BY IGGY KIM
The United States has created a real mess for itself in Korea. Washington's strategy of incessantly stirring up confrontation would be less risky if it wasn't also accompanied by a doctrine of permanent, global, pre-emptive war: For the logic of preemption leaves very little room for a backdown by the aggressor while, at the same time, heightening the fears of those under threat.
This was shown by the talks in Beijing between the US and North Korea, which collapsed in a heap after only one day on April 25. Pyongyang not only stuck to what it has been insisting all along — that the US end its threats against North Korea — but it also hardened its resolve, in the wake of the mass destruction of Iraq, to defend itself. The US, stuck in a pre-emptive posture, is now talking up more threats.
But imagine this. Sick of the grinding tension, South Korea defies Washington and resumes its "sunshine policy" towards North Korea. It sees this as the best way to pick up its flagging economy and bring Pyongyang in from the cold. Assured by this, South Korean big business steps up massive investments in North Korea. This, in turn, reassures Japanese and Europeans investors to do the same.
As a result, Pyongyang is able to get around — for the time being — Washington's veto of North Korea's membership of international financial institutions. At the same time, Pyongyang provides the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with evidence that it has three nuclear warheads, as previously rumoured, but refuses to decommission them. Instead, Pyongyang signs an agreement with Seoul to shelve the production of more nuclear bombs.
The US reacts by further demonising and threatening North Korea. Seoul responds by declaring support for Pyongyang's right to possess a nuclear deterrent against US threats.
Such a dramatic move emboldens a spontaneous mass upsurge of South Koreans demanding a full and immediate withdrawal of the 37,000 US troops currently stationed in Korea. The protests grow by the day in towns and cities throughout the country. US bases and military personnel are physically attacked. Strike actions erupt and spread quickly.
This upsurge turns on the South Korean government and demands that Seoul abolish the Status of Forces Agreement and immediately halt all services to US bases. The strike spreads to South Korean civilian and military personnel employed at the bases. Seoul buckles to the demands. The US is forced to withdraw, ending a half century of military occupation.
The two Korean states forge ahead with relations and finally establish an "interim confederation" as a step to full reunification. North Korea follows the Chinese path and gradually restores capitalism. Beijing and Moscow welcome these developments.
This shift in the balance of power in northeast Asia provokes intense debate in Japanese ruling circles. Sensing US weakness and dissatisfied with Washington's continued disregard for its economic interests, the Japanese establishment begins calling for the withdrawal of the 47,000 US troops stationed in Japan and for an independent military policy, including a nuclear capability directed against China, Russia and confederal Korea.
Ishihara Shintaro, the governor of Tokyo and one of Japan's most popular politicians, runs for prime minister. Shintaro once told Newsweek that the way to deal with Pyongyang is to declare war and called on the Japanese military to be ready to crush the Chinese and Koreans. Shintaro narrowly fails in his bid as the keiretsu conglomerates and doken kokka ("construction state", a crony system of public contract deals) seek to protect their investment interests in Korea.
Nevertheless, the political climate has shifted decisively to the right and the moderate that is elected prime minister is pressed to go ahead with nuclear weapons development and a revision of the peace constitution. Emboldened, Shintaro successfully leads the ultra-right in a push to get US troops out of Japan.
Such a scenario is Washington's worst nightmare. Maintaining a "security" threat in north-east Asia is crucial to maintaining Japan's status as a military protectorate of the US, thus giving Washington political leverage over the Japanese ruling class' international political and economic policies.
As an external power without any territory in the region, the only way the US military can justify its military presence in Korea and Japan is to constantly invent and stoke a monstrous threat. Before 1991, the Washington-Tokyo-Seoul axis was seen as a legitimate counter to the Soviet "threat". But since the latter's collapse, the US has had to seize on North Korea's nuclear energy program to whip up a frenzy of demonisation and fear-mongering, surpassed only by the deceit perpetrated against Iraq.
Shortly after the 1991 Gulf War, the then head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, told reporters that if Pyongyang had "missed Desert Storm, this is a chance to catch a rerun".
Little known, though, is the fact that North Korea's nuclear energy program goes back to the 1960s, with the Yongbyon reactor having been built in 1980. Yet, there was not a murmur of protest from the US until 1991. The so-called "nuclear crisis" was completely fabricated by the US — North Korea had done nothing different or hostile since 1980.
In fact, Pyongyang responded to the US frenzy by trying to reassure the world. In 1992, it signed a pact with Seoul to work towards denuclearising the peninsula. Between May 1992 and February 1993 the IAEA was allowed to conduct six formal inspections of the Yongbyon facility.
The US response? In March 1993, General Lee Butler, head of Strategic Command (responsible for Washington's nuclear arsenal), announced plans to retarget towards North Korea some of the nuclear missiles that had formerly been aimed at the Soviet Union. In the same month, US and South Korean forces went ahead with the controversial Team Spirit military exercises that simulated the deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 and B-1B bombers, several warships carrying cruise missiles and a nuclear battlefield scenario.
Alarmed at this, Pyongyang pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This then triggered the crisis that the Clinton administration eventually resolved through the 1994 Agreed Framework. But from the moment of signing, the US imposed a go-slow on the implementation of the three key points of its side of the deal: normalisation of diplomatic and economic relations, two light water reactors for energy production and a guarantee that the US would not threaten or use nuclear weapons against North Korea. The only steps taken were the partial lifting of economic sanctions in June 2000 and shipments of fuel oil. For its part, North Korea rejoined the NPT.
If Pyongyang has now begun to producing nuclear weapons (still unconfirmed) then it has done so only after intense US provocation. North Korea is the only non-nuclear country that has faced the threat of nuclear annihilation for nearly half a century, ever since US President Dwight Eisenhower introduced nuclear cannons into South Korea in 1958. And yet, the NPT, which George Bush alleges Pyongyang has breached, contains provisions for any country threatened by nuclear weapons to develop its own deterrent force.
Well before any of this "crisis" was conjured up by Washington's war hawks, North Korea was forced to drastically revise its relations with the rest of the world by the collapse of the Soviet Union and a series of terrible natural disasters. A major breakthrough came in the early 1990s when the fall of military rule in South Korea opened up the beginnings of rapprochement and economic ties between the two Korean states.
This inter-Korean detente reached a new level at the June 2000 inter-Korean summit, after which Pyongyang opened up diplomatic relations with Australia, some European Union countries and others in quick succession. There was also a flurry of new South Korean investments into North Korea.
The inter-Korean detente was sabotaged by the new Bush administration within a few months of its taking office. When South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung met with Bush in March 2001, Bush attacked the North Korean regime as untrustworthy and later threw in personal insults against the north's leader, Kim Jong-Il.
What threatens US dominance in north-east Asia is not just the possibility of a nuclear-armed North Korea, but any independent political initiative by the Koreans, that is, the normalisation of inter-Korean relations and eventual reunification.
Such initiatives threaten to remove any justification for the US military presence on the peninsula. In short, the roots of the US offensive against Pyongyang are political, not military.
That's why, for the Korean people, the fundamental solution to this US-invented crisis cannot be a military one but a strategy of deepening and popularising inter-Korean relations, to consolidate and escalate mass anti-imperialist opposition to US warmongering throughout the peninsula. This is also likely to assist a reunification that serves the needs and interests of Korean working people, rather than those of South Korean big business.
From Green Left Weekly, May 7, 2003.
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