<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile — Lots of talk about North Korea, but action plan from Israel

Lots of talk about North Korea, but action plan from Israel

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

By Donald Kirk

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — The full-dress White House display on April 24 of evidence of North Korea's role in Syria's nuclear program recalled the "axis of evil" theme that President George W Bush sounded in his state of the union speech of January 2002 in which he linked North Korea to Iran and Iraq.

Now it's North Korea and Syria — via perhaps Iran and Pakistan — in a program through which the White House claims North Korea provided not only the nuclear technology and materiel but also the missiles for delivering warheads to targets in the neighborhood, Israel in particular.

The White House, which spoke after being briefed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said the secret work on a nuclear reactor with Syria was "a dangerous and potentially destabilizing development for the world". The fact that Israel last September bombed the plant in Syria where North Korea is said to have been building a reactor similar to its own five-megawatt reactor at the Yongbyon complex north of Pyongyang adds yet another dimension to the confrontation over North Korea's nuclear program.

The ferocity with which Israel responded to the threat posed by a nuclear weapons program in the hands of one of its worst enemies contrasts with the reluctance of the U.S. to attack North Korea's nuclear facilities over years of off-again, on-again efforts to get the North to abandon the program.

Although the U.S. has repeatedly assured North Korea it has no intention of staging a "preemptive strike", as often alleged in statements from Pyongyang, Israel has set a precedent that hawkish U.S. strategists may not want to overlook.

In fact, the timing of the U.S. announcement suggests a move by administration hawks, led by President George W Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney, to hold North Korea to account after the State Department appeared inclined to let the North off with a face-saving memorandum that simply acknowledged "understanding" of US concerns.

The announcement came almost immediately after a State Department team had returned from negotiations in Pyongyang in which U.S. mid-level diplomats sought to persuade North Korea to sign off on the memo as a prelude to the U.S. dropping North Korea from the State Department's list of terrorist countries and lifting economic sanctions.

The team had arrived in Seoul and was giving briefings at the American Embassy and meeting with South Korean officials even as the White House was gearing up to offer videotaped evidence of the plant in Syria along with an elaborate statement describing what was allegedly going on.

The State Department team, led by Sung Kim, chief of the State Department's Korea desk and number two behind U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill on the nuclear issue, clearly won over the North Koreans with soft-line reassurances of a compromise deal.

The evidence lies not in anything Kim said when he got to Seoul, but in a surprisingly appreciative comment from a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman. As quoted by Pyongyang's Korea Central News Agency, the spokesman said "technical matters" were "winding up for implementation of the Oct. 3 agreement".

That was a reference to the deal reached at six-party talks last October in which North Korea agreed to disclose all its nuclear activities by the end of last year. North Korea has failed since then to come up with the list while denying the Syrian program and also anything to do with a program for developing nukes with enriched uranium.

The North Korean spokesman elaborated on that comment in pleasant verbiage that contrasted totally with the usual windy rhetoric from Pyongyang, saying negotiations proceeded in a "sincere and constructive manner" and "progress was made there".

Since North Korea has shown no inclination to acknowledge either its uranium program or support for Syria's nuclear activities, those remarks suggest that Kim during his trip worked out a formula for North Korea's nuclear envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, to nod in understanding of what the US has claimed while actually admitting nothing.

The fact that the White House rather than the State Department outlined the nuclear connection between Syria and North Korea indicated a rift between White House and State Department officials on confronting North Korea at this juncture.

One great question that emerged is whether Bush and South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak agreed on the need for disclosure of North Korea's relationship to the Syrian program when they met last week at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

Lee has upset North Korea since his inauguration two months ago by adopting a tough "pragmatic" policy that contrasts with the Sunshine policy initiated by Kim Dae-jung, when Kim was inaugurated 10 years ago in February 1998. Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, upset the US administration by advancing on the Sunshine policy, lavishing food and fertilizer on the North while demanding very little in return.

Lee, succeeding Roh, has called for "reciprocity" of whatever the North does as well as "verification" of any deal with the North. In return, North Korea's media have targeted Lee as a "traitor", "imposter" and "sycophant", among other gems.

Lee made plain to Bush that he was not excited about the compromise worked out by envoys Hill and Kim Kye-kwan when they met recently in Singapore. He got across his doubts by warning against a "temporary achievement" that would do little in the long run, and Bush responded that the U.S. would be sure North Korea was indeed coming clean on its activities and giving them up before concluding a real deal.

Lee appeared so delighted about the cordiality and courtesies extended by Bush at Camp David that it seems likely his happiness also reflected an understanding for the White House to publicize the Syrian program in a final bid for North Korean acknowledgement.

The White House briefing has two clear precedents.

One was the U.S. Treasury Department's decision in September 2005 to ban all institutions doing business with US institutions from also doing business with Banco Delta Asia, the obscure Macau bank through which North Korea was said to be passing stacks of US$100 bills, called "supernotes", allegedly counterfeited on a Swiss-made press in Pyongyang.

The Treasury announcement came just days after the six-nation statement of Sept. 19, 2005, in which the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas all agreed in principle on the North's abandoning its nukes in return for huge doses of aid. North Korea after the blacklisting refused to consider more six-party talks until the removal of Banco Delta Asia from the blacklist and the transfer from the bank of about $25 million in North Korean funds in an elaborate deal worked out by Hill.

The other precedent was the U.S. charge, made in October 2002, that North Korea was developing nukes with highly enriched uranium in a program entirely separate from that at Yongbyon. The reactor at Yongbyon, from which plutonium was produced for warheads, was shut down in 1994 after conclusion of the Geneva framework agreement under which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) posted permanent inspectors at Yongbyon to make sure the locks on the reactor facility were tightly sealed.

The U.S. charge about highly enriched uranium detonated the chain reaction in which IAEA inspectors were expelled at the end of 2002 and North Korea in early 2003 resumed producing warheads with plutonium at their core. North Korea by now has between six and 12 of them, according to US intelligence estimates.

The U.S. eventually backed off from the uranium claim, dropping the label "highly enriched uranium program" and calling it a "uranium enrichment program", a revision that meant the program was in a rudimentary non-production stage.

The sense is that North Korea has done much to develop nukes with uranium after importing from Pakistan a number of aluminum tubes that the U.S. charges were for centrifuges, but that North Korea says were for industrial use.

Kim Dae-Jung, in a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School, where he was a fellow in the early 1980s while exiled from South Korea, predicted that President Lee would eventually soften his stand toward North Korea.

He saw a parallel between Lee's strongly worded remarks and the outlook of Bush during his first term. "President Bush adopted the Sunshine policy," said Kim. "After six years, President Bush realized this was not working and negotiations began between the U.S. and North Korea."

Similarly, he observed, "President Lee is also making some changes. I realize he was arguing with my policy," said Kim, "but I think he will come to accept it."

The White House said it was still dealing with North Korea's Syrian adventure "through the six-party framework" and was "working with our partners to achieve the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" — the strong approach advocated by President Lee.

The timing of the White House briefing on the Syrian program raised the stakes. A South Korean spokesman said his government was "not surprised", and North Korea had to reveal its entire nuclear inventory and go along with a formula for verification — words not likely to please North Korea's Kim Jong-il.

Kim Dae-Jung, however, said Bush had decided to enter six-party negotiations "since the U.S. cannot wage another war". As a result of Bush's change in policy, he said, "the prospects seem quite bright".

   WorldTribune Home


<% Function googleColor(value, random) Dim colorArray colorArray = Split(value, ",") googleColor = colorArray(random Mod (UBound(colorArray) + 1)) End Function Function googleScreenRes() Dim screenRes, delimiter, resArray screenRes = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_UA_PIXELS") delimiter = "x" if IsEmpty(screenRes) Then screenRes = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_X_UP_DEVCAP_SCREENPIXELS") delimiter = "," end If resArray = Split(screenRes, delimiter, 2) if (UBound(resArray) + 1) = 2 Then googleScreenRes = "&u_w=" & resArray(0) & "&u_h=" & resArray(1) end If End Function Dim googleTime, googleDt, googleScheme, googleHost googleTime = DateDiff("s", "01/01/1970 00:00:00", Now()) googleDt = (1000 * googleTime) + Round(1000 * (Timer - Int(Timer))) googleScheme = "http://" if StrComp(Request.ServerVariables("HTTPS"), "on") = 0 Then googleScheme = "https://" googleHost = Server.URLEncode(googleScheme & Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST")) Dim googleAdUrl, googleAdOutput googleAdUrl = "http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?" &_ "ad_type=text_image" &_ "&channel=" &_ "&client=ca-mb-pub-9945337162717206" &_ "&dt=" & googleDt &_ "&format=mobile_single" &_ "&host=" & googleHost &_ "&ip=" & Server.URLEncode(Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR")) &_ "&markup=xhtml" &_ "&oe=utf8" &_ "&output=xhtml" &_ "&ref=" & Server.URLEncode(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")) &_ "&url=" & googleHost & Server.URLEncode(Request.ServerVariables("URL")) &_ "&useragent=" & Server.URLEncode(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT")) &_ googleScreenRes() Set googleAdOutput = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP") googleAdOutput.Open "GET", googleAdUrl, false googleAdOutput.Send Response.Write(googleAdOutput.responseText) %>