Let them! Time for Seoul to defend themselves. Especially after they way they protested against the US
Posted on 07/09/2006 12:10:21 PM PDT by HAL9000
A program of clandestine action against nuclear and missile traffic to North Korea and Iran is to be intensified after last week's missile tests by the Pyongyang regime.Intelligence agencies, navies and air forces from at least 13 nations are quietly co-operating in a secret war against Pyongyang and Tehran.
It has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, US agents prowling the waterfronts in Taiwan, multinational naval and air surveillance missions out of Singapore, investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau and a fleet of planes and ships eavesdropping on the "hermit kingdom" in the waters north of Japan.
Few details filter out from Western officials about the program, which has operated since 2003, or about the American financial sanctions that accompany it. But together they have tightened a noose around Kim Jong-il's bankrupt, hungry nation.
"Diplomacy alone has not worked, military action is not on the table and so you'll see a persistent increase in this kind of pressure," a senior Western official says.
In a telling example of the program's success, two Bush administration officials indicated last year that it had blocked North Korea from obtaining equipment used to make missile propellant.
The US also persuaded China to stop the sale of chemicals to North Korea's nuclear weapons scientists. And a shipload of North Korea-bound precursor chemicals for weapons was seized in Taiwan.
According to US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, the man who originally devised the program, it has made a serious dent in North Korea's revenues from ballistic missile sales. But the success of Bolton's brainchild, the Proliferation Security Initiative, whose stated aim is to stop trafficking of weapons of mass destruction, might also push North Korea into extreme reactions.
Australia is a member of the initiative, which was announced by President George W.Bush in Poland in 2003, and has held meetings of operational experts. Other participants include Britain, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Spain and Singapore.
There has been almost no public debate in the countries committed to military involvement. A report for the US Congress says it has "no international secretariat, no offices in federal agencies established to support it, no database or reports of successes and failures and no established funding".
To Bolton and other senior officials, those vague qualities make it politically attractive.
In the past 10 months, since the collapse of six-nation talks in Beijing on North Korea's nuclear weapons, the US and its allies have also tightened the screws on Kim's clandestine fundraising, which generated about $US500million ($666million) a year for the regime.
The US undersecretary for arms control, Robert Joseph, has disclosed that 11 North Korean entities -- trading companies or banks -- plus six from Iran and one from Syria were singled out for action under an executive order, numbered 13382, signed by Bush.
For the first time, the US Secret Service and the FBI released details of North Korean involvement in forging $US100 notes and in selling counterfeit Viagra, cigarettes and amphetamines in collaboration with Chinese gangsters.
The investigators homed in on a North Korean trading company and two banks in Macau. The firm, which had offices next to a casino and a "sauna", was run by North Koreans with diplomatic passports, who promptly vanished.
The two banks, Seng Heng bank and Banco Delta Asia, denied any wrongdoing. But the Macau authorities stepped in after a run on Banco Delta Asia and froze $US20million in North Korean accounts.
Last week, the North Koreans demanded the money as a precondition for talks but the Americans brushed off their protest.
Kim told Chinese President Hu Jintao in January that his Government was being strangled, diplomats in the Chinese capital say.
"He has warned the Chinese leaders his regime could collapse and he knows that is the last thing we want," a Chinese source close to the Foreign Ministry says.
The risk being assessed between Washington and Tokyo this weekend was how far Kim could be pushed against the wall before he undertook something more lethal than last week's display of force.
The "Dear Leader" has turned North Korea into a military-dominated state to preserve his own inherited role at the apex of a Stalinist personality cult. Although he appears erratic, and North Korea's rhetoric is extreme, most diplomats who have met him think Kim is highly calculating.
"He is a very tough Korean nationalist and he knows exactly how to play the power game -- very hard," says professor Shi Yinhong, an expert in Beijing.
But the costly failure of Kim's intercontinental missile, the Taepodong-2, after just 42 seconds of flight last Wednesday, was a blow to his prestige and to the force of his deterrent. Six other short- and medium-range missiles splashed into the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, without making any serious military point.
The US and its allies are now preoccupied by what Kim might do with his trump card -- his stockpile of plutonium for nuclear bombs.
"The real danger is that the North Koreans could sell their plutonium to another rogue state -- read Iran -- or to terrorists," says a diplomat who has served in Pyongyang.
US officials fear Iran is negotiating to buy plutonium from North Korea in a move that would confound the international effort to stop Tehran's nuclear weapons program.
The prospect of such a sale was "the next big thing", a Western diplomat involved with the issue says. The White House commissioned an intelligence study on the risk last December but drew no firm conclusions.
Plutonium was the element used in the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. It would give Iran a rapid route to the bomb as an alternative to the conspicuous process of enriching uranium, which is the focus of international concern. US nuclear scientists estimate North Korea is highly likely to have about 43kg and perhaps as much as 53kg of the material. Between 7kg and 9kg are needed for a weapon.
Former head of the US Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory Siegfried Hecker has warned that North Korea's plutonium would fit into a few suitcases and would be impossible to detect if it were sold.
For the first time since the crisis over its nuclear ambitions began in 1994, North Korea has made enough plutonium to sell a quantity to its ally while keeping enough for itself.
North Korea is known to have sold 1.7 tonnes of uranium to Libya. It has sold ballistic missiles to Iran since the 1980s. American officials have said Iran is already exchanging missile test data for nuclear technology from Pyongyang. The exchanges probably involve flight monitoring for Scud-type rockets and techniques of uranium centrifuge operation.
Relations deepened between the two surviving regimes in Bush's "axis of evil" after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's military and scientific links with North Korea have grown rapidly.
Last November, Western intelligence sources told German magazine Der Spiegel that a high-ranking Iranian official had travelled to Pyongyang to offer oil and natural gas in exchange for more co-operation on nuclear technology and ballistic missiles. Iran's Foreign Ministry denied the report but diplomats in Beijing and Pyongyang believe it was accurate.
At the same time, evidence emerged through Iranian dissidents in exile that North Korean experts were helping Iran build nuclear-capable missiles in a vast tunnel complex under the Khojir and Bar Jamali mountains, near Tehran.
So while one nation, North Korea, boasts of its nuclear weapons and the other, Iran, denies wanting them at all, the world is on edge. If the stakes are high in the nuclear terror game, they are equally high for the balance of power in Asia and thus for global prosperity. North Korea's aggressive behaviour and a record of kidnapping Japanese citizens have created new willpower among politicians in Tokyo to strengthen their military.
For China, Japan's wartime adversary, that signals a worrying change in the strategic equation. Nationalism in both countries is on the rise. Relations between the two are at their worst for decades.
One scenario is that Japan abandons its pacifist doctrine and becomes a nuclear power. "The Japanese people are very angry and very worried and, right now, they will accept any government plan for the military," says Tetsuo Maeda, professor of defence studies at Tokyo International University.
The mood favours the ascent of Shinzo Abe, Japan's hawkish Chief Cabinet Secretary, the man most likely to take over from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who steps down in September. "He will be far more hardline on Pyongyang and I'm firmly of the opinion that he intends to make Japan into a nuclear power," Maeda says.
The Government is already committed to installing defensive Pac-3 Patriot missiles, in co-operation with the US. But radical opinion in Japan has been fortified by Kim's adventures. "The vast majority of Japanese agree that we need to be able to carry out first strikes," says Yoichi Shimada, professor of international relations at Fukui Prefectural University.
"I spoke to Mr Abe earlier this week and he shares my opinion that for Japan, the most important step would be for Japan to have an offensive missile capability."
Such talk causes severe concern to Washington, which has sheltered Japan under the umbrella of its nuclear arsenal since forging a security alliance after World War II.
Divisions within the Bush administration, which even sympathisers concede have paralysed its diplomacy towards the North, also served to undermine Japanese confidence in the US, as have the well-documented failings of US intelligence.
Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute, a think tank with ties to the Pentagon, says: "There's no human intelligence in North Korea. Zero. Zippo. It's like looking at your neighbour's house with a pair of binoculars -- and they've got their blinds shut."
Last week, Bush was working the phones to the leaders of China and Russia. But British officials think it unlikely that either will support a Japanese proposal for UN sanctions on the North Koreans.
That leaves the Bush administration with the same unpalatable choices that existed a week, a month or a year ago. The military option, to all practical purposes, does not exist.
"An attack is highly unlikely to destroy any existing North Korean nuclear weapons capability," writes Phillip Saunders of the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, in a paper analysing its risks.
"The biggest problem with military options is preventing North Korean retaliation," Saunders says.
He believes half a million artillery shells an hour would be rained on Seoul in the first day of any conflict from North Korean artillery hidden in caves. The North Koreans could fire 200 mobile rocket launchers and launch up to 600 Scud missiles.
American and South Korean casualties, excluding civilians, are projected at between 300,000 and 500,000 in the first 90 days of war.
Like former president Bill Clinton's team, the Bush administration has therefore realised that a diplomatic answer is the only one available. But years of inattention, division and mixed messages robbed the US of diplomatic influence. One observer tells of watching US envoy Christopher Hill sit mutely in an important negotiation because policy arguments in Washington had tied his hands.
Hill compromised at the weekend by offering the North Koreans a private meeting if they came back to nuclear talks hosted by China. But US faith in China's powers of persuasion may have been misplaced. "China is the source of the problem, not the source of the solution," argues Edward Timperlake, a defence official in the Reagan administration and author of Showdown, a new book on the prospect of war with China.
Kim ignored Chinese appeals to call off the missile tests and some American officials now think Beijing is simply playing off its client against its superpower rival.
The clearest statement of all came from the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" itself. The state news agency said the US had used "threats and blackmail" to destroy an agreement to end the dispute. "But for the DPRK's tremendous deterrent for self-defence, the US would have attacked the DPRK more than once as it had listed it as part of an 'axis of evil'."
The lesson of Iraq, the North Koreans said, was now known to everyone.
investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of MacauTerrorist-rights violation! Terrorist-rights violation!
Call the NY Times! Call the NY Times!
"North Korea is known to have sold 1.7 tonnes of uranium to Libya..."
And thanks to George W. Bush, that uranium is now off the streets.
pong
QUIET!
Mustn't let anything that favors Bush out of the bag...
Gee. Our State Department is well-stocked with einsteins, if they actually figured this out for themselves. Who wouldda guessed--the Chinese are out for themselves.
Let them! Time for Seoul to defend themselves. Especially after they way they protested against the US
Let Kim Jong-il try.
"The vast majority of Japanese agree that we need to be able to carry out first strikes," says Yoichi Shimada, professor of international relations at Fukui Prefectural University."I spoke to Mr Abe earlier this week and he shares my opinion that for Japan, the most important step would be for Japan to have an offensive missile capability."
Kim Jong-Il's unbalanced behavior is pushing Japan toward a much-needed repeal of Article 9.
Ironically, by such a repeal, Tokyo will have a stronger case for its admission as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.
I don't want to see anyone killed, but from what I've been reading SK is part of the problem, they've gone really soft on NK ...
The time has come to put pressure on the key country - China. Quietly tell Beijing that if they don't put the squeeze on North Korea in 60 days the U.S. will place tariffs on all Chinese imports and the tariffs will be increased every 90 days China does not take action. I would also encourage Japan to annouce it's intention to go nuclear. Might as well have Taiwan and South Korea take that step as well.
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