Well, I hope that all of you enjoyed reading yesterday's opinion feature, where the five regular columnists for this newspaper provided their take on the coming invasion of Iraq.
Youssef Sawan's recognition of the burgeoning anti-war movement was on target but activists will want to note closely Mari Armstrong-Hough's analysis of the anti-war movement's need to provide a substantive response to war once it actually starts. And despite my vehement disagreement with his attacks on Progressive Dane, I am compelled to note Eric Kleefeld's deft analysis of the perils of going into Iraq for an extended stay without the backing of Arab nations.
But I want to expand on Morgan Bottner's points about North Korea--about how the Democratic People's' Republic of Korea poses \a graver threat to the United States"" and about how going to war with Iraq and not with North Korea makes no sense, given the Bush Administration's stated interest in enhancing national security through preemptive action. His analysis is incredibly accurate. But digging a little bit deeper into the matter shows, even more clearly than Bottner's necessarily short statement of the facts, why the president's foreign policy is a complete disaster.
Three years ago, the mood on the Korean peninsula was decidedly optimistic. A series of cross-border engagements took place--including, among other things, aid shipments from South Korea and high-level ministerial meetings.
The political highlight of the year was an unprecedented summit meeting in Pyongyang between North Korean Chair Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. But the most overt sign of hope appeared at the Sydney Olympics, where the two Korean delegations marched into the stadium at the Opening Ceremonies--hand in hand--under a specially-designed unity flag. The proceedings led John Burton of The Financial Times to note ""the promise of ending military tensions that have split the Korean peninsula since 1945 and of ushering in a period of peaceful co-existence leading to eventual reunification.""
After the progress and hope of 2000, things began to take a slight turn for the worse. Soon after President Bush was inaugurated, the U.S. foreign policy began to shift away from engagement and toward unilateralism--as demonstrated by the administration's antipathy toward the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. North Korea, as such, was not directly implicated by these early policy changes. Yet, a tangential effect of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast catalyzed a setback for the reunification efforts. After the attacks, South Korean forces were placed on a heightened state of alert. The DPRK took some amount of offense to this move and, after failing to negotiate a compromise, walked out of a November reunification summit.
Then it got much, much worse. 2002 began with the president's ""Axis of Evil"" declaration. This lit the fuse of Kim Jong Il--a man accurately described as a vicious dictator who is incredibly paranoid, but also rather shrewd. Then, in mid-year, the administration began to discuss its new policy of military preemption--a policy that was phrased in general terms but has been directed almost exclusively at Saddam Hussein since its promulgation. With the attention of the Bush administration squarely focused on Iraq, but with the sense that he could be the next Hussein, Kim Jong Il saw an opening and he took it. North Korea revved up its propaganda machine, ejected international observers and restarted its nation's nuclear program.
And so here we are. Three years ago, it seemed that Koreans could be dancing along the demilitarized zone--just like the Germans who danced on the Berlin Wall in 1989--within a decade. Now, we have a dictator who has the carefully-washed minds of his subjects in the palm of his hand, a million-man army that could swarm over the border in droves, missiles that could blow Seoul apart with only a moment's notice and possibly the capability to knock out Tokyo with a nuclear strike. And we cannot call for sanctions, seeing how the North Korean government, through its state-run media mouthpiece, said that economic sanctions would be seen as a ""declaration of war."" Hundreds of thousands of people could die and the world's economic system could collapse--and all on the whims of an unstable ruler with the upper-hand and absolutely nothing to lose.
And then there is this--the North Koreans will not negotiate with the State Department. Instead, they have decided, thus far, to speak only with the Clinton administration's U.N. Ambassador and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
This last fact ought to embarrass every American--New Mexicans excluded. But it also shows beyond any doubt that the Bush administration's foreign policy is an abject failure, and ought to be reworked immediately.
