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by Noah Tucker / February 19th 2007

Bad Behaviour

“I'm afraid North Korea has won,” fumed John R. Bolton, the USA’s former ambassador to the United Nations; and he added that North Korea has secured the deal by means of its “bad behaviour”- by which he meant the creation of material for nuclear warheads, its missile launches and the detonation of an atomic device last October.

It must be a very strange experience for Bolton to find himself out of step with George Bush and in step with so much of world opinion; take for instance Dmitri Kosyrev, political commentator for the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, who wrote on 14^th February:

“Washington has capitulated at the six-nation talks on the North Korean nuclear problem in Beijing…”

Kosyrev noted that the Beijing Agreement:

“…fits the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1994 agreements with the Clinton administration, under which Pyongyang abandoned its nuclear plans, to receive fuel oil until the construction of a light-water nuclear reactor according to the KEDO (Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization) specifications is completed.”

Kosyrev predicted that the USA would try to present the deal in the best possible light:

“There are PR experts who can present Washington's diplomatic capitulation as its victory and Pyongyang's defeat. This can be done because few people now remember that the conflict began with unsubstantiated US accusations, or know about the situation in North Korea at that time.”

But John Bolton is too angry to try to spin the Beijing agreement into a diplomatic success for the United States; and in any case his own undoubted PR skills occupy a rather different niche. Bolton, who was George W. Bush’s Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security before his 14 months as the US representative in the UN, has been a prolific specialist in manufacturing ‘WMD’ allegations, with the aim of providing pretexts for threats, sanctions and war.

Proliferator of accusations

By Bolton’s own account, it was in January 2002 that he named Iraq and North Korea as countries which had covert nuclear weapons programmes.

On January 29^th 2002, President Bush made the famous speech in which he said of North Korea, Iran and Iraq:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”

On 6^th May 2002, Bolton gave an address to the right-wing Heritage Foundation entitled 'Beyond the Axis of Evil', in which he extended the WMD accusations to Syria, Libya and Cuba. In respect of the latter, he stated:

“For four decades Cuba has maintained a well-developed and sophisticated biomedical industry, supported until 1990 by the Soviet Union. This industry is one of the most advanced in Latin America, and leads in the production of pharmaceuticals and vaccines that are sold worldwide. Analysts and Cuban defectors have long cast suspicion on the activities conducted in these biomedical facilities.

“Here is what we now know: The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are concerned that such technology could support BW programs in those states. We call on Cuba to cease all BW-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.”

The insinuation was then taken up by Colin Powell and other White House officials. CNN reported on 14^th May 2002:

“ ‘The United States has plenty of reason to be concerned’ that Cuba has given such technology -- which could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction -- to nations hostile to the United States, said Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary.”

The CNN article continued:

“But when pressed on whether the administration had any ‘hard evidence’ that countries are using Cuban biotechnology to develop biological weapons, Fleischer said, ‘Nobody in the government said hard evidence. We said we have concerns.’ ”

In other words, the allegation was completely baseless.

Bolton also played a key role in the construction of the spurious WMD allegations against Iraq. It was his office which ensured that the bogus assertion that Iraq had sought to obtain yellowcake (partially enriched uranium) from Niger was included in a State Department fact-sheet in December 2002. The allegation later turned out to be based on a forged document.

Evidence, schmevidence

Although Bolton’s dark star has – possibly temporarily – fallen, his legacy lives on. His impressive work to convince the US public that Iran’s nuclear programme poses a threat to the world may yet provide the United States or Israel with the necessary pretext for a military strike.

Not an atomic beggar

A common media interpretation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) government’s strategy is that it is using the threat that it will acquire the ability to produce nuclear weapons in order to blackmail other countries into providing it with economic aid. For instance, a background article on the BBC News website comes close to conjuring an image of North Korea as a kind of nuclear-armed beggar:

“…Pyongyang's diplomatic bluster is inextricably linked to its need to keep what remains of its economy propped up by donations.”

The promised provision of fuel oil to North Korea under the Beijing Agreement, and the DPRK’s insistence in previous negotiations that it should be provided with light-water nuclear power generating facilities, have been reported in ways which appear to support this interpretation. The very selective reporting of the facts which underlies this interpretation needs to be redressed.

North Korea constructed a relatively small graphite-moderated nuclear power generating plant at Yongbyon in 1987. This reactor is similar to those used in the USSR, and to the Magnox plants built in Britain in the 1950s. By 1992, the DPRK had two much larger Magnox-type power stations under construction.

This shift to nuclear energy made perfect economic sense. North Korea’s coal deposits are insufficient for the country’s energy needs, and its exports do not generate enough hard currency to buy adequate supplies of petroleum. But North Korea's geology can provide ample uranium ore for atomic energy.

Of course, an interesting by-product of graphite-moderated nuclear power generation is plutonium which can be refined for military use. And, given the loss of the USSR and the emergence of the USA as a trigger-happy sole superpower, it made perfect strategic sense to assume that the DPRK would seek to acquire the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Although the USA claims that it has no nuclear weapons at its military bases in South Korea, the Korean peninsula is a strategic focus of the hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles, planes, ships and submarines which the USA deploys from its bases in Okinawa, mainland Japan and Guam.

In 1994, the Clinton administration made use of the good offices of ex-President Carter, who helped negotiate the basis of an agreement which became known as the Agreed Framework. According to the text of the agreement:

“Both sides will cooperate to replace the DPRK’s graphite-moderated
reactors and related facilities with light-water reactor (LWR) power
plants…

“…the US, representing the consortium, will make arrangements to
offset the energy foregone due to the freeze of the DPRK’s graphite-
moderated reactors and related facilities, pending completion of the first LWR unit.

“Alternative energy will be provided in the form of heavy oil for heating and electricity production.”

The envisaged LWR plants could not be used to produce material for nuclear weapons.

On paper, the Framework should have met the stated aims of both sides, including ending the economic sanctions which had been used against North Korea since its independence in 1948:

“The two sides will move toward full normalization of political and
economic relations.

“Within three months of the date of this Document, both sides will reduce
barriers to trade and investment, including restrictions on telecommunications services and financial transactions.”

And in exchange for staying within the Non-Proliferation Treaty and allowing inspections, the North Koreans would get a written guarantee that the USA would not threaten it with nuclear weapons or use nuclear weapons against it:

“The US will provide formal assurances to the DPRK, against the threat or
use of nuclear weapons by the US.”

High hopes and bad faith

North Korea froze its graphite-moderated reactors for eight years, but while heavy fuel oil was (intermittently) delivered, the other commitments of the United States under the Agreed Framework were not.

As a report in the New York Times in October 2006 revealed, the USA never had any intention of providing the light-water reactors to a communist-led North Korea. The expectation was that the continued trade and technology sanctions and the burden of very high military expenditure would bring down the Korean Worker’s Party government before the reactors were due to be delivered:

“The belief that the North Korean economy was collapsing helped shape White House thinking in 1994 when it promised to deliver light-water reactors to North Korea by 2003 in exchange for Pyongyang [signing back onto the non-proliferation treaty]… Senior Clinton administration officials said privately at the time that they did not expect Mr. Kim’s government to be in power by the time the United States had to make good on its pledge.”

In October 2002, claiming that North Korea was producing highly enriched uranium (HEU) for atomic weapons, the Bush administration arranged with its Consortium partners, Japan and South Korea, to suspend the heavy fuel oil consignments- the only thing that the DPRK had actually gained from the Agreed Framework.

No evidence has ever been produced for the HEU allegation, and it is notable that US experts agree that the device which North Korea detonated in October 2006 used plutonium, not enriched uranium, as its fissile material.

The DPRK’s countermove was to terminate its own commitments under the Agreed Framework. By January 2003, it had withdrawn from the NPT, expelled the IAEA inspectors and re-started the reactor at Yongbyon.

Construction work at Yongbyon

The options for the USA were limited; to further alienate Russia, China and Western Europe by notching-up the stakes against North Korea while preparing for and making war against Iraq was diplomatically untenable. In April 2003, US and DPRK officials were in Beijing for ‘talks about talks’; in August that year, the first round of the Six-Party Talks, involving the USA, Russia, China, Japan and both Koreas, took place.

In these on-off negotiations, Kim Jong Il, although merely a ‘dear leader’ (unlike his father Kim Il Sung who was revered as North Korea’s ‘great leader’) showed some talent in asymmetric diplomatic warfare. The USA’s opening gambit, that the DPRK must first disable its nuclear facilities, leading to a second stage of discussions in which the USA might consider making some concessions, was trumped in February 2005 when North Korea announced that it had succeeded in developing nuclear weapons.

The USA had two declared motives for holding its negotiations with North Korea on a ‘six-party’ basis. Firstly, it did not wish to be drawn into direct one-to-one diplomacy with the DPRK because this would accord legitimacy to a ‘rogue’ regime; secondly, it wished to enlist China and Russia as partners in exerting pressure on North Korea. But both Russia and China were becoming more confident with their improving economic situations, and the United States was discovering that there was a downside to the multilateral aspect of the talks.

At the September 2005 round of the Six-Party Talks, the United States had to moderate its position, and it appeared that the DPRK’s stance of step-by-step advances involving practical moves by both sides could bear fruit. But two moves by the USA increased the pressure on North Korea and led to the temporary derailment of diplomacy.

In September 2005 the USA, alleging that the DPRK is the manufacturer of the ‘supernotes’, the almost perfect fake $50 and $100 bills which have been in global circulation since 1989, took action under the US Patriot Act against the Banco Delta Asia based in Macao, forcing the Macao government to freeze the accounts of this bank which was used by companies involved in trade with, and inward investment in, the North Korean economy. This was followed by a successful global campaign to intimidate banks from having any dealings with the DPRK. It soon became extremely difficult to arrange finance for any international transactions involving North Korea.

Despite requests by Russia and by companies adversely affected, the US Government has cited security reasons for refraining to produce any evidence that the ‘supernotes’ are North Korean products. On 6^th January 2007, a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a report which suggested that the ‘supernotes’, which are made using US-made cotton and special US-made inks, and which require very expensive high-tech specialised machinery to produce, may be manufactured by the CIA to finance officially unapproved covert operations.

Then in November 2005, the United States formally withdrew from the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), the consortium involving also South Korea, Japan and the EU, which had been set up in 1994 to build the promised light water reactors for North Korea. It seemed that the Six Party Talks had followed the Agreed Framework into the grave.

North Korea’s responses in 2006, the July missile tests and the nuclear detonation in October, attracted almost universal condemnation and allowed the USA to gain UN Security Council agreement for additional sanctions. But at the same time, the Six Party Talks were revived, with negotiations proceeding along the lines of the North Korean proposal for mutual staged advances, resulting in the agreement on 13^th February 2007.

Trading with the enemy

Is Bolton’s assessment of the Beijing Agreement as a victory for the DPRK an accurate one? The agreement does not, as yet, address the issue of the light-water nuclear reactors. The practical realisation many of its promises is left to commissions and good will. But, like the Agreed Framework, it points in the direction of normalisation and peaceful relations. For instance:

“The DPRK and the US will start bilateral talks aimed at resolving bilateral issues and moving toward full diplomatic relations. The US will begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state sponsor of terrorism, and advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect with the DPRK.”

The relaxation of financial and trade sanctions and the resumption of supply of fuel oil are likely to be of huge benefit in allowing the country to develop economically. It is likely that Washington will procrastinate and backtrack over normalisation of economic and diplomatic relations with Pyongyang; but a signal has been given that countries and companies can legitimately engage with North Korea, which has for many years been starved of investment.

Within hours of the success of the talks, the business journal Forbes reported the announcement that a “joint venture assembly plant in North Korea in which the local government owns a 30% stake” will be expanded:

“Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd, the Chinese partner of BMW AG, said it has signed an agreement with South Korea's Pyeonghwa Motors Corp (PMC) to assemble its Jinbei Haice mini-buses in North Korea…

“ ‘If the Haice project is successful, the two partners (Brilliance China and PMC) are very likely to consider further cooperation on the production of Brilliance China's other brands of vehicles in North Korea,’ said the statement.”

The cries of betrayal voiced by John Bolton and other ultra-imperialist figures following the announcement of the Beijing Agreement represent much more than just a disagreement about the terms of this deal. The neo-cons have indeed been betrayed, but not by George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. They have been betrayed by a real world which is not following the path set out for it by the ‘Project for a New American Century’. The USA’s drive for full-spectrum world dominance has been confronted in Asia by resurgent Russia and rising China, and in Latin America by the new socialism; the invasion of Iraq has generated unforeseen consequences which are as politically ghastly for United States imperial power as they are ghastly in human terms for the people in Iraq. The American signature on the Beijing Agreement is a recognition that the 21^st Century is not going according to plan.

The Daily Telegraph has suggested that through the compromise made in Beijing, the USA may be purchasing some time during which it can concentrate on isolating and threatening

Iran

. Maybe so, and elements in the United States government may believe that if the USA finds a way to impose its will on Iran, either through sanctions and diplomatic pressure or by direct or Israeli military strikes, the US can return to the issue of North Korea invigorated and emboldened. But the

Iraq

experience indicates that this might be a vain hope.

And although the DPRK itself has been careful to refrain from boasting of a tactical victory over the US superpower, the celebrations on 16^th February on the occasion of Kim Jong Il’s 65^th birthday proceeded in an optimistic mood. Unusually, in the Western media’s reports of the celebrations, the usual remarks about the bizarre eccentricities of the ‘dear leader’ were muted.

Which is surely bad reporting. After all, to face down the most powerful country on earth, you have to be at least a little bit crazy.