The Reaper Comes for Cho Myong Rok

Top North Korean military official Jo Myong Rok, a longtime confidant of leader Kim Jong Il who traveled to Washington in 2000 on a then-unprecedented goodwill mission, has died. He was 82. Jo, who was vice marshal of the Korean People’s Army and held the No. 2 post on the powerful National Defense Commission behind Kim, died Saturday of heart disease, the official Korean Central News Agency reported from Pyongyang. [AP, Hyun Jin Kim]

Other experienced Asia hands will tell you that this “unprecedented goodwill mission” could also be seen as a calculated snub of President Clinton, by which Kim Jong Il showed his higher “place” by sending a lower-ranking official to meet with him as an apparent equal, afforded a status many heads of state don’t get. The matter of just who was showing the good will here is only the first inaccuracy in the AP’s report.

It was later that day, at a banquet in his honor hosted by Albright, that Jo invited the secretary of state to visit Pyongyang, and, in her return toast, Albright accepted. However, the reconciliatory mood between the wartime foes shifted dramatically after former President George W. Bush took office, taking a tougher line against North Korea. Relations have also been strained over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and Pyongyang and Washington still do not have formal diplomatic ties.

But the report’s description of the meeting’s diplomatic context is skewed and riddled with half-truths. In fact, the meeting came as North Korea’s cheating on the first Agreed Framework became so impossible for even President Clinton to deny that he couldn’t certify to the Congress that North Korea was in compliance with the agreement. Consequently, Congress wouldn’t appropriate funds to finish building the light water reactors that were also part of the agreement. In due course, this became a suitable excuse for North Korea to stop even pretending to abide by the agreement, though the North Korean custom is to repudiate diplomatic agreements early in American presidencies and then string each administration along for its full duration.

Reading the AP report and knowing little else, you could be forgiven for thinking we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now if only we’d had superior Manbearpig Awareness in 2000. But there’s a hole in this narrative that can be measured in kilotons. By 2007, a weary President Bush finally gave in and signed the second Agreed Framework. It wasn’t much different from Clinton’s deal, and the results weren’t much different, either. Two years later, four months after President Obama’s inauguration, and five months after Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize, North Korea took us right back at Square Zero, though it now says it wants to return to the six-party talks for the right price. Today, the uranium enrichment program that supporters of Clinton’s North Korea policy spent a decade in denial about is progressing as fast as the centrifuges can spin.

Anyway, as a small public service, I thought I’d step in to mention what Hyun Jin Kim didn’t think you really needed to know. Granted, I don’t necessarily expect the wire service that gave us Charles J. Hanley to describe the predictable sequence of North Korea’s playbook in an obit for some bloody-handed apparatchik, but wouldn’t the AP have written a more accurate report if it didn’t feel compelled to shoehorn in so many excess adjectives and half-truths?

Hat tip: Theresa