North Korea laments Gaddafi's nuke
folly By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - North Korea could hardly have come
up with a better reason for not giving up its
nuclear weapons program than the United States-led
bombing of the forces of Libyan leader Muammar
Gaddafi.
It was nearly eight years ago
that Gaddafi made a show of jettisoning a nuclear
weapons program in deference to the demands of the
United States and its allies in the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. In return, Gaddafi, once the
bete noir of the Western world, the cruel tyrant
who condoned or maybe ordered the bombing of PanAm
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December
21, 1988, was showered with aid and favors, not to
mention diplomatic relations with the US in 2006.
The bad boy had reformed, so much so that
the neo-conservative servants of the presidency of
George W Bush held him up as a
shining example of what a
little common sense and diplomacy could do.
Now if only the worst actor of all, North
Korea's leader Kim Jong-il, would follow his
example. Repeatedly the neo-cons held up the
Libyan example as a model for North Korea in all
those rounds of six-party talks that culminated in
elaborate agreements in 2007 for the North to
abandon its nukes. North Korea had no intention of
doing anything of the sort, but US negotiators,
and South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak, never
tired of reminding North Korea of all the riches
they would share in the form of direly needed aid
if only the North would live up to its word.
The Libyan model endures to this day - and
suddenly North Korea is eager to cite it as proof
positive of the wisdom of it nuclear program. Only
the North Koreans have reversed the message. No
way, they are saying, would the US and others have
dared to attack Gaddafi's forces if he had had the
nuclear deterrent needed to strike back. And no
way, by inference, can North Korea afford to
compromise its own nuclear program knowing the
Americans will then strike - even if the US goes
so far as to form diplomatic relations with the
North.
North Korea, otherwise altogether
silent on uprisings that might be worthy of
emulation by the North's own starving citizens,
found plenty to report about "the Libyan crisis"
for "teaching the international community a grave
lesson". A Foreign Ministry spokesman, quoted by
Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency, said the
bombing "confirmed once again ... the truth that
one should have power to defend peace".
North Korea discerned that convenient
truth at a significant juncture in its own
relationship with the US and South Korea. It was
just one year ago, on March 26, that the South
Korean navy corvette the Cheonan was split
in two and sunk in the Yellow Sea with a loss of
the lives of 46 sailors. South Koreans
memorialized the sinking on the weekend with
services at the national cemetery in Daejeon, a
major city south of Seoul, and on Bangnyeong, the
South Korean island within a few kilometers of the
rocky southwestern-most promontory of North Korea,
near which the Cheonan went down.
South Korea's top admiral, dedicating a
monument to the sailors on the island, promised to
retaliate against future North Korean attacks, and
South Korean warships staged exercises in the
Yellow Sea in a show of force that dramatized the
risks of more incidents.
President Lee,
demanding an apology from North Korea for the
Cheonan incident and the shelling of nearby
Yeonpyeong Island in November, in which four
people were killed, still has not lived down the
failure of South Korean forces to retaliate
decisively on either occasion.
One year
after it happened, South Koreans are still
frustrated by the debate on whether North Korea
was actually responsible for sinking the
Cheonan.
Doubts about who did it
have largely died down in the South in the face of
overwhelming, minutely documented investigation of
the wreckage, as made public, that shows the
vessel could only have been sunk by a torpedo
fired by a North Korean midget submarine. North
Korea, however goes on denying all the evidence as
"fabrication" while opposition South Korean
politicians still find reason to question the
circumstances if not the actual details of the
investigation.
Thus, it was that Park
Jie-won, once the right-hand man of the late Kim
Dae-jung, who initiated the "Sunshine" policy of
reconciliation with the North during his five
years as president from 1998 to 2003, called on
the government to "resolve suspicions" about what
really happened. The inference was not that North
Korea had not sunk the Cheonan, but that
perhaps the South Korean side had incited the
attack by its own maneuvers in those disputed
waters.
Lee somewhat querulously has been
blaming his critics for dividing South Koreans
when they need to unite in confrontation against
"the enemy". At a meeting of Blue House
secretaries, he was quoted as saying it was
"heart-wrenching" when "a year ago our public
opinion was divided in front of the enemy, which
is an assailant". Although lately few of Lee's
critics are denying North Korea's role, Lee found
it "more sad that among those who distorted facts
at that time in support of North Korea's claim, no
one has boldly confessed wrongdoing".
If
plot theories about America deliberately sinking
the Cheonan to galvanize Japanese support
for the need for US forces to stay on Okinawa have
died down, criticism of the Lee government is an
enduring phenomenon. It's an open question just
how he would respond, or how much support he would
get, if North Korea perpetrated another
"incident".
We might get an answer, for
instance, if the North made good on threats to
retaliate against launching of balloons bearing
nasty messages about the "Kim dynasty" or simply
news reports of protests in the Middle East. Or
North Korea could decide to stage an incident
around the time of the 99th anniversary of the
birth of Kim Jong-il's father, the Great Leader
Kim Il-sung, born on April 16, 1912.
North
Korea would have no problem, though, about
messages publicizing the attacks on Libya, which
the North has been denouncing regularly.
Suspicions that the Americans are plotting to
attack North Korea have been at the essence of
North Korean propaganda since the signing of the
armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953.
Gaddafi's acquiescence to demands to end
his own program for developing nuclear weapons,
and the price the North Koreans say he is now
paying, fortify what are widely suspected to be
their plans for a third underground nuclear test.
This time they're likely to want to try out a
warhead spun off their new 20-megawatt enriched
uranium reactor - more powerful probably than the
plutonium tests they conducted in October 2006 and
then in May 2009.
If South Korea still
seems divided and puzzled about what to do in the
event of another Cheonan or Yeonpyeong-type
episode, no one has any idea what to do if North
Korea tests another nuke - or a long-range missile
capable of carrying it to a distant target. North
Atlantic Treaty Organization nations may agree on
the need to snuff out Gaddafiism, but there's no
agreement at all on what to do about North Korea's
nuclear program.
No one is suggesting
bombing North Korea's nuclear complex at Yongbyon,
and no one wants to contemplate a war that would
surely involve China as the North's powerful ally.
Nor, for that matter, is there really much
interest, beneath the level of rhetoric and war
games, in stirring up a conflict by retaliating
for some isolated incident.
North Korea
may be right: its nuclear program does provide a
solid deterrent against any notion of doing
anything - even if North Korea isn't actually
going to explode one of those things for real.
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