Appeasing North Korea: the Clinton Legacy

Democrats have begun a desperate-yet-predictable effort to blame North Korea's nuclear aspirations on President George W. Bush's strident rhetoric. Despite their leftist cant, they seem remarkably uninterested in the "root causes" of Pyongyang's current nuclear brinksmanship: Bill Clinton's eight years of appeasement and the gullible cordiality of the South Korean government.

Threats of a nuclear winter did not mix well with Clinton's sunny disposition. Clinton, who saw the domestic front thronged with "crises," refused to disturb his illusion of a post-Cold War world at complete peace under his watch. He had two private conversations with CIA Director James Woolsey in as many years, willfully laboring under delusions of supra-national serenity. He famously misled the public that "there's not a single, solitary nuclear missile pointed at an American child tonight" before asking China to re-orient its missiles away from U.S. population centers. When al Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center, two U.S. embassies in Africa and the U.S.S. Cole, he bombed nothing, an empty tent, and nothing, respectively. This refusal to confront reality precipitated the present crisis in Korea, as well.

If Iraq's nuclear policy in the 1990s constituted a "decade of defiance," Bill Clinton's negotiations with North Korea represented a "decade of delusion." Evidence that North Korea was violating the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty surfaced within weeks of Clinton's first inauguration. After a year of inaction allowed Pyongyang to create at least one nuclear weapon, the emboldened Stalinists announced their formal withdrawal from the treaty. It seemed North Korean officials were angling for a payoff. They must have realized they struck the jackpot when Clinton named tough-as-nails Jimmy Carter as his principal negotiator.

Under the final terms of the Agreed Framework approved in October of 1994, Clinton agreed to provide the "Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea" (DPRK) with two light water nuclear reactors and a massive allotment of oil. The U.S. agreed to ship 500,000 metric tons of oil annually in response to the North's pretense that the energy-starved backwater had developed the nuclear facility to generate power. These shipments have cost taxpayers more than $800 million to date - a bargain compared with the $6 billion spent on constructing the nuclear reactors, which now empower North Korea to produce 100 nuclear bombs each year.

In August 1998, North Korea lobbed a Taepo Dong 1 missile over Japan. Four months later, officials refused U.S. inspectors access to a suspected underground nuclear reactor at Kumchang-ni. President Clinton then sweetened the deal by rewarding Kim Jong Il's half-year-long stall tactics with 1.1 million tons of food worth nearly $200 million. Not surprisingly, American inspectors found no signs of wrongdoing at the long-sanitized facility.

Even this seemingly humanitarian food aid turned into a weapon in North Korea's hands. Reports abound that rations have been re-directed to the DPRK's military, the fifth largest in the world. This is nothing new. Using food as a weapon dates back at least to Stalin. Communist Ethiopia similarly misused international aid in the 1980s. With this in mind, Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, warned in 1999, "(A)ny food aid we provide to North Korea . . . must be monitored to prevent diversion to the military and the party cadre. Unscheduled, unsupervised visits by American Korean-speaking monitors would assist us in this regard." It didn't happen.

It seems little wonder North Korea has made threats of nuclear conflagration its only functional export industry, besides the weapons themselves. Even as floods and famine emaciated its nearly 22 million citizens, regime leaders in this "worker's paradise" earmarked every available dollar for guns, not butter, in the hope that Uncle Sam would pay their price without demanding accountable disarmament. Their gamble paid off. Clinton's appeasement programs made North Korea the leading recipient of foreign aid in the Asia-Pacific region.

Clinton's policy toward North Korea, a queer amalgamation of Clement Atlee and Alfred E. Newman, has proven disastrous. The most isolated nation in the world has possessed a nuclear weapon capable of striking the United States (the Taepo Dong 2 missile) since at least 1999. Its modern-day commissars have threatened to use these missiles against America a minimum of three times in 21 months. After kicking UN inspectors out of the Yongbyong facility, the short trip to full nuclear status has been quickly engaged.

With Marxist saber-rattling threatening an atomic showdown on the peninsula, South Korea should be in the lead denouncing the aggressive posture taken north of the 38th parallel. Instead, Seoul has saved its greatest ire for the United States while cozying up with Pyongyang. Polls show more than half of all South Korean youths hold a negative view of America. This generation has been loudest in its call to expel the 37,000 U.S. GIs stationed along the Demilitarized Zone to protect them from 1.1 million of their beloved uniformed northern neighbors. President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who campaigned on an anti-American platform, has pledged to continue the "Sunshine policy" of benign exchange, assistance and interaction across the DMZ. Roh's predecessor, Kim Dae-jung, spoke openly of the policy's goal: reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

How this policy engulfed the longstanding military tension evident for 50 years makes an interesting story in useful idiocy. While the Korean Conflict has never formally ended, contemporary South Korea has little fear that the North will transgress the world's longest cease-fire and less appreciation for the tens of thousands of American soldiers who died the last time Stalinists made just such a gambit (including this writer's grandfather).

A successful Communist PR operation has swept past transgressions down the memory hole. In recent years, North Korea has allowed families bisected by its border to hold first-ever reunions. The sight of octogenarians visiting children for the first time in half a century tugs at the heart-strings. And the North has carefully orchestrated sympathetic coverage of these reunions.

The DPRK has stoked the fires of racial solidarity in its rapprochement with Seoul. A banner carefully placed behind a 100-year-old mother visiting her son read, "We have the same blood, the same nation and the same mind." The consanguinity of Koreans again took center stage during the 2000 Olympics, when the nations' athletes entered wearing common uniforms before the "unification flag." A North Korean Olympic official took the opportunity during general press conference grandstanding to hit his talking point, chirping, "We are the same blood." Under Dae-jung's leadership, the two Koreas have begun mutual projects, such as an unfinished railway across both nations and joint industrial ventures. With an ethnic unity further cemented by a warming public image, North Korea could say in its New Year's message that "there exists on the Korean Peninsula at present only confrontation between the Koreans in the North and the South and the United States."

In 1952-1953, near the time of Stalin's death, the Soviet Union discussed reunifying East and West Germany in a desperate attempt to avoid an arms buildup in West Germany. (Ironically, it was President Reagan's deployment of ICBM missiles in western Europe thirty years later that would prove a major element in the Soviet's collapse.) The East Germans made similar appeals to their separated brethren, appeals made more substantial by the recent hysterical focus on the "one blood" of the Aryan race. Today's pretenders have not missed a trick.

Diverting attention from the regime's bloodthirsty leadership to the common peasants trapped under its rule is a classic totalitarian tactic. Throughout the Cold War, Communist propagandists and their cadre of domestic sympathizers and dupes consistently chanted the mantra that Russians are "just people." And after all, aren't we all "just people"? Well-insulated Western visitors would invariably return home to note the warmth (and intense joy) of the Soviet people within the Marxists' iron grip. After one such trip Billy Joel would croon, "We never knew all the friends we had, in Leningrad."

South Koreans have not just friends but relatives - the "same blood" - across the DMZ. Any military solution risks killing their own kin. Contrary to the North Korean propaganda machine, though, the two Koreas do not share "the same mind." South Korean freedom and economic expansion has shown their starving northern counterparts the possibilities of liberalization, an overture the DPRK has steadfastly rejected. It has instead played the role of an atomic bully. Who, exactly, do South Koreans believe will be the North's first nuclear hostages? Apparently, the point is obscured from the pleasant glow of current North-South relations. The North will undoubtedly clarify the point when it suits their purposes.

The attempt to blame the current state of affairs on Bush's "axis of evil" speech is cowardly blame-shifting of the worst sort. It is holding the solution responsible for the problem. Clinton's coddling of dictators with a yearning for Weapons of Mass Destruction got us here. But North Korea is only one bloom from the seeds planted during his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, when he forged what one critic called an "astonishing reversal of nine previous U.S. administrations" and their refusal to negotiate with terrorists. It is a dangerous world, and one cannot imagine what future dictators will expect to negotiate for during future incidences of nuclear blackmail. Provided they are interested in negotiating at all.

"Russia Helped U.S. on Nuclear Spying Inside North Korea." The CIA has been working with Russian intelligence to emplace sensors to detect nuclear weapons manufacturing.

CUTS From the NYTIMES article:

"Traditionally, uranium enrichment facilities have required large amounts of electricity and water, making it possible to identify them by spy satellite photographs of power grids and other industrial infrastructure.

Plutonium reprocessing, on the other hand, is a chemical process requiring less power and water, and so such plants can be situated in more remote locations, like Yongbyon, which is about 60 miles north of Pyongyang.

But plutonium reprocessing gives off distinctive emissions that can be tracked and measured, even in very small amounts. Experts familiar with the joint operation between the C.I.A. and Russian intelligence said plutonium reprocessing emits an isotope of krypton in gaseous form that is relatively easy to detect.

The Russians were apparently given American sensing equipment to help analysts determine whether reprocessing was under way at Yongbyon, which after 1994 would have been a violation of the agreement reached under the Clinton administration, known as the Agreed Framework.

The equipment could also help the C.I.A. determine whether plutonium reprocessing had secretly been moved to another site in North Korea.

"Krypton is a very good technical indicator that is hard to hide," said one person familiar with the intelligence efforts. "If you are able to situate the sniffers in the right places, then you could have confidence that you can find out whether plutonium reprocessing is going on or not."

CUT

North Korea had pledged not to develop nuclear weapons and had agreed to monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but by the early 1990's, there was growing evidence that North Korea was secretly flouting its agreements.

As signs of North Korea's determination to build nuclear weapons mounted, the Clinton administration intervened, and hammered out a new agreement in 1994 aimed at freezing the North Korean nuclear program, particularly plutonium reprocessing at a facility in Yongbyon. Despite the agreement, American intelligence concluded that North Korea had generated enough fissile material to produce one or two nuclear bombs.

The C.I.A. turned to its former adversaries in Russian intelligence for assistance to take advantage of Moscow's longstanding relationship with the North Korean government. The Soviet Union supported North Korea during the Korean War in the early 1950's and throughout the remainder of the cold war, until the Soviet collapse in 1991. North Korean nuclear scientists are believed to have received training in the Soviet Union. More recently, Russia has tried once again to improve its ties to North Korea,

The latest crisis over the North Korean nuclear program erupted last year (2002), when United States intelligence obtained strong evidence that North Korea had secretly developed a uranium enrichment program, which would represent a second track toward the development and production of nuclear weapons. American officials said there was fragmentary evidence of a uranium enrichment effort as far back as the late 1990's, but much more compelling evidence of such a program came last year (2002), officials said............January 20, 2003 NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/international/asia/20INTE.html?ex=1160712000&en=00a3327d8eb3cb97&ei=5070

MOSCOW:
Nuclear Smuggling From The Former Soviet Union: Threats And Responses ((St. Martin's Press, 2000)
By Rensselaer Lee
Foreign Policy Research Institute A Catalyst for Ideas

As of February 2000, more than 8 years after the collapse of the USSR, new security systems had been installed at 113 buildings, most of them in Russia; however, these sites contained only 7 percent of the estimated 650 tons of weapons-usable material considered at risk for theft or diversion. DOE plans call for safeguarding 60 percent of the material by 2006 and the rest in 10 to 15 years or longer. Obviously prospective thieves and smugglers will not wait until all Russian sites are MPC&A-ready before initiating a major diversion. Hence, the strategic rationale for the DOE effort makes decreasing sense as the timeframe for completing it lengthens. http://jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2371217

CUT

....at least 3,000 scientists with expertise in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have left Russia since 1992, some of them heading for aspiring nuclear states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Some of those who remain reportedly are feeding information on WMD systems to foreign clients via the Internet.[6](Steve Goldstein. "Russia's Dejected Scientists See Bomb Skills as Ticket Out," The Philadelphia Inquirer January 11, 1999 (www.phillynews.com/programs/aprint)

Also, Russia's international technology transfers to countries such as Iran and China are accelerating the drain of WMD expertise and hence undercutting the U.S. non-proliferation effort.

The secret agreement between the C.I.A. and Russian intelligence came sometime in the early 1990's, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and at about the same time that the North Korean nuclear weapons program first emerged as a major international issue.

The joint operation represented a major test of efforts by the C.I.A. and S.V.R. to forge a new relationship in the post-cold-war period. Even though the C.I.A. had asked for the help, it did not completely trust the Russians to tell the truth about what the nuclear monitoring equipment detected, although there was apparently no evidence that the data received from the Russians had been altered or tampered with.

(June 20, 2006-Moscow is complacent only "psychological test" by N. Korea, Moscow June 22, Moscow seemed to finally be taking North Korea's threat seriously. The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned North Korean Ambassador Pak Ui Chun to make plain Moscow's concerns.http://jamestown.org/edm/article.php?)article_id=2371217

SideBar:

1997 Congressional Hearings
Special Weapons
Nuclear, Chemical, Biological and Missile

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1997_h/s970313r.htm

.....Further search for accommodation could then be pursed within a framework similar to the discontinued Ross-Mamedov talks that were set in motion by President Yeltsin's January 1992 proposal for a Global Protection System (GPS) and the subsequent June 1992 summit of Presidents Yeltsin and Bush. We all remember that the purpose of the Ross-Mamedov Talks was to establish the basis for moving forward together on GPS.

It must be acknowledged that the American refusal to continue the GPS dialogue after 1992 left an unfortunate "after-taste" with the Russians, indicating perhaps a lack of sufficient U.S. interest in cooperation on missile defense, as proposed by President Yeltsin.

The Clinton administration is considering a US limited NMD system to counter missile threats by rogue states (the Clinton administration's rationale for a limited NMD system centers around "rogue states" like North Korea). It is intended to intercept long-range missiles launched from North Korea or from the Near East/Persian Gulf region midway toward the United States. Russia's continuous high-alert posture has already led to one major scare.

On January 25, 1995, Russian radar technicians detected a routine scientific rocket launch from Norway but misinterpreted it as a Trident missile from a U.S. submarine. President Boris Yeltsin hurriedly convened a threat assessment conference with his senior advisers and for about eight minutes they deliberated whether to launch a counterattack before the incoming missile arrived. Fortunately, Russian military officers were able to determine--with only two or three minutes to spare--that the rocket was in fact heading away from Russian territory and therefore posed no threat.

But the Clinton administration has chosen to ignore this very real and growing danger and is instead expending significant time and political capital seeking to modify the ABM Treaty to allow the deployment of a not-yet-fully tested limited missile defense system against a threat which has yet to fully materialize. It is outrageous that the United States would not only pursue this path but actually exacerbate the danger by encouraging Russia to continue to deploy thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

These documents were presented to Russian officials by U.S. negotiators during meetings in Geneva on January 19-21, 2000. John Holum, senior adviser for arms control and international security affairs at the State Department, headed the U.S. delegation. Yuri Kapralov, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's arms control department, led the Russian delegation. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs translated the English-language documents into Russian. A trusted source recently obtained a copy of the translated documents and provided them to the Bulletin. The documents were subsequently translated back into English and have been reviewed by both Russian and English language speakers for accuracy.

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