave state has found itself a niche in the international arms trade. For the regime has developed a real and effective expertise in rocket science. Its genius consists in adapting 1960s missile technology to 21st century terrorist requirements. It makes and exports to every rotten regime in the Middle East but especially to Iran a range of both short and now long-range Scud missiles. At the top end its Taepo Dong-1 is a three-stage missile designed to achieve low orbit for an intercontinental strike. The test of this in August 1998 failed but the missile did fly right over Japan before its splashdown. And what was shocking about it -- apart from the incredible recklessness -- was that the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency was completely surprised. It had no idea the regime had the extensive infrastructure to produce such a weapon. Since the regime has moved on to the Taepo Dong-2 which dispenses with the difficult solid-fuel third stage and achieves the necessary thrust by the primitive expedient of clustering its existing "No Dong" missiles together with a single No Dong for a sub-orbital second stage. Barbaric yes; inaccurate yes; but decidedly long-range and lethal if packed with "NBC" (nuclear biological or chemical warheads). At the bottom end the North Koreans now make and sell an extraordinary range of smaller rockets and even hand-held rocket-launchers none of them exactly state-of-the-art but all capable of doing astonishing damage in packed urban environments when fired from the rocketry equivalent of point-blank ranges. And all available with service and a smile to any Islamist or other terrorist organization able to pay cash on the nail including delivery in rustbucket ocean steamers under the North Korean flag. Since the 1960s the regime has been developing expertise in chemical and biological weapons. It had extensive help from the former Soviet Union in getting started but by now is supplying technicians to the ayatollahs. Indeed it is strongly suspected that several of Russia's very maddest scientists have learned to eat kimchi. U.S. satellite reconnaisance first confirmed the existence of the huge nuclear reprocessing centre at Yongbyon in 1993. It was this centre alone that was put under weapons inspection in return for Mr. Clinton's supply of the high-tech missing links to build a "peaceful" nuclear reactor there. But with improving eyes in the sky the Americans have become aware of at least ten more potential sites of nuclear proliferation in the time since all underground. (North or South the Koreans have long been able to shame the Afghans as tunnel diggers.) And none of these are accessible under Mr. Clinton's throwaway inspection agreement. (The U.S. State Department began finding the loopholes after it was signed.) Even at Yongbyon the CIA estimates that enough plutonium for a dozen nuclear warheads was extracted under the inspectors' noses when the North Koreans last replaced spent with fresh fuel rods -- suddenly and without warning. To give some idea of the scale and the madness of this nuclear programme it now appears the regime went to great lengths to build a fake underground nuclear reprocessing facility at Kumchangri complete with all visual signatures including water channels for coolant in response to U.S. pressure to widen inspections. They then generously agreed to let the Yankees see this obvious "smoking gun" in 1999 and again in 2000. On both occasions the inspectors found only a vast network of absolutely empty freshly-excavated tunnels. The trick was too clever by half (only the New York Times was fooled): for the North Koreans were unable to answer the natural question Why did you build these tunnels? Or the supplementary Why can't we now visit the other ten sites? A final question: How do you "negotiate" with a regime like this? For a further complication is that Western intelligence agencies cannot really tell us who is in charge. There is growing evidence that the little round smiling dictator whose safari suits have graced our news pages is in reality as stupid as he looks and we have no clear view of who is pulling his strings. To be fair to the South Koreans the world must necessarily look much different to them than it does from across the Pacific in North America. The capital of Seoul itself containing nearly 20 million people is in spitting distance of even the North's shorter-range missiles. The consequences of chemical and biological attacks even from inaccurate missiles in this densely populated country are too horrific to contemplate. It must be said that a very reasonable fear with its attendant impulse towards surrender enters into President Kim's judgement. It is this fear of what could happen if U.S. calculations go wrong or even if they don't go wrong that drives so many of what we might otherwise dismiss as "liberal" or "weak-kneed" responses. When President Reagan uttered the phrase Evil Empire it was heard in a different way on the front lines in Germany than it was in Dubuque. ("Thanks for taking risks with our lives as a German friend said, memorably, at the time.) What can you say to them? Without being Clintonesque, Mr. Bush must find a way to say I feel your fear" to the Koreans as to the Japanese also in easy target range. But he must add We cannot live with this threat, nor watch complacently as it grows and grows. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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