In recent days, there has been an exchange of gunfire at the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the Korean peninsula; according to unnamed senior American officials quoted in the New York Times, the North Koreans have informed the Bush administration they now have the nuclear fuel to make six nuclear bombs (in addition, assumedly, to the one or two that they are already believed to possess); the Chinese, evidently increasingly anxious about lack of diplomatic progress, have redoubled their efforts to kick-start talks that, within a multinational context, would allow the U.S. and North Korea to face each other one-on-one at the negotiating table; and the Washington Post has reported that William Perry, former defense secretary from the Clinton era, now publicly fears that the U.S. and North Korea are drifting towards war, possibly by the end of the year (Thomas E. Ricks and Glenn Kessler, U.S., N. Korea Drifting Toward War, Perry Warns).
The Post piece refers to Perry as “widely respected in national security circles,” in other words a significant insider, much appreciated within the military, of the sort who usually makes his opinions known behind the scenes. Here, instead, he arranged, or agreed to, a two-hour interview with Post reporters to raise the alarm in print and under his own name. No “former senior defense department official” here. The hair-raising Post insider article reads in part:
“The administration policy toward North Korea has been characterized by fierce disputes among senior policymakers, which officials privately acknowledge have hampered the administration’s response Perry said that after conversations with several senior administration officials from different areas of the government, he is persuaded that the Korea policy is in disarray. Showing some emotion, the usually reserved Perry said at one point, ‘I’m damned if I can figure out what the policy is.’
Nor, having had extensive contacts with Asian leaders, does Perry believe that the multilateral diplomatic approach is working.”The diplomatic track, as nearly as I can discern, is inconsequential.”
“From his discussions, Perry has concluded the president simply won’t enter into genuine talks with Pyongyang’s Stalinist government.’My theory is the reason we don’t have a policy on this, and we aren’t negotiating, is the president himself,’ Perry said. ‘I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him.'”
Calling international 911: While the situation in Iraq devolves, on the other side of town matters are going none too well, for behind the most recent developments on the Korean peninsula lie others, no less unnerving. The Bush administration announced this spring, for instance, that it was ready to begin the pullback of tens of thousands of American troops from near the DMZ and the South Korean capital Seoul, which lies perilously close by — and so out of danger of the massive North Korean artillery and rocket forces entrenched just on the other side of the border. These troops had, throughout the Cold War, served as a “tripwire,” supposedly ensuring large-scale American casualties (and so, assumedly, American support) should a new war break out on the peninsula. Their planned withdrawal at this nerve-wracking moment (though perhaps to take place over several years) was considered on both sides of the border a provocative signal that the Bush administration was considering its first strike alternatives against the North and its nuclear program.
In addition, though I’ve seen little reporting on this, Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor wrote two weeks ago that the U.S. has been feeding a startling $11 billion in high-tech equipment Korea-wards, a dangerous build-up of U.S. first-strike forces in South Korea (In Korea, a quiet US weapons buildup).
Nor, having had extensive contacts with Asian leaders, does Perry believe that the multilateral diplomatic approach is working.”The diplomatic track, as nearly as I can discern, is inconsequential.”
“From his discussions, Perry has concluded the president simply won’t enter into genuine talks with Pyongyang’s Stalinist government.’My theory is the reason we don’t have a policy on this, and we aren’t negotiating, is the president himself,’ Perry said. ‘I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him.'”
Calling international 911: While the situation in Iraq devolves, on the other side of town matters are going none too well, for behind the most recent developments on the Korean peninsula lie others, no less unnerving. The Bush administration announced this spring, for instance, that it was ready to begin the pullback of tens of thousands of American troops from near the DMZ and the South Korean capital Seoul, which lies perilously close by — and so out of danger of the massive North Korean artillery and rocket forces entrenched just on the other side of the border. These troops had, throughout the Cold War, served as a “tripwire,” supposedly ensuring large-scale American casualties (and so, assumedly, American support) should a new war break out on the peninsula. Their planned withdrawal at this nerve-wracking moment (though perhaps to take place over several years) was considered on both sides of the border a provocative signal that the Bush administration was considering its first strike alternatives against the North and its nuclear program.
In addition, though I’ve seen little reporting on this, Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor wrote two weeks ago that the U.S. has been feeding a startling $11 billion in high-tech equipment Korea-wards, a dangerous build-up of U.S. first-strike forces in South Korea (In Korea, a quiet US weapons buildup).
“The breakdown of the $11 billion is not yet clear, and US military officials say it is too early to reveal where the weapons will go. The package includes 16 new Pac-3 Patriot antimissile systems, at least two squadrons of Longbow AH-64D Apache helicopters, refitted ‘smart’ bombs, and several hundred new tanks and fighting vehicles for a ‘striker force’ that would rotate in and out of Korea.”
In a final chilling paragraph on first-strike possibilities, Marquand adds:
“At a recent panel at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a military analyst just back from Iraq said ‘the lesson’ of that war is that conventional artillery such as Kim’s is no longer effective. The ability of US forces to target artillery has changed tactics. ‘It’s easy to take artillery tubes off the table. One of the most lethal places to be is in an artillery position. You may live for one shot; you may not live for two,’ said David Kay of the Potomac Institute. Other analysts feel there are no such guarantees in the messy exercise of war.”
Behind all this and blood-curdling North Korean threats to turn the South into a “sea of blood” is an even more ominous development. The U.S. has essentially refused to negotiate into nonexistence the North Korean nuclear buildup, itself in its present speeded-up form a clear response to Bush’s “Axis of Evil” rhetoric and the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also spurned a pathetic, if also horrific, regime trying to come in from the deep-freeze zone of the Cold War era. This, in turn, may trigger a sauve-qui-peut round of nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the region, especially in Japan. Whatever the North Korean threats, the Bush people are blithely willing to play a game of nuclear dominos in East Asia.
So here we are with two hair-trigger regimes, filled with loathing for each other, armed to the teeth, facing each other down in one of the most heavily armed places on the planet. Either could go down shooting, metaphorically or quite literally speaking — something to remember here in the U.S. as we watch the Bush administration and its dreams slowly unravel over the coming months. Despite what’s going on in the Middle East, Korea may at this moment be the most dangerous place on earth (though to my mind the possibility of war, followed by a nuclear exchange, in no less heavily armed South Asia always runs a close second). The irony — only one of many, I suppose — is that an American administration which has eschewed multilateral negotiations of any sort about anything more or less anywhere on earth, insists, as if it were a matter of principle, that negotiations on the Korean peninsula only take place in a multinational context.
The urge of Bush administration “bitter enders” to bring the North Korean regime down by force is frightening indeed; nor is it surprising that the two governments, facing each other, have, as John Feffer indicates in a long analytic piece from Foreign Policy in Focus included below, come ever more to resemble one another, each with its distinctive “military-first policies,” and have in his phrase developed “a reckless codependency.” His chilling conclusion:
“We are entering a crushing new era of geopolitics. In the absence of well-enforced international laws and treaties, countries will fall back on their own mechanisms for preventing outside intervention. In geopolitics, as in geometry, parallel tracks do not meet. Until the U.S. and North Korea undo their fearful symmetry by getting serious at the negotiating table, East Asia will remain on the precipice.”
In addition, I include below a remarkable portrait of the North Korean “monarch,” Kim Jong Il by Alexandre Y. Mansourov, a Russian scholar (who, though the piece is unfootnoted, clearly relies on deep Russian sources for at least some of his information). The East Asian scholar and Korea specialist Gavan McCormack, a man whose opinions I trust, says this is “the single most important and interesting essay I have read for a long while on the North Korea question.”
Nowhere in our world will you get such a well-rounded, thoroughly human, and nuanced portrait of the North Korean dictator, the man our president referred to as a “pygmy” — “raised and socialized in communist traditions, ideals, and practices in a besieged military garrison state… sole heir to the throne of the first communist guerrilla band dynasty in the world.” His life, his world, and the constraints, psychological and otherwise, under which he thinks and operates, are carefully laid out. Despite some translation quirks, it is not to be missed if you have any interest whatsoever in what happens in the Koreas. Tom
Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang
By John Feffer
Foreign Policy in Focus Policy Report
July 2003The streets of the capital are broad and the buildings monumental. Inside the grand state offices, a power struggle rages among the political elite, and the side that seems to have the upper hand is insulated, single-minded, and shamelessly belligerent. This clique supports a military-first policy that doesn’t shrink from the first use of nuclear weapons, a stance that strikes fear into allies and adversaries alike. Nor are these fears soothed by the actions or rhetoric of the leader, a former playboy who owes his position to an irregular political process and the legacy of a more statesmanlike father.
Choose your capital: Pyongyang or Washington?
In the fun house of mirrors in which contemporary global politics is enacted, a strange resemblance has developed between George W. Bush and Kim Jong Il and between their respective war parties
John Feffer <[email protected]>, editor of Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy after September 11 (Seven Stories Press), writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He is the author of the forthcoming North Korea, South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis (Seven Stories Press).
To read more Feffer click here
Korean Monarch Kim Jong Il:
Technocrat Ruler of the Hermit Kingdom Facing the Challenge of Modernity
Alexandre Y. Mansourov, Ph.D.
The Nautilus InstituteThe Man, his Nature, and the System
Who is this 170-centimeter tall man, who dresses up like a revolutionary in the Mao-style khaki-colored suits, wears unruly hairdo and big-rim sunglasses, and puts on narrow-tipped Italian leather elevator shoes; an 80-kilogram epicure with cultivated taste in exquisite food and wine who loves French, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese cuisines; a man of arts in soul who appreciates music and cinema and is proud of his 20,000-strong universal movie collection, including all Oscar-winning performances; a dare-devil who has a passion for car-racing and untamed horse-riding; a man of letters well versed in ancient Confucian teachings on statecraft and virtues and contemporary Western philosophical literature; the “Net man” who challenges his aides to provide him with data and analyses better than what he can find by himself surfing daily the Internet; a conflicted dictator with a black sense of humor and penchant for self-doubt and occasional remorse?
Alexandre Y. Mansourov is an Associate Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.