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January 5, 2004
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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January
5, 2004
North Korea for Dummies:
Basic Facts Good People Should
Know
By GARY LEUPP
The surprise announcement on January 2 is that
North Korea has invited a delegation of U.S. nuclear experts
to visit its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Perhaps the North
Koreans want to show the world that they have what they've been
saying they have---enough plutonium for half a dozen atomic bombs.
And perhaps they will repeat what they've been saying all along:
that they will give it all up in exchange for a serious U.S.
promise not to attack and kill them. (Now is that inscrutable
or what?)
Colin Powell's State Department has been
working with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to negotiate
the dissolution of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. But
on December 12, Vice President Cheney appeared to want to sabotage
that effort, telling those attending a high-level meeting in
Washington that he wants to defeat Pyongyang, not talk
with it. According to a Knight-Ridder report, Cheney stated:
"I have been charged by the President with making sure that
none of the tyrannies in the world are negotiated with. We don't
negotiate with evil; we defeat it." That's just nonsense,
of course; while tyrant Eduard Shevardnadze was in power in the
Republic of Georgia, the U.S. contentedly negotiated with him
about oil pipeline construction and the handling of Islamic terrorism
in the Pankisi Gorge. (Meanwhile Georgia received more U.S. aid
per capita than any country but Israel.) Tyrants Musharraf, Mubarak,
Karimov, etc. negotiate with Washington all the time; Muammar
Qadhafi just negotiated the end of his nuclear program after
months of talks with the U.S. Washington chats with Evil comfortably
and routinely, in businesslike fashion.
Anyway, two weeks after Cheney's statement,
White House spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters, "The US
stands ready to resume the six-party talks [including North Korea]
at an early date and without preconditions, and we are working
with others to do so." So maybe the Bushites are sincere
about negotiating, or maybe they're not; they're divided among
themselves. The odiously influential Richard Perle, and former
Bush speech writer David Frum, have just published a book, An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which declares
that as a premise for negotiations with the U.S., Pyongyang must
completely and immediately abandon its nuclear weapons program.
So it's hard to know what's going on. But the plan currently
under discussion, drafted by the Chinese (who seem to really
not want nukes on either half of the Korean peninsula)
calls for Pyongyang to freeze and dismantle its nuclear weapons
program, in return for security guarantees and economic aid.
In contrast, Cheney's statement called for North Korea to dismantle
its very self under the threat of U.S. attack. More specifically,
Cheney set conditions difficult for a sovereign state to accept:
first North Korea, having been labeled "evil"
by Washington since Bush's first State of the Union speech (and
conflated with dissimilar Iraq and Iran as part of what thinking
people consider a ludicrously contrived "axis of evil")
must dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and make itself more
vulnerable to the defeat Cheney has specifically threatened.
Only then will the Bush administration talk to Pyongyang
about maybe issuing some statement promising not to mount an
attack. Beijing quite reasonably urges Washington to be more
"realistic" and "flexible" in dealing with
North Korea.
The Chinese, unfortunately, aren't talking
to the world's most flexible regime. These particular imperialists
responded to frantic efforts by the Iraqi regime to prevent war
(including the offer, secretly made last December, to accept
hundreds of FBI or military arms inspectors from the U.S.; give
special oil concessions to U.S. firms; and to cooperate with
any U.S.-authored Middle East peace plan) with the demand that
Saddam admit (whether true or not) that he possessed weapons
of mass destruction, place himself in U.S. military custody,
and order his military to surrender
to the U.S. without a fight. That's diplomacy, neocon style.
It requires the enemy to declare, "Yes, you're right, I'm
evil," and then to grovel and capitulate. It takes into
account that the foe will not do that, but his truculence
can then be represented to the American people as a desire to
evilly provoke their own good selves into war.
Nine months ago, John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary
of state for arms control and international security, advised
North Korea (and Iran and Syria) to "draw the appropriate
lesson from Iraq" (Reuters, April 9, 2003). (Fear us,
and obey!) He called the Pyongyang regime a "hellish
nightmare" and actually stated, "The
end of North Korea is our policy." (Mr. Bolton wants
to end North Korea, period. So why bother with diplomatic
speech, and why negotiate anything at all?) Bolton is a leading
neocon, and (with Cheney) adviser to the Jewish Institute of
National Security Affairs, which promotes aggressive assertion
of U.S. military power in the Middle East and everywhere. His
career includes a stint of service to extreme anticommunist war
hawk Barry Goldwater. A friend of the former Senator Jesse Helms,
he strove to thwart African-American voter registration in the
1980s. He has led the Bush administration's opposition to the
International Criminal Court. The North Korean regime, responding
to his attacks on it, have pithily described Mr. Bolton as "human
scum."
Now, I'm no big fan of the Dear Leader,
Kim Jong-il, and the regime he heads. But neither am I a fan
of selective vilification and simplistic thinking. If the Bush
administration is in fact planning for war with North Korea (madness,
but the neocon faction at least seems to think it's doable),
it will continue to depict Pyongyang in the worst possible light.
Just as it cherry-picked information to build a case for war
with Iraq, it will distort the historical record on North Korea.
So what follows is a very brief presentation of what I think
are the points about that history most relevant to the current
crisis.
1. The Korean peninsula, peopled by one
of the world's most homogeneous ethnic groups, and united from
the seventh century through 1945, is now divided into two nations
due primarily to the actions of the Truman administration and
the U.S. military. This is something upon which South and North
Koreans agree. The facts are laid out well by historian Bruce
Cumings in his magisterial two-volume work, The Origins of
the Korean War. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to
1945. As the Japanese prepared to surrender to the Allies, they
did what they did elsewhere in Asia: they turned over power to
local people in the hope that the western powers wouldn't colonize,
or continue to colonize, Asian nations. (One of the principle
outcomes of the Pacific War was that it indeed helped produce
the end of colonial administrations in the Philippines, Indonesia,
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, etc.) Leaders of self-governing
people's committees opposed to Japanese occupation formed the
"Korean People's Republic" in Seoul on September 6,
1945. It had a broad-based leadership ranging from right to left.
When Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, leader of the U.S. occupation
of Korea, arrived in Inchon soon thereafter, he ordered Japanese
authorities to remain at their posts, refused to acknowledge
the newly-formed republic, and indeed even banned all reference
to it. The U.S. would be in charge of what was seen as a defeated
enemy nation. This attitude produced widespread resentment and
resistance in Korea. (Compare contemporary occupied Iraq.)
2. As the war was drawing to an end,
the Soviet allies of the U.S. advocated independence for a unified
Korea as soon as possible. Truman for his part suggested a trusteeship
of decades, citing the case of the Philippines. The Soviets by
prior arrangement in the closing days of the war declared war
on Japan and moved troops into Manchuria, Korea, and islands
north of Hokkaido. They could easily have seized the entire Korean
peninsula. Instead they consulted with the U.S. State Department,
and agreed to pause at the 38th parallel, where they awaited
the arrival of U.S. forces to accept the Japanese surrender in
the peninsula's southern half. (Rather accommodating behavior,
I'd say.) The Red Army handed power over to the Korean Workers'
Party, headed by Kim Il-sung, a legendary guerrilla leader who
had fought the Japanese in Manchuria (where there is a large
ethnic Korean population).
3. In the South, U.S. Occupation authorities
installed Korean nationalist leader Syngman Rhee as president.
His dictatorial rule met with resistance from the people's committees,
which while quite independent, sympathized with the leadership
in the north. That leadership demanded the reunification of the
peninsula, and withdrawal of foreign troops; but U.S. authorities,
noting the North was becoming part of an expanding communist
bloc, became committed to the establishment of a separate South
Korean republic, This, like then-occupied Japan and Chiang Kai-shek's
Republic of China, would maintain an anti-communist alliance
with the U.S. Following the collapse of U.S.-Soviet negotiations
about Korean reunification, the Republic of Korea was formed
in the south, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in
the north, in May 1948. The Soviets withdrew their troops from
the peninsula; the U.S. continues to this day to maintain a large
force in the south. (Washington's man Rhee was overthrown in
a student-led uprising following a rigged election in 1960.)
4. On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces
crossed the 38th parallel in an effort to establish Pyongyang's
control over the whole peninsula. They took Seoul three days
later, easily. They met with little resistance from their southern
compatriots, and indeed, found much support. But the U.S. was
not prepared to see the reunification of Korea on Pyongyang's
terms. With some support from its allies, and the fig leaf of
U.N. authorization (the Soviet ambassador was absent when the
Security Council vote was taken, and Chiang Kai-shek's regime
on Taiwan held the China seat), it counter-attacked. As U.S.
troops approached the Yalu River (the natural border between
Korea and China), forces from the newly established People's
Republic came to the assistance of DPRK forces, doing much damage
to the overextended Americans. The war ended in a stalemate,
after the death of about four million people, three years later.
The pre-war border has been maintained under armistice conditions.
North Korea continues to insist that the South is occupied by
the U.S., and that the U.S. has thwarted the reunification desired
by all Koreans. Historically, the U.S. official position has
been that South Korea is a democracy (even under successive brutal
dictatorships, those of Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan,
etc.), while the North is an evil totalitarian communist state.
Vice President Cheney's position, as noted above, is that North
Korea must be defeated, and only following that defeat reconnected
with the good, pro-American, capitalist, democratic South.
5. The South is an economic powerhouse
today; its GDP is double that of the Netherlands. But it is subject
to crises, like that of 1997, and it is of course dependent on
international capital and can't have a really independent foreign
policy. The South Korean economy becomes increasingly globalized,
and under foreign control. The North Korean economy, meanwhile,
is in miserable shape. While Pyongyang long pursued, officially,
the policy of juche (self-reliance), it was badly hit
by the implosion of the USSR and collapse of its bloc. Natural
disasters, like the 1996 floods that destroyed most of the rice
crop, have caused homelessness and starvation. But should any
aver that this fate is the inevitable result of the North Korean
system itself, Cumings notes that in 1980, infant mortality in
the north was lower than in the south. Life expectancy was higher.
Per capita energy usage was double that in the south (Boston
Globe, Dec. 21, 2003).
6. Of the two Koreas, the first to begin
a systematic effort to acquire nuclear weapons was the South.
Park Chung-hee's regime was obliged to abandon its nuclear program
under quiet pressure from the Carter administration in the 1970s.
The North Koreans may have produced two nuclear weapons by 1992.
In 1994, the Clinton administration negotiated a deal by which
Pyongyang suspended its nuclear weapons program in exchange for
oil and the foreign-sponsored construction of two cool-water
reactors. But the U.S. didn't follow up on the agreement, and
North Korea resumed its program. Having withdrawn from the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty last January, it now develops that program
legally, arguing (sensibly) that it's necessary for self-defense.
As the U.S. once argued, followed by the USSR, Britain, France,
China, Pakistan and India. Nuclear Israel would argue similarly
if it talked about its program, which it doesn't as a matter
of policy. (The U.S. currently conveys the impression that any
nuclear newcomer commits a fundamentally evil act in acquiring
this technology. But putting things in perspective, one must
observe that each new nuclear state merely follows in the footsteps
of those who first developed nuclear weapons and used them, with
unapologetic efficacy, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
7. Recent South Korean presidents have
followed a policy of "sunshine diplomacy" towards the
North. President Kim Dae-jung visited Pyongyang and met with
Kim Jong-il in 2000. When George W. Bush came to power and met
with Kim in 2001, he indicated, much to the latter's chagrin,
that the U.S. had no interest in his "sunshine diplomacy"
but wished to aggressively confront North Korea.
8. The majority of people in South
Korea currently believe that the United States is a greater
threat to them than North Korea, and there is even considerable
sympathy in the South for the North's nuclear strategy. Many
feel that their compatriots across the border are being bullied
by the power responsible for the peninsula's division; they say
they don't fear the North or believe its weapons will be deployed
against them. They're Koreans, after all, victimized
historically by Japanese and Americans, Chinese and Russians,
far more than by one another.
As I say, I'm no fan of Dear Leader Kim
Jong-il (nor for that matter the current South Korean leader
Roh Moo-hyun). The North Korean leader is most often defined
as a "Stalinist," although I'm not sure that's fair
to Joseph Stalin. It's absurd to call him a "Maoist."
(Maoism stresses the vulnerability of the socialist project,
and the very real possibility of the restoration of capitalism,
which of course has happened in the PRC. North Korean official
Marxism depicts the present North Korean state as an invulnerable
worker's paradise, which can't be undermined because History
won't let such reversals happen.) The official North Korean ideology
looks to me as a peculiar mix of Confucianism, passionate nationalism,
and undigested Marxism-Leninism. Filial devotion to the house
of Kim Il-sung, national Father, is central to the ideology.
Thus both Washington and Pyongyang are benighted by simplistic,
dogmatic approaches to reality. But the will for war seems much
greater on the one side than the other.
Will the visit of non-government U.S.
nuclear experts to North Korea stymie the neocons' effort to
defeat North Korean "evil"? Will it produce an agreement
without regime change, to their chagrin? Bruce Cumings told the
Boston Globe, "If the Iraq war had gone quickly and
successfully to a conclusion, we would have had a major crisis
with North Korea this fall [2003]. It was quite apparent that
the Bush administration felt that North Korea was next on its
list if the Iraq war went well." Paraphrasing Cumings: dogged
resistance to invasion and occupation by Iraqis, fighting
on the battlefield Bush calls the "center" of the "War
on Terror" has well served the Korean people, on
the other end of Asia, who do not want to be on that list and
(like Syrians, Iranians, Cubans, Libyans, and most people) do
not want Americans killing them. At this point the State Department
(Bolton excepted) seems inclined to back off from further killing,
because the various repercussions make it nervous. But the neocons
piloting the Defense [sic] Department are as eager as ever to
affect an End to Evil, and nothing said or shown in Yongbyon
this week will likely curb their wild will to victory.
Gary Leupp
is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor
of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
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