Richard Lloyd Parry: The pygmy that Dubya turned into a monster
[Richard Lloyd Parry is a British foreign correspondent and Asia Editor of The Times.]
Korea has been such a huge and intractable problem for so many decades now that it is easy to think of it as just an unpleasant fact of life, like drizzle or midges or the aches and pains of age. There it lies on the far side of the world; we know something's wrong over there, but we can't always remember what.
The Korean War was the one that our grandfathers were too old for, and our fathers too young. We could probably find it on an atlas, but it would take a while. No one we know has been on holiday there. They make cars and stereos like the Japanese, and there's a nutty dictator with bad hair. And then, every few years, like a large but lethargic Komodo dragon dozing in the corner, Korea opens its eyes, lumbers into action and bites us painfully on the buttocks.
It happened this week, with a literal bang, when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test. Next came a barrage of short-range missiles, followed on Wednesday by what sounded alarmingly like a declaration of war by the communist dictatorship in the North against the democratic South. At such moments, politicians and commentators scramble to catch up and to explain what is happening, while the rest of us listen in confusion. Then the flap subsides, and Korea recedes to the margins, and we are allowed to forget about it - until the next time.
Such thinking is deluded, for the Korean conflict is one in which the people of the affluent transatlantic nations are deeply implicated, and for which they could pay a heavy price. It has the potential to become, in an instant, the worst war of the past 60 years; this danger becomes greater by the month. And it has turned out this way not through some abstract historical process, but because of the acts, and in large part the omissions, of our elected leaders in the past eight years.
The present Korean crisis is a by-product of the complex of instincts, prejudices and vested interests best identified by a single name: George W. Bush. Long before Mr Bush came to power, of course, the Korean peninsula was a profoundly troubled place. Half a century after the Korean War, it remained divided on ideological lines, between the Stalinist North and the increasingly affluent and democratic South.
The North, deprived of the support of its Cold War sponsors, China and the Soviet Union, struggled to feed its people and maintain its immense army. Then during the presidency of Bill Clinton, it turned out that it had a secret weapon - a nuclear reactor capable of generating weapons-grade plutonium.
President Clinton took this seriously - at one point, he was within hours of ordering an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor. But at the last minute, war was averted and, after prolonged and difficult negotiations, a complicated, fragile and unwieldy deal agreed between North Korea and a conglomerate of concerned nations. Fuel oil and “safe” reactors, without the potential to fuel nuclear bombs, would be provided in exchange for freezing and eventually dismantling Yongbyon.
Both sides would breach parts of the agreement, but the seals stayed on the reactor. A nightmare had been averted which, to Mr Clinton at least, would have been worth going to war to prevent - North Korea with nuclear weapons. Enter, stage right, George Bush...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Korea has been such a huge and intractable problem for so many decades now that it is easy to think of it as just an unpleasant fact of life, like drizzle or midges or the aches and pains of age. There it lies on the far side of the world; we know something's wrong over there, but we can't always remember what.
The Korean War was the one that our grandfathers were too old for, and our fathers too young. We could probably find it on an atlas, but it would take a while. No one we know has been on holiday there. They make cars and stereos like the Japanese, and there's a nutty dictator with bad hair. And then, every few years, like a large but lethargic Komodo dragon dozing in the corner, Korea opens its eyes, lumbers into action and bites us painfully on the buttocks.
It happened this week, with a literal bang, when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test. Next came a barrage of short-range missiles, followed on Wednesday by what sounded alarmingly like a declaration of war by the communist dictatorship in the North against the democratic South. At such moments, politicians and commentators scramble to catch up and to explain what is happening, while the rest of us listen in confusion. Then the flap subsides, and Korea recedes to the margins, and we are allowed to forget about it - until the next time.
Such thinking is deluded, for the Korean conflict is one in which the people of the affluent transatlantic nations are deeply implicated, and for which they could pay a heavy price. It has the potential to become, in an instant, the worst war of the past 60 years; this danger becomes greater by the month. And it has turned out this way not through some abstract historical process, but because of the acts, and in large part the omissions, of our elected leaders in the past eight years.
The present Korean crisis is a by-product of the complex of instincts, prejudices and vested interests best identified by a single name: George W. Bush. Long before Mr Bush came to power, of course, the Korean peninsula was a profoundly troubled place. Half a century after the Korean War, it remained divided on ideological lines, between the Stalinist North and the increasingly affluent and democratic South.
The North, deprived of the support of its Cold War sponsors, China and the Soviet Union, struggled to feed its people and maintain its immense army. Then during the presidency of Bill Clinton, it turned out that it had a secret weapon - a nuclear reactor capable of generating weapons-grade plutonium.
President Clinton took this seriously - at one point, he was within hours of ordering an air strike on the Yongbyon reactor. But at the last minute, war was averted and, after prolonged and difficult negotiations, a complicated, fragile and unwieldy deal agreed between North Korea and a conglomerate of concerned nations. Fuel oil and “safe” reactors, without the potential to fuel nuclear bombs, would be provided in exchange for freezing and eventually dismantling Yongbyon.
Both sides would breach parts of the agreement, but the seals stayed on the reactor. A nightmare had been averted which, to Mr Clinton at least, would have been worth going to war to prevent - North Korea with nuclear weapons. Enter, stage right, George Bush...