Archive for December, 2007
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 30, 2007 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Korean Politics, Appeasement, Money Laundering
Generally, I agree with Robert Koehler that Lee Myung Bak’s landslide victory was anything but a mandate for a better, more moral North Korea policy. It will put less irrational people in charge, but the policy will not be the improvement that Nicholas Eberstadt hopes for unless Kim Jong Il gets seriously on the wrong side of Lee Myung-Bak’s temper. Why? First, the election was all about money. Second, Lee Myung Bak is all about money. Third, South Korean voters … well, they care a lot more about money than they care about a few million dead North Koreans. They may want a bit more return for the money they send to North Korea, but there’s no evidence of a fundamental shift away from their deeply ethnocentric and anti-American world view. Another nation may have more decisively failed such a great test of morality and statesmanship, but I can’t think of a better example than South Korea’s last decade.
Nor has the prognosis for U.S.-Korea relations changed overnight. The fervor of their anti-Americanism may have waned recently, though there are reasons to question the limited evidence for that. The fervor of South Korea’s anti-Americanism cooled after the ugly days of the late 1980’s, too. A decade later, during my four-year tour in Korea, I watched it come back with a vengeance. Lee will be able to briefly arrest the decay in the U.S.-Korea alliance, but any improvement will be mostly confined to the cocktail party circuit unless Lee takes a persuasive case for the alliance to the people (he won’t).
It’s natural for Americans to see in Lee what they want to see and to use the occasion of his election to make the case for policies they themselves favor. I can abide most of that just fine, up to the point where they misstate facts that any “expert” ought to have known:
[T]here will no doubt be some in Washington who will see a conservative victory as an opportunity to once again revert to the more confrontational (and largely ineffective) policies of the past; this would be a huge mistake.” [Korea Times, Ralph Cossa]
Cossa isn’t just wrong once here. First, to say this is to imply that the current policy of the Bush Administration is working, at least better than last year’s. Cossa didn’t exactly write that piece while serving on a sequestered jury; he appears to recognize that North Korea is not only missing its year-end deadline to declare its nuclear programs, it’s halting the much-vaunted “disablement” of the worn-out wreck of a reactor at Yongbyon. The State Department will try to blunt the clarity of North Korea’s breach by turning it into the next extended negotiation. If that fools you, you want to be fooled.
Cossa makes his clearest error when he calls the “confrontational … policies of the past” “largely ineffective.” If he has any idea what he’s talking about there, his piece doesn’t reveal it. He really ought to read what Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard had to say about that:
We think we know why North Korea is softening, or at least appears to be. We’ve been working on an in-depth profile of the North Korean economy, and it is in serious trouble. The North Korean economy had been in weak but steady recovery since 1999, growing about 15 percent over the next six years despite its isolation and increasing backwardness. Then came a new setback. Last year the national income contracted by 1.1 percent, according to the South Korean government. Our research suggests the main reason for the downturn was that U.S.-led sanctions hit harder than most people realize. Now more than ever, North Korea needs the financial benefits of a nuclear deal to survive.
The sanctions struck a feeble economy from many sides. The United States led actions to shut down North Korea’s missile trade, and put the squeeze on its illicit smuggling and counterfeiting revenue. The black-market rate on North Korea’s currency plummeted after a small bank in Macau, central to the North’s money-laundering activities, was shut down. Japan effectively cut off a heavy flow of remittances to Pyongyang from North Koreans in Japan. We estimate that together with legal arms sales, revenue from contraband—including the production and trafficking of drugs, counterfeit cigarettes, smuggling of liquor and endangered-species parts, to name a few—may have accounted for as much as half of North Korea’s exports in the late 1990s but has fallen to roughly 15 percent in recent years due to sanctions. In the meantime, aid now finances 40 percent of imports. There are benefits to playing nice in the nuclear talks—or pretending to. [Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, Newsweek]
Noland and Haggard are probably America’s two foremost experts on the North Korean economy, and while one is entitled to disagree with their views — I’ve done so directly — no expert worth his salt throws out a conclusion like Cossa’s without dealing with a wealth of evidence to the contrary. That evidence begins with the conclusions of Noland and Haggard, but doesn’t stop there:
By December of 2005, North Korean front companies, with no means to recoup their often-illegal earnings, began fleeing Macau en masse. Many reportedly went to the Chinese mainland. The following February, Kim Jong Il reportedly told Chinese President Hu Jintao that he feared the collapse of his government. The Asian Wall Street Journal reported that Treasury’s action had “dealt a severe blow to the secretive country,” “dried up its financial system,” and “brought foreign trade virtually to an end.”
In April, Treasury claimed that the designation of Banco Delta was having a “snowballing … avalanche effect” on North Korea as other banks sought to cut their ties, creating “huge pressure” on the regime. Treasury pursued North Korea’s assets to banks in Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, and elsewhere. Banks in all of these countries also closed or blocked North Korean accounts. Pressure mounted. Kim Jong Il even began selling off his nation’s gold reserves, much of it mined in his slave labor camps, particularly Camp 15 (Yodok) and Camp 77 (Dancheon). Still, North Korea had effectively lost most of its access to international finance. [Gordon Cucullu and Joshua Stanton, Front Page Magazine]
What Cossa and other critics would be better advised to attack is what the Bush Administration’s policy was from 2001 to mid-2005: a lot of confrontational rhetoric in tandem with endless and pointless talks, without any actual confrontational policy to back it and attach tangible consequences to North Korea’s behavior. That policy didn’t work; in fact, it would be too generous to describe it as a policy at all.
The argument that Cossa seems to make instead plows through a raft of logical flaws. First, if confrontation doesn’t work, why has it worked so damned well for Kim Jong Il? Second, how does the failure of our negotiators to take advantage of highly effective financial pressure weaken the case that that pressure was working? Third, why is “confrontational” always judged on North Korea’s terms — usually meaning someone missed an extortion payment? Fourth, after all of our years of experience with North Korea, when has it ever been possible to deal with North Korea (if that’s really possible at all) by applying moral suasion alone, without the assistance of any external pressure? Cossa is really saying that diplomacy alone can disarm people who think like the North Koreans. Any bail bondman, prison guard, bookie, or crack whore knows better.
Now imagine how well our financial pressure might have worked if we had applied it for more than a mere year and a half, and if it had been loosed on Kaesong, Kumgang, and other massive subsidies China and South Korea (our supposed ally) used to prop up Kim Jong Il’s palace economy and undermine the effectiveness of our pressure. For the first time ever, Kim Jong Il might have been forced to relinquish some of his control to preserve his misrule. Naturally, we had to abandon this policy because it worked. This is Washington, and that’s our tradition.
A better, wiser, and more morally defensible approach to North Korea will not happen in the absence of leadership, and forecasts call for an extended absence of that. Bush will not lead South Korea, Japan, and other nations in confrontational directions they would prefer not to go, and Lee Myung-Bak will not lead South Koreans in confrontational directions they would prefer not to go. Therefore, we will be rudderless, and Kim Jong Il’s regime will have to collapse on its own. The only question is how many people will be doomed in the meantime.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 30, 2007 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Appeasement, Human Rights, U.S. Politics
Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of our age’s most compelling thinkers and one of the English language’s best writers. I disagree with him about plenty of things; who could say otherwise? Hitchens’s greatest logical strength is his consistent argument for the moral superiority of freedom — for all of its flaws of application — over slavery. That is a woefully unfashionable idea among popinjays in Europe and America who are too sodden with the smug confidence of liberties taken for granted. No wonder Hitchens drinks so much. He bears the burden of knowing that nothing is granted. Sadly for me, I bear not only this, but the burden of senseless sobriety as well.
Whatever Hitchens is drinking — often enough “to kill or stun the average mule,” he says — there are moments when I resolve to drink more of it next year. They’re most frequent when I contemplate just what North Korea proliferated during the last lost year and speculate about which death cult will eventually try to use it against an American city. Then there was the moment when I read the conclusions of the North Korea expert and economist Marcus Noland about just how close we may have come to ending Kim Jong Il’s capacity to murder, starve, extort, and proliferate for good. That is, before President Bush’s legacy-grasping shift to the now-manifest failure of Agreed Framework 2.0. There’s nothing I could say about this that I haven’t said a hundred times; read it yourself here if you want:
Finally, there is my fury, partly fury at myself, that I was fooled by President Bush’s meeting with Kang Chol Hwan and the rest of his soaring and ultimately false rhetoric, but in retrospect, it pains me to admit that I was fooled.
If Hitchens is wrong about the existence of a vengeful God, I hope God would consider granting forgiving his blasphemy for the clarity he has shown on North Korea in particular. Several years ago at Seoul Station, I read Hitchens’s argument that North Korea was the worst place on earth. We live in a depressingly competitive world on that account, but Hitchens persuaded me enough to have planted one of the seeds of this blog. Today, with the same clarity, Hitchens laments President Bush’s abandonment of the North Korean people:
Now, for a small prize in the seasonal spirit, can you tell me the name of our special envoy? I rather thought not. [Slate, Christopher Hitchens]
He must mean the man whose resignation I called for nearly a year ago. Not that Jay Lefkowitz is necessarily a bad or a cynical man, but he’s smart enough to know just who he thinks he’s kidding. Unfortunately, he’s still kidding too many of us. Look at his beleagured expression in this picture. He looks, as he often does these days, like a man with smallness thrust upon him. It was taken at an event I attended at Heritage last spring, perhaps after I had pointed out just how little he and his administration had accomplished toward changing America’s own laws, policies, and priorities. Hitchens gets it:
In fact, I have to confess that if I had not run into Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a Washington cocktail party a couple of years ago and been told by her of his newly mandated appointment, I would not have heard of Jay Lefkowitz, either. The president named him to the job on Aug. 19, 2005. That was a banner year for the supporters of human rights in Kim Jong-il’s hellish and hermetic state. On June 13, Bush had received in the White House North Korean defector Kang Chol-Hwan, author of the chillingly brilliant memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, which describes the gulag system that operates in that unprecedentedly wretched country.
If you’re new here, you really should know that for once, words fail Christopher Hitchens; wretched does not even begin to suggest the full horror of it. And had President Bush chosen a special envoy with the moral clarity, stature, independence, and the will to tell the American people and the world about those horrors, his State Department could never have buried human rights between the lines of Agreed Framework 2.0. That may have been exactly the idea of choosing a Bush loyalist of relatively little independent stature and with a part-time day job instead.
One might feel slightly ashamed that the Bush administration seemed to raise the hopes of the North Korean slaves before dashing them, but we can perhaps console ourselves with the thought that—absolutist control being what it is—very few of the enslaved ever got to hear of the promise before it was discarded.
Hitchens plants us directly before the uncomfortable truth that President Bush has betrayed the North Korean people for a rapidly dissolving illusion of diplomatic progress. Neither our own partisan prejudices, nor Bush’s broken promises, nor the crumbs Jay Lefkowitz tosses out to courageous human rights activists should interfere with the clarity with which we perceive or denounce this. Without question, clarity can be a hard thing to find when those “crumbs” happen to be human lives. But the greater moral imperative lies in forcing meaningful change upon the prison that still holds 23 million captives. A few tossed crumbs won’t fill the mouth of famine, and a few glasses of water won’t quench a holocaust. And if we don’t call the Bush Administration on that, we’ll eventually pay a price in credibility.
Jay Lefkowitz is the man whose nominal job is to lead the policies of this nation and others toward attaching consequences to Kim Jong Il’s atrocities. Instead, he has let himself become a caged pet of a State Department that wants no such thing. Lefkowitz can’t overrule Condi Rice, of course, but he doesn’t have to stay in his cage. He ought to step down. And if, when he does, he states clearly and publicly that he refuses to be an accessory to betraying the very people he is charged with saving, he will inject that issue into our national consciousness at the moment of optimal political opportunity. By doing so, he will have done the North Korean people far more good than any act he would be allowed to perform during the remaining months of his tenure.
There are some who would say that Lefkowitz is “our” only friend in the State Department, but one sympathetic yet powerless ear isn’t worth the price we pay by misplacing our hope in last year’s rhetoric. The fact that Lefkowitz is a living link to that rhetoric doesn’t change the fact that the Bush Administration either never meant it or no longer does. It has caused too many of us to excuse the Bush Administration’s deeply immoral appeasement of Kim Jong Il. When Lefkowitz goes, the hypocrisy of Bush’s words will be laid bare and his unprincipled, failing policies can be exposed, denounced, and possibly even reversed by the next president.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 26, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Refugees, "United" Nations
Two North Korean defectors are in the U.S. with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.The UNHCR’s Beijing office says a man in his 20s and a woman in her 30s have been under UN protection since July last year and were granted approval for asylum in the U.S. by Beijing and Washington. [Chosun Ilbo]
The report marks only the second known occasion of the UNHCR performing its assigned mission on behalf of North Korean refugees, and one of the few times our own State Department has actually complied with the North Korean Human Rights Act. The report also notes that other refugees may soon arrive via the same route.
Update: Reader “kumar,” who knows more about the subject than either the Chosun Ilbo or I do, affirms that the UNHCR is not that worthless.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 26, 2007 at 7:25 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy
No surprise there. At this point, it would really only be news if North Korea actually met the deadline, or made a full disclosure at all during Kim Jong Il’s life span.
A South Korean government official on Tuesday said, “There is no sign yet that North Korea has decided to make an accurate declaration. It’s improbable that the North will declare its nuclear programs by the end of the year, with only a week remaining before the New Year.”
It is unclear whether the North is positively refusing to make a full declaration of all materials and programs under a Feb. 13 six-nation agreement or whether it is stalling to get a bigger compensation package from the U.S. A positive refusal would derail the entire framework. * * * *
According to South Korean officials, North Korea is dragging its feet while denying the main U.S. allegations: that it has or had a uranium enrichment program and transferred nuclear materials to Syria. [Chosun Ilbo]
Is “both” an acceptable answer?
The North’s chief envoy to the Six-Party Talks Kim Kye Gwan said to his Chinese counterpart Wu Dawei that the North is not obliged to declare the alleged Uranium Enrichment Program (UEP) by year’s end, reported Tokyo Newspaper on the 23 of December.
Kim said to Wu Dawei, “Plutonium is the key item that has to be declared,” the Newspaper reported.
Kim was quoted as saying, “We are willing to declare all nuclear programs by year’s end. However, as to the alleged development of UEP, we will offer an explanation demanded by the U.S. at an appropriate time.’” Kim’s words suggest that the North would not declare the UEP this time.
The Newspaper also reported that the North emphatically denied of having any joint nuclear project with Syria. In regard to opening another round of the Six-Party Talks the North said, “It is too early to schedule for the next meeting,” thus indicating that the North would not participate in the Six-Party Talks for the time being. [Daily NK]
At this point, you have to hope the Administration has a “Plan B” to wreak financial devastation on North Korea’s palace economy. One sliver of encouragement is that with the South Korean election now more-or-less favorably resolved, we could execute Plan B without concern that the resulting backlash would land Comrade Chung in the Blue House. Domestically, there’s little question that Bush was prepared to bend over backwards to achieve a diplomatic resolution. Appeasement advocates will naturally try to blame Bush if Agreed Framework 2 breaks down, but recent revelations of Kim Jong Il’s mendacity have given Bush plenty of cover.
I still lay 80% odds that the Administration will do as I’ve predicted: engage in an extensive and lengthy renegotiation until it leaves office. That would effectively extend the status quo. A North Korean refusal to fully disclose its programs probably also means it won’t be scratched from the terror-sponsor list, and that other big concessions from the U.S. are also unlikely.
On the other hand, North Korea has now had a year to write its list, and if we’re to believe Chris Hill, he’s given the North Koreans plenty of private elaboration on just what its disclosure should contain, despite the absence of such elaboration in the actual agreement. There’s no justification for giving the North Koreans more time when their motives are this transparent.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 23, 2007 at 6:30 am · Filed under Human Rights, China & Korea, Refugees, Activism
To those who responded to my request to spam e-mail the Chinese government to demand Yoo Sang Joon’s release, reach up and pat yourself on the back. You just might have saved a life.
Yoo’s wife and one child died in the Great Famine, and his remaining son, Chul Min, died of exposure trying to escape through the Mongolian desert. Not long ago, Yoo appeared to be headed for a post-mortem reunion with his family. He was under arrest by China’s fascist regime, which wanted to send him back to North Korea, where a speedy trip to the firing squad would have been one of the more favorable outcomes he could have hoped for.Instead, thanks to international pressure and a great deal of expense and effort by the Rev. Tim Peters and Dr. Norbert Vollertsen, Yoo is in South Korea. A big hat tip and many thanks to a friend for reporting this terrific news.
Yoo’s situation was especially dire because he was a Christian missionary, underground railroad conductor, and international activist. Knowing this, Yoo risked a fate worse than death for years because he knew that others — including refugees still living in holes in the ground — depended on him.
The three defectors Yoo was leading at the time of his arrest? All three were sent back to die in Kim Jong Il’s gulag:
Defector Lee Chul Jung (pseudonym, 45 years old, male) said that it was likely that he would end up in a political prison camp. He did not express his inner thoughts, but he did say that he didn’t think he would make it back alive. Kim Soon Hee (pseudonym, 33, female) came to China and was arrested by the Chinese police five times as an illegal resident. Her expression was a brave one. Park Eun Shim (pseudonym, 22, female) called me “teacher.” Her bright smile left a deep impression on me. She was someone who was sold to Qingdao, but escaped last year and had requested our help. I was in pain because she would not stop crying at the time. They were imprisoned for 45 days and were all sent back to North Korea. [Daily NK]
Of course, it would be a tad simplistic to say that the people who run the Chinese government are merely black-hearted, slave-driving hacks who smear toxins all over my little girl’s Dora dolls. The more nuanced truth is that they’re greedy, black-hearted, slave-driving hacks, and what’s more, they’re smearing toxins all over your little girl’s Dora dolls, too, and they’re also slipping them date rape drugs. North Korean women in China, by contrast, can expect to get raped with or without drugs.
None of which, by my count, has caused even one South Korean to sever his own ear or cover himself with bees in protest, but I’m really digressing now.My point is that the Chinese regime, like most totalitarian regimes, seeks to avoid the exposure of its atrocities, because that kind of thing can be unprofitable. China’s rulers can be pressured. If we can create more pressure next time, there’s a chance that we can save more lives yet.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 22, 2007 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Korean Politics
My “what to expect from Lee MB” updates have outgrown and seceded from this post. As for what we should expect from a Lee presidency, any prediction rows into some pretty treacherous water. Lee strikes me as a guy who begins with dry cost-benefit analysis, but one with an autocratic streak as wide as that asinine canal he’s proposing to build. Lee’s history and my gut suggest a term punctuated by emotional, stubborn, and vindictive behavior, which means that national policy may well come down to who pisses him off.
Bad news for North Korea, that. And very possibly bad news for the guy in the orange jacket, whoever he is:
You can really feel the love there, can’t you? Comrade Chung might want to just ask Kim Jong Il for political asylum now. Maybe he can get an anchorman job up there on “Voice of Peoples Korea” or somesuch.
Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation, who probably has had enough contact with Lee’s people to know what he’s talking about, discusses how Lee’s election will affect U.S.-ROK relations.
Lee Myung-bak will improve bilateral coordination between the U.S. and South Korea in the Six-Party Talks, reducing Pyongyang’s ability to play the two allies against each other. A realistic policy that requires reciprocity and transparency from North Korea will also be more consistent with Six-Party Talks objectives of using coordinated multi-lateral diplomatic efforts to leverage Pyongyang’s implementation of its nuclear commitments.
Inter-Korean relations could be delayed in the short-term since North Korea may respond angrily to Lee Myung-bak’s imposition of conditionality in Seoul’s engagement policy. In seeking to influence South Korean policy, Pyongyang could also hinder progress in the Six-Party Talks and threaten a return to brinksmanship, blaming Lee’s espousal of outdated Cold War thinking. Lee should maintain resolve, however, in order for South Korea to gain more leverage in moderating North Korean behavior, inducing economic and political reform, and ensuring Pyongyang fulfills its denuclearization pledges. [Heritage Foundation, Bruce Klingner]
Needless to say, there will be other problems to overcome. Predictably, Lee is already asking the United States to slow down the handover of wartime military operational control to the South Koreans. At his confirmation hearing, the nominee* for Undersecretary of Defense for East Asian Affairs, John Shinn, sounded as though that was off the table, but the desire for the Bush Administration to ingratiate itself with the new Korean administration will be hard to resist after so many years of bleak relations. (* Shinn may actually be one of many nominees whose confirmations squeaked through before Congress went into recess. I haven’t had time to check this.)
Lee Myung-Bak’s character has not gone away as an issue, and I suspect there will be more harm done to Lee’s reputation and approval rating this year. For now, it’s fascinating how little most Korean voters seem to care about this:
“I voted for Lee Myung-bak even though I think he’s a little corrupt,” said Kim Cho-rong, 21, a college student studying interior design. “I figured someone who is a little guilty but competent was better for our society than someone who is innocent but incompetent.” [N.Y. Times]
“No one is absolutely clean when you strip-search successful and wealthy businessmen in Korea,” said Ahn Jae-woo, 54, an insurance executive who voted for Lee early today before going Christmas shopping with his family in a Seoul mall. “This election is not about ethical issues, it’s about who is really capable of making Korea prosperous.” [WaPo]
Klingner is right when he says that the left will continue to attack Lee’s ethics. If I were Lee, I’d be hauling away and sealing every government record and hard drive I could lay my hands on at the moment, because the obvious antidote to scandal is scandal, and personally, I’m hoping for a nice, juicy North Korean influence scandal. One of my greatest interests in the post-election phase has always been what we’d learn about the rest of the Il Shim Hue spy ring story. There were published reports that North Korea’s agents included one of Roh Moo Hyun’s close advisors, and/or a Blue House Secretary. I’d like to know just what the former head of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service had found when he was suddenly replaced. I also have an intense interest in whether the full exposure of this story will touch Im Jong In, a lawmaker of the now-defunct but formerly ruling Uri Party.
The Marmot’s view, though colored by an understandable desire to give Lee a chance to be a statesman, also seems realistic. If you’re interested, here’s the International Crisis Group’s take on what a Lee presidency will bring. [U/D: We should forgot to mention Prof. Andrei Lankov’s comment here, and if you haven’t read Lankov’s book yet, then you absolutely should.]
Personally, however, I’m most interested in what KCNA thinks about Lee and his latest statements promising more scrutiny of North Korea on human rights. Unfortunately, KCNA is now on its fifth day of official silence. Odd. [U/D: As I’d noted previously, KCNA found time to congratulate the President-Elect of Switzerland and to get in one last dig against Lee Hoi Chang, but not a word on Lee Myung Bak’s victory yet. I am no longer the only one to have noticed this. Yet we know that the North Korean press has been full of anti-Lee Hoi Chang fulminations, and an OFK reader and recent visitor to Pyongyang tells us that North Koreans were keenly curious about the election. So either North Koreans have wisely suspended their curiosity or the gossip is spreading like projectile chlamydia aboard the Charles De Gaulle. That, or the regime is broadcasting the news over the cable radio.]
By the way, if you’re a truly obsessed North Korea watcher, KCNA’s latest probably has your nipples all a-tingle; they’re doing non-stop adulation of Kim Jong Suk, Kim Jong Il’s dysfunctional mother, pausing only to to talk about the visit of the Dear Leader’s sister to the remote and desolate crap-heap known as Hoeryong, where the main industries are coal mining, concentration camps, coal mined in concentration camps, and fleeing the country. All of this probably has some subtle significance for the succession question, but trying to understand Kim Jong Il’s tangled web of paternity is like compiling a comprehensive geneology of West Virginia. If you happen to be unlucky enough to actually live in Hoeryong, the main significance is that you might just have found yourself out on your ass in late December. Also, there’s a “visa-free” agreement between North Korea and Belarus, which promises a trade boom in gray vinalon, olive green polyester, and assorted unmarked crates buried under sacks of cement.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 21, 2007 at 2:10 pm · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy, Proliferation
Say it aint so.
U.S. scientists have discovered traces of enriched uranium on smelted aluminum tubing provided by North Korea, apparently contradicting Pyongyang’s denial that it had a clandestine nuclear program, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources. [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler]
But where and when did we find this incriminating sample?
The United States has long pointed to North Korea’s acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes as evidence of such a program, saying the tubes could be used as the outer casing for centrifuges needed to spin hot uranium gas into the fuel for nuclear weapons. North Korea has denied that contention and, as part of a declaration on its nuclear programs due by the end of the year, recently provided the United States with a small sample to demonstrate that the tubes were used for conventional purposes.
The elemental question we face again with North Korea is just how much we really want to know.
The discovery of the uranium traces has been closely held by senior U.S. officials concerned that disclosure would expose intelligence methods and complicate the diplomatic process. North Korea has steadfastly refused to open up about its past practices, simply asserting that it is not engaged in inappropriate activities. However, the uranium finding will force U.S. negotiators to demand a detailed explanation from Pyongyang. [emphasis mine]
I can imagine that some people would rather not have had this story come out, the way the Syria story did, knowing that it would only strengthen the arguments of the skeptics. My own speculation is that the story had to come out eventually because someone would have leaked it.
I wonder what David Albright will have to say about this, given his devout atheism about the existence of a North Korean highly enriched uranium (HEU) program.
David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said the equipment did not need to be in the same room but could have picked up the uranium traces from a person who was exposed to both sets of equipment. He said that several Energy Department laboratories have highly sophisticated methods of detecting the nuclear material from items that had been thoroughly decontaminated.
“There is a real art in extracting enriched uranium from samples,” Albright said. The labs can detect micrograms of enriched uranium, which he said is “way beyond what any normal radiation detector would pick up.” However, he said, such minute quantities could easily have come from other sources.
Ultimately, he said, it might be possible to match up the enriched uranium discovered on the North Korean tubes with information known about the Pakistani material discovered in Iran to determine whether the enriched uranium on the tubes had been inadvertently transferred. [WaPo]
That seems unlikely. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the traces of HEU on those tubes turn out to be a perfect match for A.Q. Khan’s fingerprints. We know that Khan stole Pakistan’s centrifuge design from the Dutch, founded Khan Laboratories, designed the P-3 centrifuge, and then “gave” 20 complete P-3 centrifuges, centrifuge components, and centrifuge designs to North Korea, along with other nuclear technology.
From this, we can infer that the North Korean and Pakistani centrifuge designs were essentially identical and used the same parts. I also infer, from Kessler’s piece, that the tubes themselves were similar to or identical to those used in P-3’s; otherwise, this wouldn’t be big news. So if North Korea’s source of aluminum tubes was a uranium-soaked Pakistani laboratory, it’s at least strong circumstantial evidence that North Korea meant to use them for the same purpose.
Of course, that assumption — that the enriched uranium traces got onto the tubes in Pakistan, seems unlikely. Presumably, a shadowy axis-of-evil nuclear scientist of above-average intelligence would look for a less suspicious, uranium-trace-free source for its tubes. For obvious reasons, Khan’s own procurement network was decentralized and relied on a global network of suppliers for itself and its clients. The Iranians, for example, were smart enough to get their aluminum tubes through Russian suppliers. So why would any North Korean procurer buy aluminum tubes from the world’s most suspicious source, especially if its purpose was “peaceful?”
As Iraq intel critics often note, there are other uses for aluminum tubes of similar specifications, but as they tend not to point out as often, those other uses mainly involve rocket fuselages. Thus, North Korea’s continued possession would still violate UNSCR 1695. Not that anyone cares, of course.
The evidence Kim Jong Il is lying to us just keeps piling up, as does the evidence that when it comes to foreign policy — with the exception of Iraq — the third Clinton Administration has already begun. To the extent that the Bush Administration still clings to Foggy Bottom, it seems more interested in diplomacy for the sake legacy-building than for the sake of verifiable disarmament.
[Part 2 here]
See also: Ampontan’s take.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 21, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, Diplomacy, Proliferation
[Part 1]
An honest appraisal of this new discovery means that those of us who are skeptical of AF 2.0 should grudgingly admit that it has produced at least one significant intelligence windfall, even if it was due to a North Korean oversight. Since that oversight will probably land a few people in front of firing squads, AF 2.0 proponents should at least draw the obvious conclusions to which this new intelligence leads. It seems difficult to deny that AF 2.0 draws near the end of its useful life, but Condi Rice can’t bring herself to let go:
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, I’m wondering if you can tell us what you think the significance is of the discovery of enriched uranium on the samples of the aluminum tubes from the North Koreans. Will this complicate the six-party process? And will it — does it raise any flags ahead of the declaration which they are supposed to present in about 10 minutes?
RICE: I’m not going to comment on specific reports or — certainly on intelligence matters. But we have been very clear that we expect a declaration from North Korea that is complete and that is accurate.
As you know, we have long been concerned about highly enriched uranium as an alternative route in North Korea. And so, we expect there to be a declaration that is complete and accurate.
I also want to note that there is a considerable diplomatic effort under way, not just by the United States but by other members of the six-party talks, to make certain that we can complete this second phase, both with the disablement, which I should underscore is going very well, and with the declaration.
I sincerely hope that it will be by the end of the year, but the key here is to get the process right. And we’re going to stay at this until we get it right. [Thanks to a friend for forwarding]
Reuters is also reporting, as I noted here, that AF 2.0 is in deep trouble.
The United States is still struggling to get North Korea to disclose its nuclear programs, a challenge in a society so tight-lipped that it would keep even clothing sizes secret, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
North Korea has promised to make a declaration by December 31 as part of a wider deal to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for economic and diplomatic benefits from the United States and others.
The senior official told Reuters that reflexively secretive North Korea was reluctant to detail its nuclear proliferation activities — which it has steadfastly denied — as well as what it regards as military secrets in its declaration.
“They have real weapons and so they should tell us what the weapons program looks like,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. [Reuters, Arshad Mohammed and Sue Pleming]
The article’s source then went on to offer this rather silly apology for North Korea’s refusal to abide by its agreements:
“That is where you get into military secrets and, in a country that would keep a sweater size secret, you can imagine the difficulty in revealing military secrets,” he added.
Lucky for us North Korea didn’t agree to disclose Kim Jong Nam’s sweater size. Or Kim Jong Il’s condom size, for that matter.
As I guessed several months ago, North Korea’s “red line” in this process is revealing, disabling, or dismantling anything of real strategic value. Its goal for Agreed 2.0 is to gain as many concessions from the United States as possible without giving up anything of significance in return. It made significant progress in disabling Yongbyon, a facility that was already worn out, and whose much larger replacement lies half-built, stalled for the time being. Otherwise, it has disabled nothing of lasting importance to its nuclear program, has admitted nothing we didn’t already know, and has denied plenty that we apparently do know.
North Korea’s winnings have been impressive. It has escaped a tightening web of U.S. financial sanctions that virtually destroyed its palace economy in just a matter of months. It coopted the U.S. Federal Reserve into laundering its money. It effectively silenced the United States on its human rights atrocities, drug trafficking, and slave labor. It received a U.S. permission slip to sell arms in direct violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718 when that resolution wasn’t even half a year old, and generally swept 1718 into the great ash-heap where all U.N. resolutions go sooner or later. C-V-I-D? Forgotten. Finally, even if North Korea doesn’t succeed at getting itself removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, the Bush Administration’s willingness to pursue removal in exchange for little or no real verifiable progress on North Korea’s terrorism and terror sponsorship could give a future Democratic administration political cover to do what not even Bill Clinton dared to try.
An enduring feature of North Korean diplomacy is that its own concessions are eternally negotiable, while our concessions always lower the bar for the next negotiation. The stage is now set for North Korea to get everything it could possibly want from a Clinton or Obama administration, and no Republican who has supported the Bush Administration’s eleventh-hour folly will be in a strong position to criticize that.
The North Korea debate will now revert back to the specious false choice between appeasement and war. It will continue on those superficial terms because the State Department, spurred on by a South Korean client that has since been driven from office, persuaded the Bush Administration to abandon a highly effective strategy of economic pressure that nearly cost Kim Jong Il the ability to pay his army. Had that strategy ever been applied to the full extent of its potential, it might have secured North Korea’s disarmament on the only terms it will ever be verifiably secured — by breaking Kim Jong Il’s paranoid and secretive misrule for good.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 21, 2007 at 8:37 am · Filed under Korean Politics
[Updated and Bumped — scroll down — original post 19 Dec 07]
Following record low voter turnout, Yonhap has Lee Myung Bak winning by a landslide with over just under 50%. This is unbad news to me; I always root for a lying stock manipulator over a lying abettor of genocide with untamed abandon. I can hear the celebratory gunfire all the way out in Centreville. I’m also pleasantly surprised that the last-second leak of a video proving that Lee fibbed his way through the BBK scandal didn’t mush up the prospect of any one candidate getting a mandate.
The best news of the election? Comrade Chung, the poster-boy for propping up Kim Jong Il and slamming the furnace door on his wretched subjects, has now led two leftist parties to record-breaking beat-downs. He drew just 26% of the vote. Chung also led the Uri Party to defeat in the summer of 2006, and that defeat eventually destroyed Uri. There’s a good chance that this lopsided defeat will destroy its successor, the United New Democratic Party. Chung had a well deserved reputation for shallowness, but let’s not forget that he was also a conniving, black-hearted, anti-American demagogue (three links) whose mouth emitted words of breathtaking stupidity whenever it wasn’t otherwise occupied in fellating Kim Jong Il.
At least it’s possible to say that for now, appeasing North Korea and bashing Uncle Sam don’t have the voter appeal they did five years ago. I am not too cynical to deny that one thing will improve, which is the volume of Yankee-baiting cheap shots from the Blue House.
The worst news of the election? South Korea missed its chance to have a national conversation about The Big Issue, unification. The campaign was really about which candidate was the most repellent, and with the abundance of such exquisite material on that question, there wasn’t much time to talk about when, how, and on what terms Korea should resolve that nation’s most fundamental question. There wasn’t even much discussion about the smaller issues that devolve from The Big Issue: refugees, concentration camps, nuclear disarmament, defense policy, conventional disarmament, reconstruction planning, or humanitarian aid policy.
Flashback: The Lee Myung Bak Dossier, from September 2005; Much, much more: Andy Jackson, bless his heart, semi-live-blogged this.
Update 1: A reader was kind enough to pass along a scan of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s letter of congratulations to Lee.
Update 2: The official results have Lee falling just short of 50%. Here are the final results.
Lee Myung Bak, Grand National Party (Conservative), 48.7%
Chung Dong Young, United New Democratic Party (Nationalist-Left), 26.1%
Lee Hoi-chang, Independent (Conservative), 15.1%
Moon Kook-hyun, Create Korea Party (Center Left), 5.8%
Kwon Young-ghil, Democratic Labor Party (Socialist), 3%
Rhee In-je, Democratic Party (Center Left), 0.7%
This means that conservative candidates’ combined support totaled 64%, nearly two thirds. That’s a very significant shift since 2002. So what will that mean as far as South Korea’s policies toward North Korea and the United States? Lee used his first press conference to say some encouraging words:
The president-elect is expected to tie aid to continued compliance with international demands in the atomic dispute in line with Washington’s wishes, but was not expected to make any dramatic change in assistance while the North remains on the path to disarmament.
“The North’s abandonment of its nuclear programs is the way for the North to develop” its economy, Lee said in his comments to reporters Thursday.
Lee said he would not shy away from raising the North’s shortcomings. “I think unconditionally avoiding criticism toward North Korea would not be appropriate.”
On relations with Seoul’s key Washington ally, Lee said he would “renew the common values and peace based on trust.” [AP, Burt Herman; emphasis mine]
Can we assume he refers to human rights? Lee is also saying he will conduct a review of the soft-line policy toward Kim Jong Il’s regime.
All of this got me to wondering how this is going over in Pyongyang, but KCNA is uncharacteristically at a loss for words today. They found time to congratulate the President-Elect of Switzerland and to get in one last dig against Lee Hoi Chang, but not a word on Lee Myung Bak’s victory. I can see why. In a place where saying the wrong thing can easily get you killed, I can see why nobody is volunteering to write the official reaction. Still, you’d expect at least some kind of terse reaction. I wouldn’t want to be serving the drinks here tonight.
Lastly, it bears notice that Roh was a charter member of a group of faux allies who found it politically profitable to exploit anti-Americanism in the post-9/11 era. Iraq is frequently cited as the cause for this by the American left, but Roh’s use of this tactic preceded Iraq, and was primarily about domestic quarrels with the U.S. military that had protected Korea for 50 years. Now, he and his most recognized political ally have gone the way of Schroeder and Chirac, only they’ve been much more roundly discredited at the polls.
We bid them good riddance, though for uncounted numbers of North Koreans who are dead instead of free today, it comes too late
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 20, 2007 at 12:51 pm · Filed under Southeast Asia
You will recall that the House passed this measure earlier this month. The Senate has now done the same. The President’s signature is virtually assured, given that Laura Bush has emerged as an activist on this issue.
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 20, 2007 at 7:12 am · Filed under Six-Party Talks, U.S. Politics
Maybe the Dear Leader will save us all yet. From ourselves, that is.
If he does, it will be because he’s overplayed his hand again. A reader forwards a scan of a letter sent by three Republican U.S. Senators — Brownback, Grassley, and Kyl, the new minority whip, to Chris Hill, the architect of Agreed Framework 2.0. The letter requests that State specifically respond to this Congressional Research Service report’s allegations that North Korea continued to materially support Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers recently. The letter asks why, if the reports are true, North Korea should be removed from the list of state sponsors of terror. You can read the signed version here:
kyl-grassley-brownback-letter.pdf
Kyl’s signature is significant and ought to worry State, given that he’s now the number two Republican in the Senate. Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who co-sponsored [proposed] legislation setting conditions for removing North Korea from the terror list, did not sign. North Korea’s state news agency, KCNA, takes exception and does not leave us wanting for levity: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm · Filed under An Alliance?, U.S. Military, U.S. & Korea
I’ve linked John Shinn’s advance Q&A below, and although I don’t have time to graf it, Shinn is saying — emphasizing, really — that he plans to drive on with USFK restructuring. He also sounds agnostic on North Korea’s commitment to disarmament. Read the whole thing here (it’s a big pdf).
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 19, 2007 at 12:37 pm · Filed under Appeasement, Korean Society, Deprogramming
Let me say it: I’m very pleased that Dvorak’s 9th Symphony will be on the program. Those who are familiar with this music will know its optimistic, sweeping, subversive majesty. If allowed only one word to describe it, I would choose “open.” Here are links to the bucolic first movement and the triumphant fourth movement. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 18, 2007 at 12:57 pm · Filed under China & Korea, Refugees
From Tokyo, where some NGO’s are holding an international conference on North Korean human rights, Human Rights Without Frontiers sends this sad news: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Joshua Stanton on December 18, 2007 at 7:57 am · Filed under U.S. Politics
The resolution passed unanimously last night (suspension of the rules, voice vote). You can read the full text of the resolution here.
It’s sad to think of Hyde’s own passage; sadder still to contrast him with the rudderless party he left behind. For purposes of Korea policy, we might as well be in a second Carter Administration with a 1975 Congress. Yes, a few isolated Republicans (and one or two Democrats) take a principled stand here and there, but it seems doubtful that they can do much. Functionally, we entered the third Clinton Administration a year ago. The Korea Lobby and its friends in the State Department have the conversation all to themselves, and the extent of their confidence is such that they feel free to violate the law flagrantly and without a whimper of complaint from those self-proclaimed sentinels of our government in the media. One has to wonder if someone of Hyde’s stature could have changed that, or whether he did, or for how long.
(Pause to swallow own bile.)
Republicans often sound depressed about the Democrats when they should be depressed about themselves instead. Their party certainly hasn’t earned the donations or support of foreign policy conservatives this year, and no candidate in either party has yet said anything to pry dime one out of me. And in the grander scheme, four years of Hillary Clinton — probably the least likeable politician of the last hundred years, save Spiro Agnew — could be just the thing to help the Republicans learn to stand for something and articulate some principle again.
One key lesson that this Administration will leave behind is the importance of not filling its top foreign policy slots with holdovers from the other party. The GOP will never manage to carry out a successful foreign policy initiative until it purges the senior ranks in the State Department.
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