Posted on 01/08/2003 7:40:51 AM PST by AmericanInTokyo
Title: North Korea Denounces U.S. After Talks Offer
9:15 a.m. 8 January Eastern Time Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Kim Yeon-hee
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) accused the United States Wednesday of increasing the danger of war on the Korean peninsula, just hours after Washington changed tack and signaled a willingness to talk about their nuclear standoff.
The reclusive communist state's KCNA news agency made no mention of the U.S. offer, nor of the U.N. watchdog's deadline for it to readmit nuclear inspectors within weeks, but decried Washington's "racket of a nuclear threat."
The U.S administration, which had previously insisted North Korea roll back recent steps to revive its nuclear weapons plans before any talks, announced its new position Tuesday after holding talks in Washington with South Korea (news - web sites) and Japan.
But it insisted that it would not allow North Korea's nuclear program to become a bargaining chip. Pyongyang has threatened war in the event of U.S. economic sanctions over the issue.
"The 'nuclear issue' that renders the situation on the Korean peninsula strained is a product of the U.S. strategy to dominate the world whereby it is working hard to bring a holocaust of a nuclear war to the Korean nation, calling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike after deploying lots of nuclear weapons in and around South Korea," KCNA said. Meanwhile, in further diplomatic efforts to end the crisis, a South Korean presidential envoy, Yim Sung-joon, was due at the White House Wednesday while U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who led Tuesday's talks with South Korean and Japanese officials, was to visit Asia at the end of the week.
"The United States is willing to talk to North Korea about how it will meet its obligations to the international community," the three countries said in a joint statement.
"However, the U.S. delegation stressed that the United States will not provide quid pro quos to North Korea to live up to its existing obligations."
The United States has branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran and believes it to be building nuclear weapons but has ruled out a military attack.
North Korea's riposte is that Washington is the world's biggest producer and seller of weapons of mass destruction. South Koreans have been less worried about a perceived North Korean threat than some of their Western allies because they have lived with Pyongyang's bombastic rhetoric for half a century.
SEOUL'S IRAQ FEARS
"What is more serious to us is a war over Iraq because of what it will do to oil prices," said Chung Doo-sun, a fund manager with CJ Investment Trust Management. "War in Iraq is an uncontrollable risk to us. In whatever direction the North Korean issue is developing, we know it will not lead to a war."
North and South Korea are technically still at war because the truce that ended their 1950-53 conflict never led to a peace treaty, but both look forward to eventual reunification of a country which dates back some 5,000 years.
"People do not think that there is going to be a war in the Korean peninsula," a Unification Ministry official told Reuters.
"People want to solve this issue through dialogue or other peaceful tactics, not through military force."
South Korea's benchmark stock index stayed steady in the morning, partly on the U.S. comments on North Korea, but slipped in the afternoon. The South Korean won was slightly lower but North Korea was not a factor, dealers said.
KCNA reported that more than 100,000 residents of the North's capital, Pyongyang, massed Tuesday to show support for Kim Jong-il's leadership on the 55th anniversary of the founding of the DPRK -- the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
A banner in the square, which is named after Kim Il-sung, Kim's late father and the state's founder, summed up sentiment. "Let's make a great victory this year... the 55th anniversary of DPRK establishment on the back of a god-like leader."
SWIPE AT TOKYO
North Korea denounced Japan, meanwhile, for meddling in its business.
"The nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula arose because of the United States and it has nothing to do with Japan," the South's Yonhap news agency quoted Pyongyang Radio as saying.
"Japan has the effrontery to intervene in the nuclear matter and complicate the issue. It is none of their business."
Yonhap said South Korean president-elect Roh Moo-hyun would meet two Japanese delegations next week to discuss the crisis.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Tuesday that Pyongyang had "only a matter of weeks" to readmit the IAEA inspectors it expelled last week. Their ejection prompted the new crisis. Earlier, the reclusive North had intensified its rhetoric, demanding Washington open talks and saying any sanctions over its nuclear program would "mean a war, and the war knows no mercy."
President Bush (news - web sites) had hinted at the U.S. change in position Monday, saying "we'll have dialogue," without setting any conditions.
PRECONDITION DROPPED
His aides said later North Korea must first dismantle its nuclear weapon programs, a precondition they acknowledged on Tuesday they had dropped. "This is a step forward from what we have been saying and doing," one senior U.S. official said.
Tensions flared in late December when Pyongyang expelled the inspectors and vowed to fire up a reactor idle since a 1994 pact with Washington that froze its nuclear program in exchange for oil supplies from the West. The U.S. decision marked a partial step in the direction of South Korea, which has argued for dialogue with the North.
In media leaks over the weekend, South Korea dropped hints it wanted the United States to give North Korea security assurances and a promise to resume energy supplies in return for Pyongyang dismantling its nuclear programs.
Washington is seeking to play down the threat from North Korea, which some analysts believe may already possess one or two nuclear weapons, as it prepares for possible war with Iraq.
It accuses Baghdad of seeking weapons of mass destruction but believes it has not yet acquired nuclear weapons.
Does everyone remember why we face the North Korean issue today? We face it because nearing fifty years ago the United Nations accepted a cease-fire that has never resulted in a ceasation of war. We have a truce, but still exist under a state of war for all intents and purposes.
Did the United Nations seek to resolve this issue? It's been 47 years. What deadlines were set along the way? What ultimatums were delivered?
Today the United Nations is as silent as a church mouse on the subject of North Korea posessing nuclear weapons.
I mention this because this is the legacy of the United Nations in a nutshell. They damn our allies, coddle our enemies and inceasantly involve us in quagmires that are assured to keep our troops involved for decades if not centuries.
North Korea, Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, Lebanon... the list goes on. Can anyone name a war, skirmish or peace process the United Nations involved the United States in that has been resolved, all troops disbursed back to their home nation? If you can think of one instance, you're doing better than I can.
The initial mandate of the UN was to prevent wars through providing a means of debate and resolution of differences by peaceful means. This mandate has seldom been met. Where it has a bandaid has been placed on the problem, which once removed will result in us being right back where we were, one two six twenty or fifty years before. Nothing is resolved. The issues still remain. War is still imminent even up to half a century later.
Instead of fighting the fight to an end and obtaininga just surrender that everyone can live with, we now expend vast sums of money on expeditionary forces in perpetuity.
Unless we kick North Korea's ass, it's going to be on the verge of war 2000 years from now. That's the sad truth.
Soviet Russia, North Korea, China... the list goes on. These pariah nations seldom if ever receive criticism from the UN. Our allies, specificly Israel are singled out over and over again for special condemnation from the UN. Noticibly free from criticism accept in an offhanded manner are Yasser Arafat, Hesballah and the other rogues of war.
The UN is worthless. It is less than worthless. It is a net negative. It sucks our funds and then just plain sucks in return.
Kofi Annan could do the world a favor. He could disolve the organization. Course we could withdraw under a momentary period of clarity and sanity, but neither will happen. We'll coddle the North. We let them develop their nukes. We'll let those nukes be proliferated to the middle east and terrorist cells. We'll huff and we'll puff and we'll absolve our national security agencies when the unthinkable happens. Then we'll explain how unimaginable it all was and put every citizen of the US in shackles to keep it from happening again.
Yakov Smirnov had it right. What a country!
It is a conceptual gap based on differing cultural factors that might indeed take pages to explain; basically it comes down to a fundamental difference between unbridled fatalistic ruthlessness (even if masked in surface pleasantries), on the one hand, and Judeo-Christian benevolent naivety which shows all of it's cards and is fundamentally optimistic, exporting ones ethics blindly upon an adversary with whom those concepts may not even resonate.
Regardless, a quick spin throught the pages of Sun-Tzu's "Art of War" might help me illustrate the differences for you.
Cheers,
On the other hand, no way with us fighting one of the axis countries can we afford to NOT up our security status with respect to the other enemy nations.
Absolutely. The herd is becoming overpopulated because we removed the predator from the feeding ground (at our taxpayers expense I might add). Time to thin the herd by reintroducing the predator. Trust me, if Japan gets back in the game you won't hear a peep out of the commies.
In fact, all this is about is an opportunity for the NKs to listen to our diplomats lecuture about dismantling their program. Not a concession. Not a discussion. Bush is at best treating them like a child who is pretending he forgot how to clean his room.
What is really amazing is that anyone at all is fooled by this. I'm glad that shifty poker player Bush is at the helm, because he's pulling fast ones left and right.
Apparently we've thought about that and believe that us and the South Koreans can hold them in check long enough to complete the deal in Iraq and transfer forces to the Korean theater.
And if that will not suffice, we will use nukes to save our troops from getting over-run, as Rummy and Rice have intimated.
North Korea steps up rhetoric in nuclear dispute North Korea has again accused the United States of increasing the threat of nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. The official North Korean news agency said the Americans were spreading false rumours in order to engineer a confrontation between the two Koreas. It was the first statement from the North since the United States said that it was willing to open direct talks about Pyongyang's nuclear programme. The United States' offer,- reversing its previous policy,- followed talks in Washington with South Korean and Japanese diplomats. Pyongyang sparked the crisis when it admitted to re-activating a nuclear plant capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. Adding to the pressure on North Korea, the International Atomic Energy Agency repeated that Pyonyang had "a matter of weeks" to readmit inspectors to its nuclear facilities before the agency would report the regime to the UN Security Council.
I disagree. The U.S. made a reasonable concession in order to facilitate negotiations, and now NK has taken on the role of war-monger.
They've kindly strengthened our hand.
NK is going to go down in flames. Japanese , SKorean, or American flames but they WILL go down.
No, I believed as I do now, that every time Bush said "we aren't going to invade", he only drove their heels in further.
He did not have to say "we will invade". But he did need to hold off on the "we won't invade" rhetoric as well as the actions of the State Department.
Just to set the record straight, the "just surrender" to which you refer would have had to have come from the Chinese, and by extension the Soviet Union, and not the North Koreans (whom we destroyed in 1950).
Once you add in that inconvenient fact, your comment loses much of its force.
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