WASHINGTON — While the American public, insofar as it is
concerned with international affairs, remains preoccupied with
Iraq, the two other members of the Axis of Evil have not moved from
the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. United Nations nuclear
inspectors continue to dither in Iran even as U.S. and other
Western diplomats have provided the International Atomic Energy
Agency with evidence of a covert nuclear weapons program run by
Tehran, but even that crisis seems manageable when compared to the
trouble brewing another half a world away in North Korea.
That a rogue state will sell a nuclear weapon to a terrorist
group has become the foremost security threat for the United States
and for the world. In his “Worldwide Threat 2004” analysis, CIA
Director George Tenet says his “deepest concern” is that terrorist
organizations remain intent “on obtaining, and using catastrophic
weapons.”
If such a nightmare scenario were to become a reality, the
suspect list for the supply-side of the equation would be short.
And North Korea would lead it.
Vice President Dick Cheney, traveling in Asia last month, told a
Chinese audience, “We worry that, given what they’ve done in the
past and given what we estimate to be their current capability,
that North Korea could well, for example, provide this kind of
[nuclear weapons] technology to someone else or possibly to a
terrorist organization.”
In weeks prior to Cheney’s trip, the two senior U.S. military
commanders in that part of the world gave the House Armed Services
Committee the same warning.
“They’re a known proliferators of missiles, missiles technology,
narcotics and other illegal activities,” said Army Gen. Leon
LaPorte, commander of U.S. forces in Korea. “What’s to prevent
North Korea from deciding to sell to other nations or terrorist
organizations weapons-grade material? Given the history of North
Korea relative to selling missiles and missile technology it’s a
concern we must address,” he added.
“I think our largest concern would be if nuclear material was
sold to al-Qaeda, clearly,” said Navy Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander
of the U.S. Pacific Command. “They have the will and the skill,
obviously, to carry out a devastating terrorist attack. …
That is a kind of nightmare scenario, and that’s why we feel so
strongly about a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula,” he added.
Also within the past month, even the head of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, traveled to Washington to
express his alarm over North Korea. He said the situation there is
the highest-level crisis facing his agency because North Korea “has
the most advanced capability.”
And over the course of the past year, information has been
trickling in regarding the now notorious Pakistani nuclear
scientist A.Q. Khan, who reportedly confessed to transferring
Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He
told his Pakistani interrogators that he provided North Korea with
both the designs for uranium enrichment centrifuges and a small
number of the actual machines, as well as a “shopping list” of what
was necessary to mass-produce the centrifuges, according to U.S.
officials who have reviewed the Pakistani intelligence reports.
“We think they’ve pretty much bought everything on the list,
with the possible exception of a few components,” said one U.S.
official when additional news of Khan’s confessions provided by
Pakistani authorities broke in the New York Times last
month.
WILLIAM TRIPLETT, IN HIS recently released book Rogue State:
How a Nuclear North Korea Threatens America (Regnery, 272
pages, $27.95), catalogues intelligence from recent years that we
can combine with these latest developments to form a clearer
picture of international terrorism. Among the most notable
examples:
* The North Koreans and Osama bin Laden have an existing arms
sales relationship. This was discovered in 2000 when bin Laden
financed a shipment of North Korean conventional arms to a
Philippine Islamic terrorist group.
* In 1998, Pakistan set off a nuclear test which scientists at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory now suspect may have been a
North Korean nuclear weapon or a joint venture between the two
countries, due to the fact that it was a plutonium rather than
uranium weapon, which Pakistan’s nuclear research is exclusively
comprised of.
* According to a defector report, the North Koreans have been
training “Arab terrorists” for the past decade at the Kim Jung-Il
Political and Military University.
With the missing link of A.Q. Khan discovered and now shedding
light on the operations of his nuclear black market, there is ample
evidence that the Axis of Evil, minus Iraq, continues to pursue
both terror and nuclear weapons.
As the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and the two Koreas
prepare for the next round of talks aimed at reaching a diplomatic
solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff, many senior Bush
administration officials, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice among them,
have publicly expressed the view that “time is running out” on
North Korea. Triplett, with some thirty years of foreign policy
experience and expertise on China, agrees with the view and adds
the warning that China is the key to unlocking North Korea.
In a recent interview, Triplett revealed that his book was
almost titled China’s Knife. “If you take China out of the
North Korea nuclear program, there is no North Korea nuclear
program,” he noted, adding that “China does not want a democratic
country on its border.”
In Rogue State, he writes that China has done very
little for North Korea, which he refers to as its client state. The
minimal economic aid China offers does little more than to prop up
the terror regime of Kim Jong-Il and his “army first” policy, he
adds.
TRIPLETT GOES ON TO explain that socialism is not the guiding
ideology of the Kim regime, which has made the military a priority
over any pretense of bettering the condition of the “working
class.” In a chapter devoted to human rights, he reveals how Kim,
whose father Kim Il-Sung was hand-picked by Joseph Stalin from
among numerous Korean military men to rule North Korea because of
his unflinching brutality, has moved even a step beyond Stalin in
his methods.
While Stalin’s purges focused on men he thought posed even the
slightest challenge to his political authority, Kim’s gulag state
takes the nightmare to the next level by imprisoning entire
families for the political transgressions of one of its members
and, the author notes, opens the door to new abuses with the
presence of young women in the camps. Triplett admitted in an
interview last month that the human rights chapter of his book was,
“difficult, as a writer, to handle.” And indeed it’s likely to be
difficult for many readers to handle, with details of the Kim
gulags including everything from human experimentation to rape and
forced abortion.
On this count Triplett is particularly critical of Madeleine
Albright and the Clinton administration and shows how the
administration that wanted to inaugurate a new era of
“moralpolitik” deliberately ignored human rights issues in North
Korea, instead pursuing a policy of “engagement,” in which Albright
herself became a prop for the Kim regime when visiting North Korea
in 2000. Pursuit of this unsentimental policy included the Agreed
Framework, a deal whereby Pyongyang received two new nuclear
reactors to supply power in exchange for freezing its old nuclear
program. It didn’t take much foresight to realize that this
“realistic” approach was a big giveaway to North Korea, which would
soon start up its supposedly frozen nuclear programs again.
Triplett applauds the effort of the Japanese who, in the context
of the multilateral talks with North Korea, have begun exploring
ways of incorporating human rights into the negotiations, and many
have concluded that, like Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il must go.
Triplett noted recently that “a diplomatic deal leaving Kim in
power is not satisfying to me because of what they do to their
people.” Unfortunately the difficulties the U.S. has faced thus far
in Iraq are likely to pale in comparison to even the best-case
scenario for ending the North Korea stand-off.
