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Shame: Former U.S. president kow tows to an evil regime

Wednesday, August 5, 2009   E-Mail this story   Free Headline Alerts

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

It appears highly likely that another ignominious chapter in U.S. relations with North Korea has opened with President William Jefferson Clinton’s “mission” to rescue two captured young American female journalists. As the relief, cheers, and good wishes ring out, the reality of what has happened may become all too self evident.

At this early juncture the details surrounding the Clinton voyage to Pyongyang are not clear. They may never surface until long after the Obama Administration is history, given the already blatant lie from the White House that the trip had no official sanction. It fractures the credulity of even the most devoted partisan of this Administration that a former president of the United States of the president’s own party, the husband of the President’s secretary of state, and a still active political figure would have made such an expedition – given all the preparation necessary to complete it – without virtually total White House participation.

Again, the actual circumstances of much of the whole episode will now probably be further camouflaged. With the secretary of state – as well as the poor captive women – making a public apology for having wronged the North Koreans for supposedly voluntarily entering their territory, we may never get confirmation of a more likely story: that the young women were either kidnapped or inveigled by Pyongyang’s agents into a trap in their journalistic pursuit of details of the flight of pitiful North Koreans escaping into the pocket of their ethnic countrymen in northwest China.

But what is clear even at this early hour is that the North Korean Communists have again outmaneuvered the U.S. and their Japanese opponents and won an important victory in their attempt to keep alive one of the most vile regimes ever known.

Sick, and probably dying, Kim Jong-Il’s reign is coming to an inglorious end. He is trying to continue the dynastic succession of the only Communist kingdom ever with the poor prospects of all three of his sons as successors. There is every reason to believe that the generals who have long monopolized the country’s resources – to the extent of causing starvation for perhaps as many as two million of their countrymen in the mid-1990s – are restless. And the succession is obviously in trouble.

The kow-tow of a former American president coming to Pyongyang, with whatever took place in negotiations before the performance, is the kind of legitimacy the dying Kim needs desperately. Furthermore, it seems logical given the smoothness with which the whole procedure took place that Washington has made additional concessions, perhaps even extended aid at a time when North Korea always in perilous economic straits, is facing starvation again, when a toughened South Korean Administration is refusing to be browbeaten and blackmailed to help keep it alive.

One can only believe that Kim has had an enormous breakthrough in propaganda if not a strategic victory which he will use against domestic enemies and rivals.

The truth is that there has never been any choice for U.S. policy but regime change in North Korea.

Is it necessary to recall that the North Korean Communist state was created in infamy, an imposition by Stalin at the end of World War II, a part of the miscalculation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Soviet aid would be needed to defeat Japan. Soviet propagandists dressed up former Soviet Korean military as the anti-Japanese nationalists during the half century of Tokyo’s attempted colonization and installed them as puppets in their occupation zone. But their Korean Communist students were clever and mastered the art of playing Moscow against a powerful Chinese Communist neighbor once it was installed next door in 1949. Then came the Korean War when Stalin again took the Americans at what he thought was their word and naivete, accepting American public statements that ruled the Korean peninsular outside the U.S.’ perimeter of security in northeast Asia.

During the decades since the failure of the U.S. to obtain a clearcut victory in the Korean War despite some 57,000 killed, the Pyongyang regime has attempted every act of aggression and perfidy within their capabilities against both the South Koreans and their American allies. The kidnapping and holding of innocent Japanese villagers for supposed use in intelligence training and activities is only part of the story of a regime so bizarre as to be a joke were it not so dangerous for its neighbors and world peace generally. But it is a regime that has repeatedly outwitted its enemies, not least by playing one against another.

It was, after all, during the Clinton Administration’s years that it became increasingly obvious that by diverting all its resources – and through the help of the Soviets and the Chinese bidding for influence – North Korea had become the world’s principal proliferator of weapons of mass destruction to pariah regimes everywhere. The parallels of the present Clinton mission to Pyongyang with then ex-president Jimmy Carter’s visit which inaugurated a phony negotiation for nuclear disarmament are all too vivid.

It may well turn out that Beijing, always caught between its fear of an implosion in North Korea and a reunited, strong, independent and democratic Korea, and its attempt to keep Little Brother under control, helped facilitate the Clinton visit. It was the least the Chinese could do after promising for years as part of its all critical relationship with Washington to oppose North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. But Beijing, too, is conflicted in relationship with Korea and probably can do more than nibble around the edges of the problem – especially given the tendentiousness of the Pyongyang regime at the moment. It dare not use its enormous leverage as the principal prop with energy and food for the Pyongyang regime, lest it pull down the whole house of cards.

Promises of Pyongyang or of Beijing to bring North Korea back to the Six Party negotiating table are virtually meaningless. China is a fencesitter, Russia an onlooker, and the U.S. and Japan stymied. The negotiations without a framework or, indeed, a goal which either side accepts, only permits Pyongyang to continue to use the wait to move ahead with its nuclear and missiles development – and to try, evermore, to court the rogue regimes around the world for sales.

President George W. Bush was perfectly correct when he named Pyongyang as part of an axis of evil, working against world peace and stability. Furthermore, it is also perfectly clear that having lost the race – ironic that it was once thought that North Korea was winning it in the 1960s and 70s – with its Siamese twin, South Korea, the Pyongyang regime as it is constituted has no other strategy than its continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction blackmail and proliferation of armaments to other regimes outside the pale of civilized intercourse. Any move to follow a program of U.S./Japanese/Chinese assisted liberalization and development of its economy would collapse a regime which survives only on shortages, fear and intimidation. Furthermore, Pyongyang relies for its fragile continued economic existence on the sale of these weapons wherever it can market them – even to other bankrupt states such as Burma [Myanmar] where Beijing’s writ is supposed to run paramount.

If the world needed any additional proof of the relations of this hideous regime with the rest of the world, it came when Special Emissary Christopher Hill [now alas! Managing the U.S. interests in Baghdad] – the latest in the series of American negotiators who seem to loose their common sense in dealing with Pyongyang – announced a new breakthrough in negotiations as the Israelis were bombing a North Korean-Iranian effort to build a nuclear potential in their ally Syria.

What the Obama Administration has promised in order to rescue the two poor victims of this affair may not be apparent for weeks, months, or years. But while we may all take comfort and rejoice in the release and rescue of two young innocents from the nightmare of the North Korean prison world, a scene that matches in every way the worst of the Nazi and Soviet gulags, we can take no comfort in its implications.

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