Condi Rice, Touring Asia, Comments on North Korea

Years ago, the Tango Security Force was one of my main sources of business as a JAG prosecutor. Today, Condi Rice visited the place and spoke some words that the New York Times apparently construed as harsh. I’ve never seen a paper make so many characterizations of a statement without quoting the allegedly significant statements. I’ll try to dig them up as soon as State actually publishes them.

I liked this part: “Even China must eventually embrace some form of open, genuinely representative government.”

It was at least mildly interesting that Condi headed straight for C.P. Tango without stopping to see any South Korean officials first. The requirements of the exercise might have affected that, but I suppose it’s possible that we’ve pretty much dropped the pretense that all is well with The Great ROK-U.S. Alliance.

If you’re interested in reading something that Condi really said, here are some excerpts from her remarks from Japan yesterday:

Our security is jeopardized, too, by North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions. The Six-Party Talks offer the best framework for dealing with this problem. This is where the North Korean government can find the respect it desires and acquire the assistance it needs, if it is willing to make a strategic choice.

No one denies that North Korea is a sovereign state. [Actually, I just did.] We have said repeatedly that we have no intention of attacking or invading North Korea. With others in the Six-Party Talks, we are prepared to offer multilateral security assurances to North Korea in the context of ending its nuclear program. We have offered to examine North Korea’s energy needs. North Korea knows all of this.

But the United States and other democratic societies will not be silent about the plight of the North Korean people, about the nature of the North Korean regime, about that regime’s abduction of innocent civilians of peaceful neighboring countries, and about the threat that a nuclear-armed North Korea poses to the entire region.

Let me put it plainly: North Korea should return to the Six-Party Talks immediately, if it is serious about exploring the path forward that we and the other parties have proposed.

China has, to be sure, played an important role in the Six-Party talks. President Bush and President Hu Jintao have agreed that the existence of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula is unacceptable. We have made diplomatic common cause in pursuit of this objective. But North Korea has rejected the call of its neighbors, and in the face of that rejection, all parties must magnify their efforts to convince North Korea that the time has come for a strategic decision.

China has a particularly important opportunity and responsibility here, and I will soon be discussing with Beijing how the United States and China can advance our common interests on this, as well as on other issues.

. . . .

We tried direct negotiations with North Korea once before. In 1994, we had the Agreed Framework. And North Korea was pursuing a nuclear weapon outside of the Agreed Framework. And I think we learned a lesson from that. And at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. I don’t mean to try and go back and challenge the history here.

But we learned a lesson, and that is when North Korea can separate its neighbors and have a dialogue with China about its nuclear program and a dialogue with Japan about its nuclear program and a dialogue with the United States about it, then it can play one off against the other and it doesn’t have to answer the central question, “when are you going to get rid of your nuclear weapons programs? No one will accept you fully into the international system until you do.”

Now we have in the Six-Party Talks, and I understand that people think that it sometimes is moving slowly. We would like it to move more quickly. We would like North Korea to be at the table today. But what we have going for us in the Six Party-Talks is that all of North Korea’s neighbors are saying the same thing to North Korea in the same forum with the same requirement, the same demand of North Korea. And I think this is enormously important.

It is also important because we bring different incentives and different leverage to the table in dealing with North Korea, each of us. And I believe we can do a better job, all of us, of mobilizing our efforts, vis-à-vis North Korea, although I would be the first to admit that it is not easy to deal with North Korea. When I go to China, I look forward to talking to the Chinese about what diplomacy they may be able to engage in to bring North Korea back to the talks and back to the talks in a spirit of actually trying to resolve the difficulties.

. . . .

I don’t know whether North Korea is really prepared to do what it needs to do to find a more appropriate place in the international community of states. I do know that currently its behavior seems to be instead that it threatens and it decides to leave the talks and it declares itself a nuclear weapons state, and it doesn’t come to negotiate in a way that suggests that it can make a strategic choice which would give, if it were willing to make that strategic choice to put aside its nuclear weapons ambitions and to verify and dismantle its nuclear programs, it would open up different paths for North Korea. But it really is incumbent on North Korea to show that it is prepared to do that.

Let me be very clear. The United States remains committed to a diplomatic solution to this problem. We believe that we can resolve it diplomatically. Of course, we are able to deter any North Korean aggression through our alliance with the Republic of Korea, with our own forces in the region. But no one wants to invade or attack North Korea. We would like to see peace on the Korean Peninsula and we would like to see a non-nuclear North Korea, because that’s the only way you’re going to get true peace on the Korean Peninsula.

There are a lot of other issues with North Korea that also would need to be resolved. We have said that the Japanese abductee issue must be resolved. There are missile issues with North Korea, conventional weapons issues. And there is also the matter of the fate of the North Korean people. I mean, there may be few people in the world who live in such dire circumstances. And we, and I know Japan, has tried through humanitarian assistance to try to help these people who are in desperate, desperate need. But if the North Korean government were willing to forgo its nuclear ambitions, perhaps it too could find a path to do something for these long-suffering people who deserve to live better than they do and who, frankly, deserve a chance also at greater freedom.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing here.

I’d like the boys at the New York Times to know that it took me about six minutes to find and post what the woman actually said. Nice going, guys.