On Saturday, the U.N. Security Council voted 15-0 to impose financial and weapons sanctions on North Korea, following its Oct. 9 nuclear test, Reuters reported.[1] -- Strong action against the North Korean regime was tempered by China's fear of the consequences should it collapse. -- U.S. officials pretended to present the resolution as a positive step. -- But as Jim Lobe observed on Wednesday, the neoconservatives who still have a strong, if weakened, grip on U.S. foreign policy are looking at events in North Korea as a demonstration that their doctrine of aggressive war, dressed up as "pre-emption," is the only valid approach to dictatorships.[2] -- "[Bush] must now choose," wrote Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, "whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill." -- If the administration listens to neoconservative advice, as its most influential member, Vice President Dick Cheney, is usally inclined to do, it will inclined to use the North Korean case as a justification for an aggressive, hardline approach to other brewing crises as well: "This crisis is not just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba as well," wrote Rubin this week....
1.
U.N. PUTS SANCTIONS ON N. KOREA; MULLS IMPLEMENTATION
By Evelyn Leopold and Michelle Nichols
Reuters
October 14, 2006
UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose financial and weapons sanctions on North Korea for its claimed nuclear test in a resolution that Pyongyang immediately rejected.
The U.S.-drafted resolution, which said the reclusive Communist state's action was a "clear threat to international peace and security," allows nations to stop cargo going to and from North Korea to check for weapons of mass destruction or related supplies.
The resolution bars trade with North Korea in dangerous weapons. It also impose bans on heavy conventional weapons and luxury goods and asks nations to freeze funds connected with North Korea's unconventional arms programs.
North Korea's U.N. ambassador, Pak Gil Yon, walked out of the council after he spoke. He accused members of "gangster-like" action for adopting the resolution and ignoring the threat from the United States against his country.
Pak said Pyongyang considered any further U.S. pressure a "declaration of war." North Korea has issued similar statements before, but this time it was before a formal audience.
Enforcement will largely depend on whether those who have traded with North Korea honor the bans, which now also have the support of neighboring China, the closest ally of North Korea, as well as Russia.
A U.N. sanctions committee will distribute a list of which weapons and related supplies are banned.
President Bush said the resolution showed "the world is united in our opposition to its nuclear weapons plans" and Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Aso said North Korea had to "take concrete measures to resolve the issue."
CHINA'S WORRIES
As for North Korea's reaction, China warned the 15 Security Council members not to provoke Pyongyang by "provocative steps," in particular the stopping of suspicious cargo going to and leaving North Korea to check on weapons.
Although this provision was somewhat softened at China's request, it still authorizes countries to inspect cargo, thereby putting an international imprimatur on the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative. The PSI was launched in May 2003 and encourages countries to interdict weapons from North Korea, Iran, and other states of concern.
"China strongly urges the countries concerned to adopt a prudent and responsible attitude in this regard and refrain from taking any provocative steps that may intensify the tensions," its U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, said.
In Washington, a preliminary U.S. intelligence analysis showed radioactivity in air samples collected near the suspected nuclear test site, a U.S. official said on Friday. But there has been no conclusive statement on the test.
U.S. officials believe the resolution has spurred international cooperation against North Korea. To this end Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plans to visit Japan, South Korea and China later next week.
"We will talk about our efforts to enforce the provisions and the steps they are likely to take," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kristen Silverberg said. "We want to see each domestic regime moving as quickly as possible to enact whatever legislation they need."
Most of Pyongyang's trade crosses through China, which fears a flood of refugees if the Pyongyang government collapses. North Korea also rests between China's border and South Korea, where 25,000 U.S. troops are stationed.
"North Korea is already very familiar with poverty," former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung told Reuters in an e-mail interview. "The country can also get support, at least in order to survive, from countries such as China."
Kim, the architect of South Korea's engagement policy with the North, blamed U.S. policy in part for the nuclear crisis, which he said could only end if Washington held direct talks with Pyongyang, which the Bush administration rejects
The Bush administration has been urged to talk to South Korea by Russia, China, and some leading Democrats.
"We have to talk not only with friends but also with enemies, if necessary," Kim said.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told the Security Council's 15 members: "Today we are sending a strong and clear message to North Korea and other would-be proliferators that there will be serious repercussions in continuing to pursue weapons of mass destruction."
Next week, the Security Council begins considering sanctions against Iran for its refusal to suspend it nuclear program. Iran's foreign ministry said on Saturday threats of sanctions were "psychological war" and it was more determined than ever to pursue "the peaceful use of nuclear energy."
Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters after the vote that deliberations were made more difficult because the United States had imposed unilateral sanctions on both North Korea and Iran.
But Bolton told reporters he hoped Iran would pay attention to the North Korea resolution because deliberation on Tehran's actions would come next.
"I'm sure they're watching in Tehran what we do on this North Korea resolution and I hope they watch closely," he said on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Lee Suwan in Seoul, Sue Pleming and and David Morgan in Washington)
2.
Politics
U.S. NEOCONS CALL FOR JAPANESE NUKES, REGIME CHANGE
By Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
October 11, 2006
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35067
WASHINGTON -- Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neoconservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.
Writing in publications from National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neoconservatives claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by "realist" and other critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates their long-held view that negotiations with "rogue" states like North Korea are useless and that "regime change" -- by military means, if necessary -- is the only answer.
"With our intelligence on North Korea so uneven, the doctrine of pre-emption must return to the fore," wrote Dan Blumenthal, an Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who worked for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during Bush's first term, in the NRO Tuesday. "Any talk of renewed six-party talks [involving China, Japan, Russia, the U.S. and the two Koreas] must be resisted."
The North Korean test "has stripped any plausibility to arguments that engaging dictators works," according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at AEI, who added that the Bush administration now faces a "watershed" in its relations with other states that have defied Washington in recent years.
"This crisis is not just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba as well," according to Rubin. "Bush now has two choices: to respond forcefully and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm that defiance pays and that international will is illusionary.
". . . (He) must now choose whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill," he added in a reference to the pre-World War II debate between the "appeasement" of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of his successor, Winston Churchill.
The neoconservatives, whose influence on the Bush administration has generally been on the wane since late 2003 when it became clear that the Iraq war that they had done so much to champion was going badly, nonetheless retain some clout, particularly through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Rumsfeld.
They are opposed by the "realists" who are concentrated in the State Department and also include former secretary of state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard Armitage; and a number of top national security officials in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, such as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state James Baker, who just last weekend publicly called for Washington to directly engage its "enemies", including North Korea, Syria, and Iran.
That stance is anathema to the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, such as Cheney, who, at one national security council meeting on North Korea several years ago, was reported to have said, "We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
The neo-conservatives' main area of concern has historically been the Middle East -- indeed, their central focus in recent months has been publicizing the threats to the U.S. and Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and opposing any realist appeals to engage Tehran and Damascus in direct talks. But they have also been warning for some time against "the appeasement" of North Korea and its chief source of material aid and support, China.
In their view, Beijing has always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms programs, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China sees itself as a "strategic rival" of Washington, a phrase much favored by administration hawks during Bush's first year in office.
Indeed, in the most prominent neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to "punish China" for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.
Among them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is sometimes credited with inventing the phrase "axis of evil," in which North Korea, Iran, and Iraq were lumped together, for Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, urged the administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South Korea to do the same, and thus force China to "shoulder the cost of helping to avert" North Korea's economic collapse.
Frum, who is also based at AEI, urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to be invited to join NATO and that Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, to send observers to NATO meetings.
Frum, who in 2003 co-authored "An End to Evil" with former Defense Policy Board chairman, also suggested that Washington "encourage Japan to renounce the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent."
"A nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea dread most (after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea or Taiwan)," he asserted.
"Not only would the nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea," he wrote, "but it would also go far to meet our goal of dissuading Iran (from trying to obtain a nuclear weapons) . . . The analogue for Iran, of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel's capacity to hit targets with nuclear weapons," according to Frum.
Other neo-conservatives echoed Blumenthal's position that the Six-Party Talks should be abandoned and called for the administration to resist any further appeals for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang -- repeatedly made by China, South Korea, and Russia, as well as by realists here, over the past several years.
"There will be renewed calls for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang. That would be a mistake," according to the lead editorial in the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal, which also urged the U.S. to "make clear that a military response is not off the table."
Other commentators called for strong efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, called for covert action, including "sabotage, espionage, information operations, subversion, deception -- the works. A highly paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim (Jong Il's) will be highly susceptible to these methods," he predicted.
At the same time, former House Speaker and DPB member Newt Gingrich, who is also based at AEI, said he favored continuing shipments of U.S. food aid but through a covert delivery system "consciously designed to undermine the dictatorship."
"Food might be parachuted into the country, delivered from submarines and small boats by clandestine services, shipped in from China and Russia through anti-regime middlemen, and delivered in every way possible to divert energy and authority away from the government and toward an alternative organizing system of individuals dedicated to a better more prosperous life," he wrote.
Like his fellow-neo-conservatives, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, called for accelerated development and deployment of Washington's embryonic but extraordinarily costly missile defense system, including a ship-launched system that can shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges "whether launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our coasts."
He also urged Washington to resume periodic underground nuclear tests of its own, ending a moratorium on such testing announced by former President George H.W. Bush in 1992.