The Death of an Alliance, Part X
The first item in today’s installment has to do with an alleged “stealth” reduction in the Korean military presence in Iraq from 3,700 to 3,200. I’m not sure how strong my reaction is here– first, because I was under the impression that there were only 3,000 Korean troops there, so 3,200 represents a net gain of one company over my own expectations. Second and more importantly, the military value of the Korean contingent was already negligible, at least according to this report, so nothing ventured means nothing lost. Indeed, the troops were sent to Irbil, the quietest, most stable Kurdish area in Iraq, and hunkered down inside their walled fortress of a compound, far from the fighting.
At the risk of obscuring this point, I want to repeat it here: every member of the Zaitun brigade volunteered to go there. The American people owe each one of those volunteers their heartfelt appreciation. If only Roh Moo-Hyun’s government had a fraction of their courage.
Still, Roh had used the Iraq deployment for its own cynical political purposes: to attempt to extract concessions from the Bush administration on North Korea; and to use the deployment as a useful shield from criticism that the U.S.-Korea alliance is crumbling–which it is, Zaitun brigade or not. Just read this:
According to the U.S. sources, the U.S. central command asked the Korean military in March why the troops [rotated out when their tours ended] hadn’t been replaced. The explanation given was that the troop contingent had been reorganized because some of its military installations had been consolidated. . . . The troop reduction makes Korea the country with the fourth-largest military presence in Iraq, after the United States, Britain and Italy. . . . Gvernment sources in Seoul last month said Korean military leaders had recommended a reduction in the troop presence in Iraq. These sources said the Roh Moo-hyun administration had seized on the idea as a way of signaling its dissatisfaction with the United States over what Seoul perceives as its “favoritism” toward Japan.
There is really only one explanation for this. Scrape off all that guano and Tokdo must be made of solid gold. What other rational explanation could there be for such a case of diplomatic self-immolation?
Enter Chris Hill, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, into the bizarro-world of South Korean academia, which is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish from North Korean academia–by its own admission, yet. In what must have been a weak moment, Hill agreed to attempt reason with Korean “activists.” The Chosun Ilbo informs us of the logical baseline we’re dealing with:
[Hill] threw himself into a debate with civic groups vociferous in their criticism of the U.S. The Civil Network for a Peaceful Korea (CNPK), which sponsored the debate held at the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in Seoul, has criticized the U.S. Forces in Korea since 1999. The four activists sitting on the panel declared they would “speak from a pro-North Korean position” on the North Korean nuclear dispute. “If you can convince us, you’ll be able to make progress in your negotiations with North Korea,” they told the ambassador, who is also Washington’s point man in six-party nuclear disarmament talks. “For Ambassador Hill, the debate was like a mock exam,” CNPK chairman Chung Wook-sik said.
If you don’t recognize Chung Woon-Sik’s name, then perhaps this masterwork will refresh your memory: Two Koreas Ensnared in U.S. Nuclear Trap. Chung is a regular “columnist” over at OhMyNews (. Chung is also linked with the “Korea Solidarity Committee,” a U.S.-based organization of North Korean apologists. Nice of him to admit that he’s pro-North Korean, by the way, since it saves me the trouble, unless he meant “pro-North Korean position” in the strictly hypothetical sense. Something tells me that no method acting was necessary.
The futility of the exercise ought to have been pretty apparent right away.
As soon as Hill said he did not understand why North Korea was refusing to rejoin the six-party talks, the panel shot back, “You really don’t know?” They brought up such matters as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s labeling North Korea an “outpost of tyranny” and the U.S.’ North Korean Human Rights Act — all evidence, they said, of hostile U.S. policy.
It could all have come straight from the Rodong Sinmun. Hill answered as well as could be expected under the circumstances:
[Hill] said that when it came to “hostile policy,” North Korea was “gold medal material.” “Can you really say that North Korea isn’t an outpost of tyranny?,” he added. “Look at how many planes fly in and out of North Korea a day. Is there another nation in the world as closed as North Korea?”
. . . .
“Doesn’t the level of tension increase when North Korean human rights are discussed?” asked Kim Nak-jung, who once spent time in prison on charges of being a North Korean spy. Hill responded by pointing out that in the U.S. neither the right nor left saw human rights as a political choice. He expressed hope South Korea would see it the same way, and said that being afraid to discuss human rights in North Korea did not help relieve tensions on the peninsula.
The Joongang Ilbo continues:
I believe North Korea needs to focus on the seriousness of this issue and not on their sense of whether they are being treated with the correct amount of politeness,” he said. Referring to harsh rhetoric coming from Pyongyang over the last several weeks, Mr. Hill said, “I do feel it is worthwhile at times to read some of the things they regularly say in official announcements about my country. When it comes to a hostile policy, they truly have to give themselves a gold medal in this area.”
. . . .
“We are prepared to have a give and take with North Korea,” Mr. Hill said. “But we do it at the table and not through press announcements. To make gestures in order to bring someone back to the table is simply a recipe for encouraging that party to leave the table again in order to achieve more gestures.”
My personal favorite nominee for that gold medal, btw.
A side note is appropriate. Kim Nak-Jung was convicted based partly on his membership in the South Korea Workers’ Party. According to this Amnesty bulletin, Kim met with North Korean officials before his 1992 conviction, although the report asserts there is no evidence that he actually passed on state secrets. This Kimsoft report (dubious source alert!) claims that Kim was on a list of North Korean operatives carried south by Hwang Jang-Yop when he defected in 1997. To me, it doesn’t add up to proof of espionage beyond a reasonable doubt, especially given my own low opinion of the Korean criminal court system. Yet there is more than sufficient proof of where the man’s sympathies lay.
So would, say, Matt Hale be considered a worthy representative of a large bloc of American public opinion and trotted out to harangue the Belgian ambassador? This is the state Korea has reached. Here, Holocaust deniers, defenders, and apologists are shunned fringe figures. In Korea, they’re cogniscienti, influential columnists, respected academics, and kingmakers.
Hill seems to have gotten in over his head when he commented on the Washington Post’s dubious allegation that the administration lied about A.Q. Khan’s role as middeleman in North Korean uranium sales to Libya, in response to this question:
“The U.S. said the material was from North Korea, but didn’t the U.S. pick and choose the intelligence or simply fabricate it?”
At which point, Hill admitted fabricating it, right? What idiots.
At the risk of mud-wrestling a pig, let me just state that if you really think there’s still much question that North Korea was the source of the UO6, you haven’t followed the links. Both Sanger’s (NYT) and Kessler’s (WaPo) sources seem more or less in agreement on that now.
But what of North Korea’s knowledge of the destination? A better informed questioner might have found something worth asking about here. Until now, the administration had a pretty good story–that it didn’t really know whether North Korea knew of the final destination, that it said as much to its “allies,” and that anyone selling nuclear material on the black market presents an unacceptable risk, period. Hill’s answer yesterday went a whole lot further. Joongang Ilbo:
“We do have evidence that what arrived in Libya was actually of North Korean origin . . . . My understanding is that we believe that it was brokered through Pakistan with the knowledge that it would end up in Libya.”
What changed? As of February 9th, David Sanger’s (NYT) sources in the administration said they didn’t know what North Korea knew of the final destination. As of March 24, the administration considered the question irrelevant. It certainly looks contradictory and frankly, a whole lot more troubling than the Washington Post’s story, given the current environment.
So what is the evidence of North Korea’s intent–which is a discussion we never had to have anyway? I mean, which one justifies calling the cops? Your neighbor selling loaded guns to (a) crack dealers; (b) preschoolers; (c) registered sex offenders; or (d) a troop of feral Howler Monkeys? The answer is all of the above, you moron! But back to my point. There is some evidence of suspicious money transfers from Libya to North Korea, according to David Sanger’s report in last week’s New York Times, discussed here:
In interviews this week, administration officials and foreign diplomats disclosed that Libyan officials had also surrendered financial ledgers to the United States that provide a guide to the front companies involved in the nuclear network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist. One large payment, American officials contend, was directed to North Korea, presumably for the uranium hexafluoride that arrived in Tripoli in 2001. But American and foreign officials who have seen the financial documents or been briefed on them say they do not prove a direct payment from Libya to the North Korean government.
Lots of uncertainties as well as some questions. Is this information really fresh, and if not, are we being spun or is there disagreement about the evidence? And how was the evidence regarding North Korea’s intent to sell to Libya characterized in the briefings to China and South Korea? Sanger, who is no fan of Bush, doesn’t believe it meets the “smoking gun” standard, although he probably said that about Robert Blake, too (which would make him right and me wrong). And why are we having this argument anyway? Howler Monkeys with loaded guns, man! A.Q. Khan!
I wasn’t privy to the briefings, but I can only hope that the administration was up-front about the unknowns, whatever they may be. Some quick clarification might be called for. Intelligence is never an exact science when you’re confronting the deepest secrets of secret states. Still, you have to wonder why Chris Hill is saying things like this given the obvious need for the administration to get its story straight on anything related to WMD these days.
If the Washington Post had waited a week, it might have had something to actually write about. Ironic, no?
Finally, here’s Chris Hill on food aid, via the Korea Herald:
Our food assistance to North Korea does not depend on the progress of the six-party talks. Our conditions for food aid to North Korea are three: first, we need to determine the need for the food aid in North Korea; second, we need to determine competing needs elsewhere, in Africa and etcetera; and three, we need to look at our ability to ensure that the food aid gets to the people that need it.
Those neocons at Medicins San Frontieres had already told us that much:
Even population groups such as children, pregnant women, and the elderly, who are specifically targeted for assistance by the United Nations World Food Program, are being denied food aid.
. . . and this:
North Korean refugees across the Chinese border spoke of widespread famine, and reported that the authorities had distributed international aid according to social position and party loyalty.
But of course, North Korea no longer needs food aid. And that will never be a scandal in the newsrooms of America, will it?
This is an updated post.