Posted on 11/26/2003 12:17:56 PM PST by shrinkermd
WASHINGTON - North Korea's apparent acquisition of nuclear weapons and its admission last year that it had abducted scores of Japanese citizens over the past two decades have transformed the political outlook of many Japanese, driving even cautious diplomats to take positions further to the right of the administration of US President George W Bush.
That was apparent at a recent Washington seminar on Korea, where Naoyuki Agawa, the minister for public affairs and director of the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Embassy of Japan, publicly endorsed the concept of "regime change" in North Korea as "ultimately the solution" for the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
"Nobody talks about it, but I think it's obvious," Agawa told the seminar organized by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation. "The question is how soon. I don't think anybody's in a hurry to forcibly bring that to take place, and therefore I think that the status quo will continue."
To be sure, Agawa, who is a member of a US-Japan Strategic Study Group, was speaking for himself and not the Japanese government. But his open call for an overthrow of the Kim Jong-il regime in Pyongyang show how deeply North Korea's recent behavior has touched Japan's political psyche.
According to Agawa, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, along with and other political parties, began to change their attitude toward North Korea after it tested a ballistic missile over Japan three years ago and admitted to the kidnapping charges during Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's historic visit to Pyongyang last year.
"For the first time in 50 years, Japan has the fear of a clear and present danger," he said. Many ordinary citizens now realize "that one of their loved ones could be abducted from the coast".
He pointed out that Takako Doi of Japan's Socialist Party, a historical ally of North Korea, recently lost her bid for re-election as party chair because she was identified with a faction that had denied the abductions for many years.
To some observers, Agawa's comments illustrate an alarming lurch toward militarism in Japan and show how quickly Japan has forgotten its own legacy in colonial Korea and its role as a US military supply base during the Korean War.
Agawa's view "reflects the Koizumi's government's stand, definitely", said John Feffer, a longtime Korea watcher and the author of North Korea/South Korea: US Policy at a Time of Crisis recently published in the United States by Seven Stories Press. "It's unfortunate there's been such a rise in anti-North Korean feeling in Japan."
Feffer sees a strong link between the government's positions on North Korea and its attempts to change the peace clause in Japan's constitution to allow Japanese military forces to participate in overseas conflicts, such as the US war in Iraq. "The specter of a North Korean attack is the only thing that can uproot Japan's deeply seeded pacifism," he said in a separate interview.
Feffer, who has visited both North and South Korea, believes that calling for regime change in North Korea is irresponsible because "there are no alternatives. They have no idea what would replace it" (the Kim Jong-il regime).
Agawa broached the idea after Ralph Cossa, a Korea specialist and president of the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu, provided a generally upbeat preview of the upcoming six-party talks on ending the nuclear crisis. The talks, tentatively scheduled for December, include the United States, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan, all of whom want Pyongyang to stop making weapons, and North Korea, which is seeking guarantees of security and economic aid in exchange for any promise to disarm.
The negotiations have been complicated by deep splits within the Bush administration, which is constantly wavering between a hardline faction centered at the Pentagon - which would prefer to see the problem disappear through the regime change sought by Agawa - and a more pragmatic faction at the State Department, which sees no choice but to negotiate.
Bush himself, in a recent visit to Asia, made it clear that he supports the latter course, which has been doggedly pursued by Secretary of State Colin Powell. He has been represented at all talks with North Korea by assistant secretary of state James Kelly, who was Cossa's predecessor at the Pacific Forum before taking his present job.
Cossa lamented as "one of the saddest things in the conduct of US foreign policy" the fact that when Powell announces something as policy, skeptics question whether that is official policy even after Bush endorses it. Instead, many suspect that when John Bolton, a hardliner in the State Department who supports the Pentagon position "opens his mouth, that's when the real George Bush speaks".
"That's the real US credibility problem in Asia," said Cossa. "There's a feeling that US foreign policy is in shambles."
Despite that perception, said Cossa, many officials in both China and Japan, key participants in the talks, believe that their relations with the United States have "never been better". With both countries pressing for an end to North Korea's nuclear program, Cossa said a multilateral deal with North Korea is a likely outcome of the talks.
Realistically, "they will be rewarded", he said. "It's not a question of if, but when." Cossa added that any such agreement must be fully verified, and, as a prerequisite, "South Korea must stand firm with North Korea."
Cossa dismissed liberal critics who say that Bush's hostile attitude toward Pyongyang, as evidenced by his 2001 "axis of evil" speech, was a key factor in the crisis that began a year ago when Kelly confronted North Korea with evidence it was enriching uranium.
"The ultimate goal of pursuing nuclear weapons and the decision to cheat not only on the Agreed Framework but also on the North-South 1992 denuclearization agreement and also on the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty commitments started well before the Bush administration, and we're still dealing with that," he said.
Feffer pointed out that key members of the Bush administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for regime change in North Korea long before the uranium revelations, adding that even the Central Intelligence Agency has no concrete evidence of exactly what that program looks like.
The harsh rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon and people such as Agawa in Japan, Feffer said, is exactly why conservative Republicans in Congress such as Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania "want to strike a deal".
Weldon recently led a small, bipartisan delegation of US lawmakers to Pyongyang and returned saying he believed a deal was in sight in which North Korea would end its nuclear program in exchange for written guarantees of its security
"Hi boys. Remember me! I'MMMMM BACK!"
Ya know, if I had a crazy neighbor who publicly bragged he was going to make nukes and bioweapons, use them, and even sell them to others, I might be a little scared too...
Wow, that's all they wanted? Man, why didn't we send this master negotiator over sooner? To think that we've been worried all this time for nothing. Were it not for Bush's unilateralist foriegn policy, we would be able to have an honorable peace with North Korea. There could be peace in our time.
Let me get this straight, because bad people living in geographical region A hurt good people living in geographical region B over sixty years ago, the good people living in geographical region A must now stand passively by as bad people in geographical region B hurt them.
You can tell a leftist wrote the article, because no decent human being would argue that a genocidal tyranny should go unopposed.
“A proposed 13,500 ton helicopter-carrying destroyer, similar in design to a small aircraft carrier, would provide the Maritime Self-Defence Force with greater capability for force projection. A total of three SH-60J and one MH-53E will be carried. These new units are intended to replace the Shirane and Haruna classes of Helicopter Destroyers, with at least four ‘air capable surface combatants’ under study. The officially released design is a unique configuration that features forward and aft helicopter pads with a hanger in the center. Alternative designs are of more conventional layout, and more strongly resemble a normal aircraft carrier.
On 15 December 2001, the Japanese Government approved a new mid-term procurement plan for its Self-Defense Forces totaling 25,160 billion yen (US$223.6 billion) over the next five years. The new procurement plan allows the building of two DDH helicopter escort vessels. In fact, this kind of ship is a type of light aircraft carrier, with its dead weight reaching 13.5 thousand tons and its gross weight 20,000 tons with fuel, water and weapons, beyond the current patrol vessel. In service date will be after 2004.”
[Source]
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