- The surprise announcement on January 2 is that North
Korea has invited a delegation of U.S. nuclear experts to visit its main
nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Perhaps the North Koreans want to show the
world that they have what they've been saying they have---enough plutonium
for half a dozen atomic bombs. And perhaps they will repeat what they've
been saying all along: that they will give it all up in exchange for a
serious U.S. promise not to attack and kill them. (Now is that inscrutable
or what?)
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- Colin Powell's State Department has been working with
China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to negotiate the dissolution of North
Korea's nuclear weapons program. But on December 12, Vice President Cheney
appeared to want to sabotage that effort, telling those attending a high-level
meeting in Washington that he wants to defeat Pyongyang, not talk with
it. According to a Knight-Ridder report, Cheney stated: "I have been
charged by the President with making sure that none of the tyrannies in
the world are negotiated with. We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat
it." That's just nonsense, of course; while tyrant Eduard Shevardnadze
was in power in the Republic of Georgia, the U.S. contentedly negotiated
with him about oil pipeline construction and the handling of Islamic terrorism
in the Pankisi Gorge. (Meanwhile Georgia received more U.S. aid per capita
than any country but Israel.) Tyrants Musharraf, Mubarak, Karimov, etc.
negotiate with Washington all the time; Muammar Qadhafi just negotiated
the end of his nuclear program after months of talks with the U.S. Washington
chats with Evil comfortably and routinely, in businesslike fashion.
-
- Anyway, two weeks after Cheney's statement, White House
spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters, "The US stands ready to resume
the six-party talks [including North Korea] at an early date and without
preconditions, and we are working with others to do so." So maybe
the Bushites are sincere about negotiating, or maybe they're not; they're
divided among themselves. The odiously influential Richard Perle, and former
Bush speech writer David Frum, have just published a book, An End to Evil:
How to Win the War on Terror, which declares that as a premise for negotiations
with the U.S., Pyongyang must completely and immediately abandon its nuclear
weapons program. So it's hard to know what's going on. But the plan currently
under discussion, drafted by the Chinese (who seem to really not want nukes
on either half of the Korean peninsula) calls for Pyongyang to freeze and
dismantle its nuclear weapons program, in return for security guarantees
and economic aid. In contrast, Cheney's statement called for North Korea
to dismantle its very self under the threat of U.S. attack. More specifically,
Cheney set conditions difficult for a sovereign state to accept: first
North Korea, having been labeled "evil" by Washington since Bush's
first State of the Union speech (and conflated with dissimilar Iraq and
Iran as part of what thinking people consider a ludicrously contrived "axis
of evil") must dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and make itself
more vulnerable to the defeat Cheney has specifically threatened. Only
then will the Bush administration talk to Pyongyang about maybe issuing
some statement promising not to mount an attack. Beijing quite reasonably
urges Washington to be more "realistic" and "flexible"
in dealing with North Korea.
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- The Chinese, unfortunately, aren't talking to the world's
most flexible regime. These particular imperialists responded to frantic
efforts by the Iraqi regime to prevent war (including the offer, secretly
made last December, to accept hundreds of FBI or military arms inspectors
from the U.S.; give special oil concessions to U.S. firms; and to cooperate
with any U.S.-authored Middle East peace plan) with the demand that Saddam
admit (whether true or not) that he possessed weapons of mass destruction,
place himself in U.S. military custody, and order his military to surrender
to the U.S. without a fight. That's diplomacy, neocon style. It requires
the enemy to declare, "Yes, you're right, I'm evil," and then
to grovel and capitulate. It takes into account that the foe will not do
that, but his truculence can then be represented to the American people
as a desire to evilly provoke their own good selves into war.
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- Nine months ago, John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of
state for arms control and international security, advised North Korea
(and Iran and Syria) to "draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq"
(Reuters, April 9, 2003). (Fear us, and obey!) He called the Pyongyang
regime a "hellish nightmare" and actually stated, "The end
of North Korea is our policy." (Mr. Bolton wants to end North Korea,
period. So why bother with diplomatic speech, and why negotiate anything
at all?) Bolton is a leading neocon, and (with Cheney) adviser to the Jewish
Institute of National Security Affairs, which promotes aggressive assertion
of U.S. military power in the Middle East and everywhere. His career includes
a stint of service to extreme anticommunist war hawk Barry Goldwater. A
friend of the late Senator Jesse Helm, he strove to thwart African-American
voter registration in the 1980s. He has led the Bush administration's opposition
to the International Criminal Court. The North Korean regime, responding
to his attacks on it, have pithily described Mr. Bolton as "human
scum."
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- Now, I'm no big fan of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il,
and the regime he heads. But neither am I a fan of selective vilification
and simplistic thinking. If the Bush administration is in fact planning
for war with North Korea (madness, but the neocon faction at least seems
to think it's doable), it will continue to depict Pyongyang in the worst
possible light. Just as it cherry-picked information to build a case for
war with Iraq, it will distort the historical record on North Korea. So
what follows is a very brief presentation of what I think are the points
about that history most relevant to the current crisis.
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- 1. The Korean peninsula, peopled by one of the world's
most homogeneous ethnic groups, and united from the seventh century through
1945, is now divided into two nations due primarily to the actions of the
Truman administration and the U.S. military. This is something upon which
South and North Koreans agree. The facts are laid out well by historian
Bruce Cumings in his magisterial two-volume work, The Origins of the Korean
War. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. As the Japanese prepared
to surrender to the Allies, they did what they did elsewhere in Asia: they
turned over power to local people in the hope that the western powers wouldn't
colonize, or continue to colonize, Asian nations. (One of the principle
outcomes of the Pacific War was that it indeed helped produce the end of
colonial administrations in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, etc.) Leaders of self-governing people's committees
opposed to Japanese occupation formed the "Korean People's Republic"
in Seoul on September 6, 1945. It had a broad-based leadership ranging
from right to left. When Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, leader of the
U.S. occupation of Korea, arrived in Inchon soon thereafter, he ordered
Japanese authorities to remain at their posts, refused to acknowledge the
newly-formed republic, and indeed even banned all reference to it. The
U.S. would be in charge of what was seen as a defeated enemy nation. This
attitude produced widespread resentment and resistance in Korea. (Compare
contemporary occupied Iraq.)
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- 2. As the war was drawing to an end, the Soviet allies
of the U.S. advocated independence for a unified Korea as soon as possible.
Truman for his part suggested a trusteeship of decades, citing the case
of the Philippines. The Soviets by prior arrangement in the closing days
of the war declared war on Japan and moved troops into Manchuria, Korea,
and islands north of Hokkaido. They could easily have seized the entire
Korean peninsula. Instead they consulted with the U.S. State Department,
and agreed to pause at the 38th parallel, where they awaited the arrival
of U.S. forces to accept the Japanese surrender in the peninsula's southern
half. (Rather accommodating behavior, I'd say.) The Red Army handed power
over to the Korean Workers' Party, headed by Kim Il-sung, a legendary guerrilla
leader who had fought the Japanese in Manchuria (where there is a large
ethnic Korean population).
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- 3. In the South, U.S. Occupation authorities installed
Korean nationalist leader Syngman Rhee as president. His dictatorial rule
met with resistance from the people's committees, which while quite independent,
sympathized with the leadership in the north. That leadership demanded
the reunification of the peninsula, and withdrawal of foreign troops; but
U.S. authorities, noting the North was becoming part of an expanding communist
bloc, became committed to the establishment of a separate South Korean
republic, This, like then-occupied Japan and Chiang Kai-shek's Republic
of China, would maintain an anti-communist alliance with the U.S. Following
the collapse of U.S.-Soviet negotiations about Korean reunification, the
Republic of Korea was formed in the south, and the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea in the north, in May 1948. The Soviets withdrew their
troops from the peninsula; the U.S. continues to this day to maintain a
large force in the south. (Washington's man Rhee was overthrown in a student-led
uprising following a rigged election in 1960.)
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- 4. On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th
parallel in an effort to establish Pyongyang's control over the whole peninsula.
They took Seoul three days later, easily. They met with little resistance
from their southern compatriots, and indeed, found much support. But the
U.S. was not prepared to see the reunification of Korea on Pyongyang's
terms. With some support from its allies, and the fig leaf of U.N. authorization
(the Soviet ambassador was absent when the Security Council vote was taken,
and Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Taiwan held the China seat), it counter-attacked.
As U.S. troops approached the Yalu River (the natural border between Korea
and China), forces from the newly established People's Republic came to
the assistance of DPRK forces, doing much damage to the overextended Americans.
The war ended in a stalemate, after the death of about four million people,
three years later. The pre-war border has been maintained under armistice
conditions. North Korea continues to insist that the South is occupied
by the U.S., and that the U.S. has thwarted the reunification desired by
all Koreans. Historically, the U.S. official position has been that South
Korea is a democracy (even under successive brutal dictatorships, those
of Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, etc.), while the North is an evil
totalitarian communist state. Vice President Cheney's position, as noted
above, is that North Korea must be defeated, and only following that defeat
reconnected with the good, pro-American, capitalist, democratic South.
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- 5. The South is an economic powerhouse today; its GDP
is double that of the Netherlands. But it is subject to crises, like that
of 1997, and it is of course dependent on international capital and can't
have a really independent foreign policy. The South Korean economy becomes
increasingly globalized, and under foreign control. The North Korean economy,
meanwhile, is in miserable shape. While Pyongyang long pursued, officially,
the policy of juche (self-reliance), it was badly hit by the implosion
of the USSR and collapse of its bloc. Natural disasters, like the 1996
floods that destroyed most of the rice crop, have caused homelessness and
starvation. But should any aver that this fate is the inevitable result
of the North Korean system itself, Cumings notes that in 1980, infant mortality
in the north was lower than in the south. Life expectancy was higher. Per
capita energy usage was double that in the south (Boston Globe, Dec. 21,
2003).
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- 6. Of the two Koreas, the first to begin a systematic
effort to acquire nuclear weapons was the South. Park Chung-hee's regime
was obliged to abandon its nuclear program under quiet pressure from the
Carter administration in the 1970s. The North Koreans may have produced
two nuclear weapons by 1992. In 1994, the Clinton administration negotiated
a deal by which Pyongyang suspended its nuclear weapons program in exchange
for oil and the foreign-sponsored construction of two cool-water reactors.
But the U.S. didn't follow up on the agreement, and North Korea resumed
its program. Having withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
last January, it now develops that program legally, arguing (sensibly)
that it's necessary for self-defense. As the U.S. once argued, followed
by the USSR, Britain, France, China, Pakistan and India. Nuclear Israel
would argue similarly if it talked about its program, which it doesn't
as a matter of policy. (The U.S. currently conveys the impression that
any nuclear newcomer commits a fundamentally evil act in acquiring this
technology. But putting things in perspective, one must observe that each
new nuclear state merely follows in the footsteps of those who first developed
nuclear weapons and used them, with unapologetic efficacy, on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.)
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- 7. Recent South Korean presidents have followed a policy
of "sunshine diplomacy" towards the North. President Kim Dae-jung
visited Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong-il in 2000. When George W. Bush
came to power and met with Kim in 2001, he indicated, much to the latter's
chagrin, that the U.S. had no interest in his "sunshine diplomacy"
but wished to aggressively confront North Korea.
-
- 8. The majority of people in South Korea currently believe
that the United States is a greater threat to them than North Korea, and
there is even considerable sympathy in the South for the North's nuclear
strategy. Many feel that their compatriots across the border are being
bullied by the power responsible for the peninsula's division; they say
they don't fear the North or believe its weapons will be deployed against
them. They're Koreans, after all, victimized historically by Japanese and
Americans, Chinese and Russians, far more than by one another.
-
- As I say, I'm no fan of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il (nor
for that matter the current South Korean leader Roh Moo-hyun). The North
Korean leader is most often defined as a "Stalinist," although
I'm not sure that's fair to Joseph Stalin. It's absurd to call him a "Maoist."
(Maoism stresses the vulnerability of the socialist project, and the very
real possibility of the restoration of capitalism, which of course has
happened in the PRC. North Korean official Marxism depicts the present
North Korean state as an invulnerable worker's paradise, which can't be
undermined because History won't let such reversals happen.) The official
North Korean ideology looks to me as a peculiar mix of Confucianism, passionate
nationalism, and undigested Marxism-Leninism. Filial devotion to the house
of Kim Il-sung, national Father, is central to the ideology. Thus both
Washington and Pyongyang are benighted by simplistic, dogmatic approaches
to reality. But the will for war seems much greater on the one side than
the other.
-
- Will the visit of non-government U.S. nuclear experts
to North Korea stymie the neocons' effort to defeat North Korean "evil"?
Will it produce an agreement without regime change, to their chagrin? Bruce
Cumings told the Boston Globe, "If the Iraq war had gone quickly and
successfully to a conclusion, we would have had a major crisis with North
Korea this fall [2003]. It was quite apparent that the Bush administration
felt that North Korea was next on its list if the Iraq war went well."
-
- Paraphrasing Cumings: dogged resistance to invasion and
occupation by Iraqis, fighting on the battlefield Bush calls the "center"
of the "War on Terror" has well served the Korean people, on
the other end of Asia, who do not want to be on that list and (like Syrians,
Iranians, Cubans, Libyans, and most people) do not want Americans killing
them. At this point the State Department (Bolton excepted) seems inclined
to back off from further killing, because the various repercussions make
it nervous. But the neocons piloting the Defense [sic] Department are as
eager as ever to affect an End to Evil, and nothing said or shown in Yongbyon
this week will likely curb their wild will to victory.
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- Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University,
and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
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- He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu http://www.counterpunch.org/
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