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ChroniclesExtra! October 18, 2002
NORTH KOREA'S TROUBLING ADMISSION
by Srdja Trifkovic
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has declared that North Korea already
has a "small number" of nuclear weapons. The statement follows the
admission by North Korea that it has a secret nuclear program. A
Pentagon official later added that the U.S. government thought Pyongyang
had two nuclear bombs.
This second stunning revelation about North Korea in 24 hours has sent
shockwaves around the world.
The reaction from the White House has been surprisingly restrained so
far. Spokesman Scott McClellan said Pyongyang's nuclear program was a
"serious violation" of the 1994 deal under which North Korea agreed to
halt its nuclear weapons program in return for light water reactors, but
he added that Washington viewed the problem in a different light from
Iraq which is threatened with military action over its weapons program.
"These are different regions, different problems," McClellan said, "we
are seeking a peaceful solution. This is best addressed through
diplomatic channels at this point." McClellan then went on to describe
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a "homicidal dictator who is addicted to
weapons of mass destruction." He did not comment on allegations that
North Korea is also pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs.
This is all very curious. Let's suppose that you, a superwealthy and
powerful homesteader in a mansion on the hill, have some issues with two
unruly gang leaders on the wrong side of the track. They are both trashy
types, murderous and nasty to boot, one Middle Eastern and another
Oriental. One gang leader is said to "gas his own people" (an apparent
lie dating over a decade back, but useful for the requisite reductio ad
Hitlerum). The other starves his charges to death, in the name of a
curious concept of self-sufficiency that is somehow connected to
mid-19th century neo-Hegelian dialectics elaborated in a London suburb.
It's a strange world.
The former, a nasty brute with a low IQ but with no powerful backers,
tried to take over one of your client's properties a decade ago,
assuming that it was OK with you. Once you changed you mind about that,
you taught him a lesson that was -- now you claim -- not memorable
enough. He is still around, cornered in his seedy abode that you keep
cordoned off, but powerless to threaten you. As you go into strange
paroxisms of rage about his alleged transgressions he wonders what he
needs to do to stay out of your way, and keeps his fingers crossed that
you'll just forget he exists. There's no serious proof that Saddam
really means to hurt you. There can't be any: he IS bad but he's not
mad. Even if he did dream of getting back at you (we're all human, sort
of) he has no wherewithal to do so now, and there is no serious
likelihood of his acquiring it in a decade or two to come.
The latter gang leader -- his awful domain's latent famine
notwithstanding
-- is a far nastier piece of work. This fellow, Kim Jong Il, is
hell-bent on acquiring some serious weaponry of mass destruction, in
fact he already has them on your own admission, and wants to use the
hardware as a tool in his dealings with you and your proxies.
So what do you do?
If you follow George Washington's advice, you stick to your side of the
track, well armed to be sure, and let the bad guys over there do their
thing -- whatever unpleasantness it entails for their subjects and their
unlucky neighbors -- for as long as they stay away from your turf.
Ah, but you like being the boss. OK, if you're half-serious about being
the only sheriff in town, you'll prioritize and go after the chief
offender first. You declare the rules, you define the consequences.
Having, or seeking, "weapons of mass destruction" invites blind,
automatic retaliation
-- nothing personal.
On the other hand, if you're a coward or a fraud, or if your choices of
enemies are determined by someone else, you'll go after the softer
target pretending that he's the really bad guy. In this case you'll
pretend that Comrade Kim is the lesser threat -- he has "only" two nukes
after all -- while Saddam remains the real threat.
The rest of the world disagrees. With Pyongyang's spectacular admission
that it has a secret nuclear weapons program Washington's attempts to
muster a new coalition for the preventive march into Baghdad have
suffered a serious setback.
On October 17 middle-ranking State Department bureaucrats embarked on a
hasty tour of east Asia to forge a concerted strategy. As James Kelly,
the assistant Secretary of State, and the Undersecretary, John Bolton,
arrived in Beijing, en route for Tokyo and Seoul, Mr. Bush described the
North Korean admission as "troubling and sobering."
This statement was curious. In addition to Iraq and Iran, Mr. Bush
included North Korea, urbi et orbi, in his "axis of evil" State of the
Union address last January. If he was half-serious about the threat from
this dangerous rogue nation, what is there to be "troubled" by, and
"sobered" from? Whatever the rogues do, we should be ready for them.
In the aftermath of Mr. Kim's admission that he's out to get nukes we
face a strange spectacle in Washington. It seems that last winter's
"axis of evil" was purely coincidental, and its pecking order dependent
on expediency. Saddam -- the real target all along -- is a secularist
dictator who appeals to the Baathist variety of Arab nationalism, but
whose vanity and ambition guarantee that he'll get no external support
when the going gets tough. (Forget Iran for now. It upholds Islam as the
basis of its ancient polity, but its Shiite leaders detest the Wahabi
"heretics" of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is far closer to getting
nukes of its own than Saddam will ever be, but that is not a polite
thing to say inside the
Beltway.)
North Korea, by contrast to both, is a zany neo-Stalinist hell on Earth,
whose minimal external links go only as far as Peking. To Mr. Bush the
"Axis of Evil" was a rhetorical device that sought not to describe
reality, but to blur it. How inconvenient, then, that one of the evil
triumvirate proves to be seriously demented. In a pragmatic and
non-ideological scheme of things, after the latest announcement from
Pyongyang the assorted North Korean sites should become more attractive
targets for cruise missiles, airborne assaults, and special operations,
than Baghdad or Basra.
But the Administration minimizes North Korean threat while we're still
on automatic pilot to clobber Saddam. This indicates that in Bush's team
there is no predictable corelation between a threat to national security
and its processing through the decision-making machinery. Messrs.
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. will not allow mere national security
threats to get in the way of their grand Middle Eastern designs, so the
North Korean bombshell needs to be ignored or minimized. Our readers
wouldn't know any of this from their local TV channels, but as London's
"Independent" reported, "Washington's uncertainty is reflected in the
long delay between Mr. Kelly being told of the programme when he visited
the North from 3 to 5 October, and the announcement by the State
Department on Wednesday, almost a fortnight later":
"The immediate fears in Washington are twofold: first, that a new crisis
might erupt on the divided and heavily armed Korean peninsula, where
35,000 US troops are stationed... The second worry is that the
restrained US reaction will lead to accusations that America operates
double standards in its dealings with Iraq and North Korea, making the
search for a tough United Nations resolution against Saddam Hussein even
trickier... In the eight years since the agreement with the Clinton
administration, which essentially bartered US economic aid for the
dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear programme, Pyongyang appears to
have mounted a secret one, based on enriched uranium. Unlike the
plutonium technology mothballed in 1994, reactors are not needed in this
process. But it does require centrifuges, precisely the technology
Washington claims the Iraqis are trying to assemble in their own pursuit
of a bomb."
While the old plutonium-based program was in force the North Koreans
admitted that they had only three ounces of the deadly material. This
was implausible, and the CIA always believed the stock was much more
substantial. It is sufficient now to produce several atomic weapons. . .
something that Saddam can only dream of.
Scarcely less alarming was Pyongyang's claim, reported by US officials
in early October, that it had unspecified "more powerful" weapons. This
is a confirmation that North Korea already has chemical and biological
arms, as all of its neighbours and most weapons proliferation
specialists have long believed. Nevertheless, we shall be told yet again
that the war against Iraq is a must. No new facts from the outer fringes
of the Orient will be allowed to disrupt the Iraqi war scheme.
While it may be a good idea to get rid of Saddam, to pretend that
hitting him and the city of Baghdad in preference to Pyongyang would
serve any American interest is absurd. In a sane world the very notion
of America going to war with a rogue on the wrong side of the track
would be preposterous. We live in a fallen world, however. The best we
can do, perhaps, is to remind ourselves that, in a real democracy,
determining threats to national security should be hotly debated. Since
this is not going to happen, for now anyway, we'll have the Marines in
the streets of Baghdad before this winter is out. At the same time there
will be a Fat Boy or two in North Korea's arsenal, out of America's
sight or mind. Saddam will have a hearty posthumous laugh.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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