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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (54093)	10/23/2002 4:12:41 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

fight with strangers on politics You kick around here for a while, you are no longer a stranger. I wish the girls here would get with the "Monaco" look, but still too prudish to go to "bottoms only." It is really funny to see what the Missionaries made the natives wear here 120 years ago. They look like Queen Victoria's Court. Clinton's attitude toward the Military, and reluctance to "Face Down" North Korea, has cost us dearly. Here is an op-ed from Former Secretary of State Baker. washingtonpost.com No More Caving On North Korea By James A. Baker III Wednesday, October 23, 2002; Page A27 Surprise, surprise -- North Korea now admits it has a secret program to develop nuclear weapons. Analysts have suspected for years that the North had already assembled, or was capable of assembling, one or two bombs. Now there are credible reports that Pyongyang may be no more than a year away from mass producing up to six a year. The leaders of North Korea starve their people to maintain the world's fifth-largest military force and with it personal power over a bankrupt country. They earn hard currency by selling advanced missile technology in violation of the international missile technology control regime. Potentially just over the horizon is the ultimate proliferation nightmare -- ballistic missiles fitted with nuclear warheads. This is exceedingly dangerous and enormously troubling. What it is not, however, is surprising. Rather, it is the natural and foreseeable result of the 1994 Framework Agreement between the United States and North Korea. The government of North Korea holds power by force. All it understands is force, strength and resolve. By acceding to blackmail threats and signing the Framework Agreement, the United States turned a policy based on strength into one based on accommodation, compromise and appeasement. North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1985. That treaty required Pyongyang within 18 months to sign a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and allow inspection of its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. Instead, North Korea secretly escalated its nuclear weapons development program. Little-noticed but intensive diplomacy by the first Bush administration forced the North Koreans on Dec. 26, 1991, to end six years of intransigence on signing the safeguards agreement and allowing inspections. In a follow-up meeting in January, the United States bluntly warned Pyongyang that it either had to live up to the international agreements it had just signed or face further isolation and economic deprivation. Pyongyang then refused to live up to the agreements it had signed and -- after a change of U.S. administrations -- threatened to withdraw from the nonproliferation treaty and, worse, to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire." That's when the Clinton administration signed the 1994 Framework Agreement. "This agreement will help achieve a longstanding and vital American objective," President Clinton said at the time, "an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula." But in reality, our policy of carrots and sticks had given way overnight to one of carrots only -- fuel oil to help run North Korea's beleaguered economy, two new nuclear reactors and diplomatic ties. Moreover, Pyongyang was given another five years to do what it had already agreed to do in 1991 -- allow a full inspection of its nuclear facilities. This agreement was an abrupt policy flip-flop, and in the end has, in my view, proved to be a mistake that has made stability on the Korean peninsula less, not more, likely. Given their track record before 1994, there was substantial reason to question whether the North Koreans would ever keep their side of the Framework Agreement. The worst part is that it sent this dangerous message to other would-be proliferators in capitals such as Tehran and Baghdad: "Sometimes crime pays." But those who criticize have an obligation to suggest an alternative approach. So what should we do now? Instead of caving in to Pyongyang's belligerent threats, I think the United States should go to the U.N. Security Council and obtain political and economic sanctions against the North for breach of its solemn international obligations, much as we did against Iraq in 1990; beef up our forces in South Korea to whatever extent necessary; and quietly make it clear to the North Koreans that for more than 40 years the U.S. nuclear deterrent kept the peace in Europe against an overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority, and we are quite prepared to do the same on the Korean peninsula to fulfill our security obligations to South Korea and Japan. How "natural and foreseeable" was it that the Framework Agreement would produce a nuclear-armed North Korea, not "an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula"? Consider this: Subject only to editing to change tenses and time references, omit extraneous material and provide logical transitions, the preceding four paragraphs are word-for-word from my diplomatic memoir, "The Politics of Diplomacy," written in 1994, immediately after the Framework Agreement was signed, and published in 1995. I would offer only a few additional observations. I believe we will be able to get the full support of the U.N. Security Council for the economic and political sanctions elements of this more muscular policy approach. None of the permanent member countries, Russia and China included, wants to see a nuclear-armed North Korea. The United States has properly begun preliminary consultations with those powers and with Japan and South Korea. We've wasted eight years at considerable cost to our nonproliferation efforts, but what should have been done in 1994 can still be done today. The writer was secretary of state from 1989 to 1992.