RUTHFULLY YOURS

BLAMING AMERICA FIRST: PART ONE

Posted By Ruth King on November 2nd, 2009

November 2, 2009

Exclusive: Pyongyang Puzzles: Blaming America First – Again (Part One of Two)Peter Huessy

What is the threat from the nuclear weapons of North Korea? And what are the prospects for a de-nuclearization agreement between Pyongyang and the United States and the remaining members of what is known as the “Six Party Talks?” Are we to live with a permanent nuclear state north of the 38th parallel, relying on our counter-proliferation policies to prevent Kim Jong Il from selling or transferring his nuclear weapons to the highest bidder, perhaps including terrorist organizations? Or are their any prospects for regime change in the DPRK where a new government would give up whatever nuclear weapons and weapons material are now being held by Communist North Korea?

These and other questions were the subject of a day long conference in the basement of the House Rayburn Building October 28, 2009 sponsored by the ICAS, the Institute for Corean-American Studies. Unfortunately, one speaker, Lawrence Korb, perpetuated a number of historical fairy tales that have become conventional wisdom. However, if left unchallenged, such views may seriously hinder a frank and honest appraisal of the prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula.

Korb believes that North Korea developed nuclear bomb making material during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush but essentially froze whatever capability they had from 1994-2001 under William Clinton and the Agreed Framework agreement. Many believe that the North did not procure nuclear warheads until after 2001, when they continued with the reprocessing of plutonium and began warhead production during the Presidency of George W. Bush. The initial impetus for the North Korea action was the U.S. withdrawal from the Agreed Framework after the North Korea delegation to talks on the same subject revealed the existence of a secret uranium enrichment capability.

It is further postulated that the DPRK accelerated its nuclear weapons program following President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech in which he described the threat from an “axis of evil” which included North Korea. This was followed by the invasion of Iraq, so the template goes, which sufficiently frightened North Korea to where they were justified in seeking to develop nuclear weapons as a “deterrent” against a reckless US “hyper-power.” This was then followed by a second Bush administration from 2004-8 wherein “engagement” and negotiations with North Korea were taken up once again but to no avail.

According to Bruce Klingner, the Senior Research Fellow, Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, who also spoke at the ICAS meeting, it was not until late 2002 and early 2003, following the October 2002 revelation of the North Korean uranium enrichment facility that Pyongyang started to withdraw from the NPT, kick the IAEA inspectors out of the North and remove the seals from the Youngbon reactor. And this was nearly a full year “after” the axis of evil speech before the U.S. Congress but long before the liberation of Iraq. In addition, both Democrat and Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress, particularly in the Senate where Democrats were in the majority, strongly opposed continued fuel and food shipments to North Korea in the face of the new evidence of Pyongyang’s duplicity and cheating.

Despite these “facts,” Korb and others now postulate that Bush administration’s Korean policy was hijacked by the “evil” Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who believed North Korea would soon collapse. Thus the necessity of continuing to provide food and fuel aid, while also coordinating the construction of two new light water nuclear reactors, was not necessary. (The view that the North might soon collapse was also the view of most of the ROK leadership.)

This was then followed, so the story goes, by the ascendancy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who worked over the past four years, 2005-08, to engage North Korea through the six-party talks but without success, although the U.S. did succeed in securing the outline of an agreement to fully denuclearize the peninsula in September 2005.

This convenient “fairy tale,” because that is what it is, was designed to absolve Democrats and the Clinton administration of any responsibility for the emergence of a nuclear weapons program in North Korea, and to blame the nuclear threat solely on the two Bush administrations. The template outline was repeated in a 2006 letter from then Sen. Joe Biden to the Wall Street Journal:

Why Democrats Oppose Billions More on Missiles, July 31, 2006;
“…under this administration’s watch, North Korea has become far more dangerous, and not because of its long-range missiles. The danger is a 400% increase in Pyongyang’s stock of plutonium above the amount it had in 2001 (which was produced during the administration of the first President Bush) and which it could sell to the highest bidder. If this had happened under the previous administration, you would be calling for impeachment. In fact, the Clinton administration’s approach, which this page loves to deride, succeeded in freezing Pyongyang’s production of plutonium and got a missile test moratorium that lasted until this month.”

The late Sen. Moynihan of New York once remarked that we are all entitled to our opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts. Fortunately, the ICAS conference featured one of the former top intelligence officers in the U.S. government responsible for assessing developments in North Korea, especially its pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery vehicles.

These are the facts: North Korea asked the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) to begin the process of bringing Pyongyang into the nuclear non-proliferation treaty or the NPT during the mid to late 1980s. As part of this process the Vienna-based UN agency determined that something wasn’t exactly right with the small “research reactor” at Yongbyon that they were allowed to inspect. The reactor was “offline” for some 70 days and the estimates were that a considerable amount of plutonium fuel rods could have been removed during this period.

By 1993-4, officials in the Clinton administration were convinced that North Korea had, at the very least, begun to reprocess plutonium and may have had enough material to build 1-2 nuclear warheads, which administration officials acknowledged in open Hill testimony. The Secretary of Defense, William Perry, said later in the decade that he had even advocated during this period that the United States preemptively attack North Korea’s nuclear facilities to ensure Pyongyang did not develop weapons or possibly use the ones they had, if any. By the end of the decade toward the end of the Carter administration, it was openly suggested that the North probably had from 1-2 warheads.

But the concerns in 1993-4 led former President Carter – ever seeking a Nobel peace Prize – to rush to North Korea and “save the Pyongyang regime.” Although experts now believe the US was not close to war with the North at the time, there was discussion in the media and among defense experts that a “crisis” of some kind was brewing. However, experts in and out of government now say that the U.S. and North Korea were in fact not close to open conflict, though the Clinton administration did discuss augmenting U.S. forces in the ROK as a precautionary measure.

Nonetheless Carter met with the then DPRK President and announced on CNN a “fait accompli” of a rough outline of an agreement which became known as the “Agreed Framework” which was largely dictated by the DPRK President. The wording of the “agreement” was done to avoid it looking like a “treaty” to avoid the necessity of sending it to the U.S. Senate for a two-thirds vote of ratification. Japan and the Republic of Korea would pay for the entire costs of the two new reactors to be built in the DPRK. One of the selling points of the deal was that it would not cost U.S. taxpayers one nickel. Later, when the Clinton administration approached the U.S. Congress with a bill for food and fuel shipments to North Korea, which the latter had repeatedly demanded, support for the deal further declined.

But the fundamental flaw of the new agreement was that the eventual disposal of both the reprocessed plutonium that had been removed from the fuel rods and any nuclear warheads that may have been built was left to an indeterminate fate – at sometime before the two nuclear reactors were completely finished and operational, it would be “worked out.” In dozens of meetings during the 1990s on the subject, I remember the casual manner in which administration experts as well as outside expert observers simply “assumed” such an eventual agreement would be quickly worked out. Unfortunately, the agreement had carved out a new membership category in the NPT – neither completely within the treaty but not completely without. Caught cheating, the North received not only a pass, but benefits such as two nuclear reactors and billions in food and fuel assistance, as well as investment trade assistance from the ROK.

We now also know, by the mid-to-late 1990s, the prime Minister of Pakistan, Mrs. Bhutto, had traveled to Pyongyang with blueprints for making uranium based nuclear weapons fuel, even warheads. During her visit she claims to have seen “three devices” which many experts believe were warheads.

During this period North Korea also purchased some number of centrifuges for enriching uranium from Pakistan’s “Khan Network,” what I have often referred to as “Nukes ‘R Us.” Although the existence of the Khan nuclear smuggling group was known, it is unclear whether we knew the full extent of its sale of such technology to North Korea, Iran, Libya and elsewhere.

During the Bush administration, the existence of the DPRK centrifuge program was admitted by the North Korean delegation to the on-going negotiations and talks with the U.S. in October 2006. They claimed it was pursued as a result of the U.S. “hostile policy” which would have meant during the Clinton administration!

The American administration, already unhappy with what was seen as a very weak “sunshine policy” of the then Republic of Korea, which was making major concessions to North Korea, decided to suspend the Agreed Framework because of North Korea’s blatant cheating. North Korea in turn dropped out of the agreement as well as the NPT, and begun to reprocess more of the plutonium that had been removed from their Yongbyon reactor but under the “Agreed Framework” had remained under seal.

The extent to which North Korea was in the business of exporting its technical nuclear know-how – also a violation of the Agreed Framework – also came to light when a nuclear reactor constructed in Syria was revealed to be a project of the North Korea government. This information was revealed following the Israeli air strikes in September 2007 which destroyed the Syrian facility. Over the next two years, including during the first six months of 2009, North Korea continued its missiles launches. It tested two nuclear weapons, following by the UN Security Council adopting a set of stronger sanctions that now remain in place. However, the DPRK was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism by the Bush administration in return for the North beginning the dismantlement of some of its nuclear program.

This then is the situation in which we now find ourselves. Over the past two years, much has been made of whether we “talk” or “not talk,” directly or indirectly with rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. We were told how much we needed to try “Soft power” or “Smart diplomacy.” We were repeatedly told that “talk” can actually bring about agreement because misunderstanding is at the heart of much of the differences between the United States and the regimes in Iran and North Korea.

Although “talk” is but tactic, it has been elevated to something akin to a strategy, which it is not, and had become a central debating issue within the U.S. – are we going to talk directly with Tehran “without preconditions,” directly or indirectly. All of which is in my mind beside the point. This latter view is important in that the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that demands that Iran actually suspend uranium enrichment as a condition of continued negotiations, in return for the UN parties’ suspension of further consideration of additional sanctions against Iran. By going the route of talk without preconditions, we unilaterally undercut the very decisions made by the Security Council in a multilateral forum we keep insisting is the key to resolving the questions surrounding the Iranian nuclear program!

Talking directly to Iran is seen as “acting confidently,” that there is no downside in giving Iran’s terrorist leadership a platform upon which they appear to be equally within their rights to enrich plutonium even as key members of the UN seek to discover exactly what their enrichment activities are supporting. Supporters of such talks repeatedly remind us that they are “not afraid” of losing some debate with the Iranians, (as if that had anything to do with why such conditions were placed on negotiations in the first place).

Eventually, the Iranians agreed to meet in Geneva to “talk.” About exactly what was unclear. But just prior to the talks, the U.S. revealed that we had discovered another facility that was capable of enriching uranium and that the Iranians had not revealed this to the IAEA.

The Iranians tried to preempt any negative publicity – so they probably believe – by revealing the site to the IAEA at the last moment before the U.S. went public with the information about the site. The Iranians boasted that they were thus “in compliance with international law,” thus deflecting attention from the very purposes of the talks which was at a minimum the cessation of uranium enrichment now being done at Natanz.

But following the October 1st talks, during which the subject of discussions was on shipping some enriched uranium out of Iran to Russia and France for fabrication to then be returned to Tehran for use as medical isotopes, the Iranians had successfully turned the entire purpose of the talks upside down – uranium enrichment would continue at Natanz, a second reactor would be able to operate, and as experts such as Henry Sikolski and David Albright warned, nothing had been resolved while Iran was free to further produce nuclear fuel to replace whatever fuel they might agree to ship out of the country while the fabrication of greater enriched fuel was completed.

Iran has now turned down the proposed deal, round one of direct negotiations with Iran is completed, and the issue of the suspension of their uranium enrichment has been bypassed completely. As noted above, the issue was whether some portion of their enriched uranium would be shipped out of Iran to Russia and France for fabrication into nuclear rods for use in Iran’s Tehran-based research reactor for use in nuclear medicine. As Investors Business Daily concluded in a sharp editorial: “We were snookered.” So much for “direct talks without preconditions.”

Thus we turn back to North Korea and what the proper strategy should be to secure a permanent and verifiable removal of nuclear weapons and weapons material from the peninsula. The question of when to talk with the North Koreans is a question of tactics. The question of what to talk about is all about strategy.

But as one of the conference participants from Russia admitted, the talks with North Korea are “unfortunately just for the sake of talks.” He repeatedly warned that there was very little chance that Pyongyang would relinquish its nuclear weapons as they were simply responding to a “hostile” U.S. policy and would only agree to eliminate them upon a wholesale change in the relationship between the U.S. and the DPRK. Note the echoes of “Blame America First” in these remarks.

Mr. Korb continued the emphasis upon the “hostile” United States. He was convinced that the Bush administration liberated Iraq when it did precisely because we would not do so once Saddam Hussein deployed nuclear weapons. Pyongyang and Tehran then drew the appropriate lesson said Korb: “Get nuclear weapons and the U.S. won’t think of liberating us.” Unfortunately such thinking is confused as both North Korea and Iran were seeking nuclear weapons long before the U.S. liberation of Iraq. And in fact Korb has everything backward. If North Korea would only stop threatening to use nuclear weapons with which to attack their neighbors or America and its allies, there would be no reason to take defensive measures to deal with such threats.

What then are the prospects for positive discussions with North Korea? Some ICAS participants said the possibilities were “brighter than under the previous administration” because of two things: (1) the changed relationship between the U.S. and Russia, (the famous “reset” button having been pressed!) and (2) the prospects for further reductions in nuclear weapons under a new START agreement between the U.S. and Russia.

This is part of the template that sees proper and moral U.S. behavior – going toward “global zero” nuclear weapons – as being critical to securing the “blessings” of our allies and friends and even some of our adversaries such as the PRC and Russia, as they then will magically change their previous unwillingness to “lean” on North Korea and now help secure Pyongyang’s agreement to get rid of its nuclear weapons and “come clean.”

A U.S. pledge to go to zero was seen as making a deal with North Korea that much easier. Ironically, according to some news sources, during informal meetings with an unofficial American delegation in San Diego, North Korean government representatives readily agreed to go to “zero nuclear weapons.” They simply explained that since the United States had some number of thousands of such weapons, they would be happy to begin the process of going to zero once the United States itself got down to their level.

This was exactly the tactic used by the Iranian delegation to the Geneva October meeting: they said they would be happy to endorse the goal of zero nuclear weapons but the United States “should go first” as we had more weapons. Thus it is that a pledge to go to a world with zero nuclear weapons – however reasonable such an idealistic goal appears to be – has boomeranged against us and has become an excuse for two rogue nuclear states to buy time as their nuclear programs advance.

Even should the “moral carrot” of arms control not work to secure a nuclear-free North Korea, under active consideration is what combination of additional sanctions and/or promises of additional development assistance, trade, investment or changed U.S. and allied defense policy might induce North Korea to “come clean”.

The problem with such a strategy is that it assumes, in part, that if were simply “nicer” to North Korea – i.e., offer more carrots – they would not be hostile to the world, and that whatever hostility they may have demonstrated was largely the result of a “hostile” American policy, especially the 2002 speech by President Bush placing Pyongyang – correctly so – in the series of states and terror allies described as an “axis of evil.”

For 50 years, starting with the June 1950 invasion of South Korea, the North Koreans have been at war with the U.S., the ROK and Japan. They captured the USS Pueblo and then tortured its crew. The blew up a Korean airliner over the Gulf of Thailand; they attempted to assassinate the President of the ROK and managed to kill his wife and many bystanders in a church; they murdered three-quarters of the ROK cabinet that had been on a state visit to Burma; and they murdered numerous ROK fisherman and villagers in commando raids on the south and bullying engagements on the high seas.

They have repeatedly said their goal remains the unification of the peninsula under North Korean communist rule, even should this require the use of force. Might their acquisition of nuclear weapons allow them to have more confidence to undertake this endeavor should the time come when U.S. forces have been largely withdrawn from the area along with a diminution of ROK readiness? In that their nuclear weapons are to hold at risk American and Japanese cities, might this prevent a U.S. President from taking the risk of coming to the assistance of our brothers and sisters in Seoul?

The hostile policy is therefore not of the United States, the ROK or Japan toward North Korea. It is the other way around. What nations hostile to another provide that very nation with some $5 billion in food, fuel and other assistance over an extended period of roughly 15 years?

As for additional sanctions, the Russian member of the conference, while not speaking for Moscow, made it crystal clear that in his view Russia was not going to support any further sanctions against North Korea. Isolating North Korea, he repeatedly emphasized, would not get the proper response. It was North Korea that properly worried about “the intentions” of the West and particularly the United States. Nuclear weapons in North Korea would be given up “at the end of the road” of negotiations which was well over the horizon. Again, notice the refrain “Blame America First” but in this case it is sounding a lot like “Blame Only America.”

[Next week, in Part II of Pyongyang Puzzles, we will explore other options for our North Korean policy.]

It was even suggested that further sanctions against North Korea, if resulting in the elimination of a flow of money to the regime, would force them to sell one of its nuclear weapons, perhaps to a terrorist group, in order to make “ends meet.”

Most participants did conclude that the United States and its allies should indeed seek to prevent the transfer or sale of such weapons from North Korea, especially through the Proliferation Security Initiative and/or other means. But others thought U.S. proposals for dealing with North Korea had to start with security guarantees, followed by investment, trade and normalization of relations, and only then perhaps followed by denuclearization “at the end of the road.”

Whatever track the new administration takes with North Korea, it should start with an appreciation of exactly what kind of regime we are dealing with, what its objectives are, and whether we should continue to accept the template that sees the West and particularly the United States as the prime culprit in the tensions created by Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

In much analysis of the problem, there are loud echoes of the “Blame America First” catechism so well explained by our former Ambassador to the UN, the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Having now acceded to power, the very Americans many so frequently blamed for the tyrannies in Pyongyang and Tehran are now the folks they see in the mirror every morning. Now, if they continue with the same worn-out analysis, they will have no one else to blame, except for themselves.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense consulting company in Potomac, Maryland.

Comments are closed.