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Move over Iraq, North Korea wants the
spotlight
By Bradley K Martin
A quarter-century ago, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il
was sharing absolute power in North Korea with his
father, Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Their principal
American-handler was Kim Yong-nam, a bespectacled
functionary with Groucho Marx eyebrows - but no
one-liners and no cigar. When I met him in 1979 his
specialty was earnest, three-hour monologues over lunch.
And now? Kim Il-sung died in 1994, but otherwise
at the top it's business as usual. Kim Jong-il is the
Great Leader, flexing the dynasty's still enormous
muscle. Kim Yong-nam acts as head of state.
In
the United States, four presidents have come and gone,
along with their principal North Korea-watchers.
The discontinuity in Washington may help to
explain what otherwise would be a mystery: how the
current US team imagines it can focus on invading Iraq
while consigning to a back burner North Korea's revived
threats to make trouble big time.
Consider the
response recently when Pyongyang announced it was
reactivating the Yongbyon nuclear power plant - a
reactor that produces weapons-grade plutonium, and that
the United States prepared to bomb in 1994 before the
North Koreans agreed to shut it down. Bush
administration officials were loath to attend to the
challenge before dealing with Iraq. "One rogue state
crisis at a time," a senior administration official was
reported to have said.
But Pyongyang's history
and circumstances dictate that it cannot and will not
permit the United States to wait and deal with North
Korea at a more opportune time when other foes have been
vanquished and the field is clear.
Just put
yourself in Kim Jong-il's place. You are a dictator
whose top priority - far outranking such mundane
concerns as feeding your people - is preserving your
regime. Over decades you have fortified your country,
hardening sensitive installations inside tunnels and
bunkers.
Now US news reports tell you that your
enemy is preparing more sophisticated weapons, and
contemplates practicing with them on Saddam Hussein in
Iraq. These include "smart" bunker-busters, which can
penetrate to the correct underground level before
detonating, and thermobaric bombs whose blast can
destroy the germs in biological weapons.
You
note that President George W Bush has termed Iraq, Iran
and North Korea the "axis of evil". You don't need to be
a tea-leaf reader to know that, once Iraq is out of the
way, your time will be short.
Now, still
imagining that you are Kim Jong-il, do you graciously
wait in the anteroom and avoid interrupting while the
Pentagon targets Iraq? Or do you see it as essential to
your survival to take swift advantage of Washington's
Middle Eastern preoccupation?
The question
answers itself. Washington's refusal to acknowledge
urgency guarantees that Kim Jong-il will follow his
latest provocation with another provocation, and yet
another, each one more threatening, until he has gained
Bush's full attention.
The stage for the coming
confrontation was set more than a decade ago, after the
collapse of Soviet communism. Officials of the George
Bush I and Bill Clinton administrations hoped to play a
waiting game. They figured North Korea would collapse,
perhaps to be absorbed into South Korea in the pattern
of East and West Germany. Meanwhile they would rely on a
balancing act: neither speeding things up through
military intervention nor providing to the regime the
means to prolong its existence.
Pyongyang caught
on and made clear that studied neglect was not
acceptable. Kim prepared his people for a war that might
break out at any moment. That got Washington's
attention.
War was averted in 1994 with a deal
that Pyongyang believed would lead to diplomatic
relations. Washington didn't follow through on that part
of the deal, though. Thus Pyongyang issued periodic
reminders of its capacity for hurting the United States
and its allies, reminders such as its 1998 launch of a
rocket over Japan.
Now Kim Jong-il can see
clearly that he is now in a do-or-die situation.
The North Korean ruler has little hope unless he
can pose to Bush a stark choice: attend to Pyongyang's
demands or sign up to fight a far wider war. Kim can
indeed do that. He can threaten to turn what the
Pentagon now plans as a two-front war against al-Qaeda
and Iraq into a three-front war - or a four-front war if
Iran, whose nuclear-weapons progress was featured in
satellite photos last week, gets involved. As a
condemned man, Kim may feel he has little to lose from
actual warfare.
North Korea's war plans always
have contemplated fighting Uncle Sam only when he has
one hand tied behind him. "It would be rather difficult
for us to fight all alone against American imperialism,"
Kim Il-sung acknowledged in 1955. However, "under
conditions where they must disperse their forces on a
global scale, it would be comparatively easy for us to
defeat them".
Kim Jong-il has the men and the
weapons to do horrific damage to South Korea, where
37,000 US troops are stationed, and probably to Japan as
well. In threatening, he would not be bluffing, any more
than Bush is bluffing Saddam Hussein.
What does
Kim Jong-il want from the United States?
His
minions have made clear that Pyongyang demands a US
guarantee of the regime's security. Why not give such a
guarantee if it would lead to peace on the Korean
Peninsula?
The devil is in the details. In
exchange for a security guarantee, Bush and his advisors
would want to obliterate all traces of Pyongyang's
capability to produce and use weapons of mass
destruction. Those weapons are Pyongyang's final card.
There is little in the history of the relationship to
suggest that Kim would trust Washington sufficiently to
give them up.
Considering the likelihood that
talks would prove fruitless - and considering the
evident lack of enthusiasm in Washington for trying to
force regime change in North Korea right now, ahead of
Iraq - what alternatives exist for Washington?
One is to recognize that the Cold War is not yet
over, as long as Kim Jong-il's regime exists, and to
re-emphasize the Cold War policy of containment - so
successful since the 1953 armistice in preventing a
second outbreak of war in Korea.
The Bush
administration will resist that alternative. Redoubling
military, diplomatic and economic efforts to contain Kim
Jong-il when he desperately seeks to avoid containment
would imply giving North Korea an enormous quantity of
attention. In those circumstances it would be difficult
to concentrate with sufficient single-mindedness on
invading Iraq.
But there may be no choice.
Picking off evildoers one at a time may prove to be a
task that is simply beyond Washington's present
capability.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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