Here's another interesting twist to 'the NK problem'.
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atimes.com
The Asia Times
February 16, 2002
The Koreas
Is George W ignoring George Sr's advice on Korea?
By Tim Shorrock
WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush is likely to encounter the largest anti-American demonstrations of his presidency when he visits South Korea next week. From the highest levels of President Kim Dae-jung's government to the lowest-paid industrial workers in the street, there is anger and consternation at Bush's threats to use military force to change the behavior of North Korea, which he claims is one of three countries conspiring in an "axis of evil" threatening the United States.
While US journalists and foreign-policy analysts debate the wisdom of the new policy, one of the most curious aspects of the president's new foreign policy has gone virtually unnoticed in the media: the role played by his own father in trying to ease tensions with North Korea over the past year. Is George W, who calls his father one of his most trusted advisers, rejecting the former president's counsel on Korea?
year ago, Bush Sr made his views on Korea known in a memo written by Donald Gregg, his former national security adviser, that he forwarded to his son. According to an account in the New York Times, the memo urged George W to "adopt a more moderate position" on North Korea "instead of going with the advice he was receiving from the Pentagon". Gregg argued that "Washington should re-engage with North Korea because not to do so would seriously undermine the current government in South Korea and hurt United States security interests in North Asia", the Times said.
Bush Sr certainly had the experience to make such a judgment. As director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US ambassador to China, chief US representative to the United Nations and vice president, he developed lasting ties with the region's political leaders and an understanding of the complexities of Korea's relations with other Pacific powers. In 1982 he visited Seoul as vice president and addressed the Korean National Assembly. Gregg, who was Bush's ambassador to Seoul and is now president of the Korea Society, was CIA station chief in Seoul during the 1970s and is credited by Kim Dae-jung for saving his life when he was kidnapped by the Korean CIA in 1978.
Bush also has extensive relationships with Korean business leaders through his ties with the Carlyle Group, the Washington private equity fund with a major stake in South Korea. As senior adviser to Carlyle's Asian advisory board, he meets annually with a powerful group of prominent statesmen, industrialists and financiers from the Asia region to strategize about Carlyle's Asian investments. Three years ago, Bush led a Carlyle delegation to Seoul.
Now, flash back to last spring. In March, George W stuck a knife in the heart of Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine" policy toward North Korea by calling the North untrustworthy and reversing president Bill Clinton's policy of negotiating an end to Pyongyang's ballistic-missile program. Bush's remarks, which were made on live television with Kim standing next to him, shocked and embarrassed the former dissident and directly contradicted his own Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had told reporters the day before that Bush would pick up where president Clinton left off in his talks with Pyongyang.
Under language negotiated by Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright, North Korea was ready to end all of its exports, production and testing of long-range ballistic missiles - the very dangers cited by President Bush in his "axis of evil" speech - in return for diplomatic recognition from the United States and economic aid. "This was a breakthrough of incalculable proportions, and we left it sitting on the table," said Don Oberdorfer, the former diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post and author of The Two Koreas.
Coming less than a year after President Kim made his historic visit to Pyongyang to sign a reconciliation agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, Bush's reversal was a severe blow to Korean efforts to move toward reconciliation after facing the threat of nuclear war for more than 50 years. Many Koreans saw the new policies as a cynical attempt by Bush and other hardliners to win support for his missile defense program, which is based in large part on the alleged threat of missiles fired from North Korea. Within weeks, North Korea withdrew from its talks with the South and the reconciliation process went into deep freeze. Meanwhile, South Korean conservatives, seeing an opportunity to challenge Kim's policies in advance of this year's presidential elections, used Bush's comments as a weapon in their campaign to discredit the "Sunshine" policy. It was about that time that Bush Sr sent his memo.
The advice had an immediate impact. Within weeks, the president and Powell declared that they were ready to talk to North Korea "any time, anywhere". The shift, said the New York Times, was "the first concrete evidence of the elder Bush's hand in a specific policy arena" with his son's administration. But Bush and Powell angered North Korea by adding new conditions for the negotiations, such as accelerated inspections of its nuclear facilities and a reduction in North Korea's conventional forces along the demilitarized zone (DMZ).
Some former US diplomats experienced with North Korean negotiating tactics said the Bush demands were unreasonable, particularly since Pyongyang has honored its commitment not to test-fire any missiles - a claim recently verified by the CIA. Gregg and others in favor of dialogue urged the administration to take steps that would encourage Pyongyang to start talking again. "I think North Korea wants to resume the dialogue," he told a Washington conference on Korea last fall. "But as an Asian nation they've lost face. They're looking for a gesture from us to get the talks started."
After September 11, Korea fell by the wayside as Bush concentrated on the war in Afghanistan. But the administration remained concerned about North Korean sales of its Nodong missiles to Pakistan and its technical assistance to Syria and other countries. For reasons that remain unclear, Bush and his foreign-policy team decided to incorporate in his January State of the Union speech the North Korean threat into their vision of an "axis" of enemy nations bent on terrorizing the world and attacking the United States.
In response to Bush's verbal attacks, North Korea accused the United States of trying to start another war on the Korean peninsula. Last week, it canceled a visit to Pyongyang of a group of former US officials that was to include Gregg, former US ambassador to Seoul William Gleysteen and others. Gregg so far has been silent about the recent events.
But even analysts who support Bush's hardline stance over Clinton's interest in open-ended negotiations are concerned that Bush's policies will be hard to explain to Seoul. Victor Cha, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations study group on Korea, blames North Korea for the breakdown in intra-Korean dialogue. "They started backing away on the rail links and family visits" long before Bush took office, he said. Still, he is concerned "that the United States not be seen as an enemy of Korean peace, and there's now the potential for that". Bush, Cha added, "has a position but no policy".
So whom is President Bush paying attention to, if not his father? "He's listening to the ideologues," said Leon V Sigal, a consultant to the Social Science Research Council in New York and author of a book about nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. "It's a very divided administration."
Kurt Campbell, who was responsible for Northeast Asia policy at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, said the new president was deeply affected by the briefings he received at the start of his administration on starvation in North Korea and the resources Pyongyang was devoting to the military. He noted that senior officials in the Bush administration, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, all "refer to people dieing in North Korea" in their explanation for the new hardline policy.
But probably the biggest influence on Bush, Campbell said, comes from the CIA briefing he receives every morning. In contrast to president Clinton, who received his briefing in writing and had a distant relationship with CIA director George Tenet, Bush gets his information directly from Tenet. Because President Bush is still learning about foreign policy, Tenet's briefings "have an enormous impact on how his world view is shaped", Campbell said. Next week, that world view will be sorely tested.
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