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Fantasies, Fairy Tales and Fortune Cookies - North Korea, Iran and the Bomb
Guest Column | By Peter Huessy | July 10, 2009
The current administration has its plate full in trying to make more stable the deterrent relationship between the U.S. and Russia, curtailing and then eliminating the nuclear weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, providing a defense of Europe from ballistic missile threats, modulating NATO expansion in Russia's near abroad, while at the same time seeking Russia's full cooperation in the areas of counter proliferation, counter terrorism and securing nuclear materials.
Even as it seeks to start a new path forward, it is interesting that despite an assumption that the new administration is over turning much of the Bush-era foreign policy, there are some remarkable sustaining strategies. In three areas this is apparent - missile defense, the Proliferation Security Initiative, and economic divestment/sanctions.
For example, as North Korea continued to launch rockets into the Sea of Japan and the Pacific, the U.S. moved missile defense elements to Hawaii and put on alert the mid-course missile defense batteries in Alaska and California. These systems were of course built primarily during the eight years of the Bush administration.
In addition, the U.S. Navy shadowed a North Korean freighter, bound for Myanmar, possibly carrying ballistic missile components or other weapons banned by UN sanctions. That freighter has now returned to its home port without delivering its cargo. This is another sound application of the Proliferation Security Initiative which in 2003 intercepted a cargo of some 13,000 centrifuge or centrifuge parts bound for Libya from the A.Q. Khan "Nukes 'R Us" network.
And finally, the U.S. continues to go after the financing arrangements which make possible the development of both ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology in Iran and North Korea. This recently included an 118 count indictment of a Chinese firm selling such technology to Iran with financing provided through a New York based bank. Similarly, the U.S. has also gone after a number of North Korean entities involved in similar trafficking as well as banks which might be facilitating such transactions. This is a continuation of the extraordinary work initiated years ago by Treasury official Stewart Levy.
Although these are common elements between the two administrations security policy, the U.S. has now embarked on a new effort to reset or change our relations with the world in the hope that by doing so we will engender the kind of support we need from friends, allies and others to secure the needed international cooperation to end the threats from Pyongyang and Tehran.
In much of the critique of the U.S. role in the world has been a common assumption that the U.S. meddled too much, threw its weight around too much, and generally risked unilateral action as opposed to working cooperatively with the "international community." On the very far left, this included William Appleton Williams and Noam Chomsky and their belief that the U.S. government created the Cold War in order to fuel the military industrial complex. We looked for wars and we found them, so to speak.
Related to this idea was the corollary that much of what the US did was immoral - we consumed too many resources, installed too many dictators to do our bidding, and acted as an imperial warlike power. William Ayers, the former Weatherman and Reverend Wright are two actors on the left who pushed this template vigorously. As the latter said after the attacks of 9/11, "the chickens have come home to roost."
These views then led to the idea that if the United States significantly changed its behavior - or "reset" its relationships with friend and foe alike - others would also "reset" their behavior. The U.S. would be able to seize the "moral high ground" and thus be in a position to put together a sufficiently powerful coalition to secure such goals as ending the current dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons and their associated delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles, especially in countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Part of changing our behavior has been what the President has described as more rationally managing our nuclear arsenals. In addition, he has called for the U.S. to fully grasp and begin to implement steps to get to a nuclear weapons free world. These steps - fully visible and transparent for the entire world to see - would it is hoped re-establish U.S. leadership and with it the moral authority to secure the ends envisioned by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act or NPT -a nuclear weapons free world.
However, none of the conditions for a nuclear free world exist. Fissile material continues to be produced; nuclear weapons production complexes especially in China and Russia are robust; no verification regime exists to determine nuclear weapons numbers in most states with them; no mechanism has been put into place to verify compliance with any agreements for putting limits on such weapons; and no vehicle exists for not only detecting cheating but what consequences would there be for cheating and how such sanctions, if any, would be enforced.
Furthermore, whatever corrections the U.S. makes to its own policies, we are tending to forget that the two countries we wish to make partners in the effort to roll back nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea are themselves highly complicit in the very dangers we seek to corral. Numerous recent reports have highlighted the relationship between ballistic missile programs of Pyongyang and Tehran and those of Russia and China.
Russia is also the sole partner with Iran in building the nuclear reactor at Bushehr and supplies Iran with vast quantities of conventional weaponry. Investment dollars from Moscow and Peking also flow in the billions to Iran in its energy sector while Peking is North Korea's largest supplier of food and fuel. Russia sees Iran as a strategic partner. And China sees North Korea as a strategic ally.
The previous administration repeatedly sought Chinese help in curtailing and ending the nuclear weapons program in North Korea. But to no avail. The U.S. cut off North Korean access to a major part of the international banking system and China did at one time significantly curtail oil exports to Pyongyang. Both actions resulted in the North Korean government agreeing to come back to the six-party talks.
But they simply came back to the negotiating table as opposed to being required to come back to the table with, for example, a proposal to implement in a verifiable manner the denuclearization commitments they had made. They came back to simply talk while continuing their same rogue behavior.
So, too, today we are seeking Moscow's helping securing a change in Iranian behavior. The assumption behind both endeavors, both then and now, was that there was some carrot of sufficient size that would induce the Iranian and North Korean rabbits to come to the table and seriously undertake to eliminate their pending or existing nuclear arsenals.
But this bought into the very template that it was U.S. actions that were responsible for the problem to begin with. The North Koreans repeatedly cited a "U.S. hostile policy" as the rationale for their own nuclear weapons program. And the Iranians followed suit, blaming "American arrogance" for Tehran's hostility to America. But Iranian support for terrorist proxies - such as Hamas and Hezbollah - are not the result of American behavior. It is what the Iranian mullahs believe they are commanded by God to do - whether against fellow Muslims and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon or Jews and Arabs and Christians in Israel, or against their own people at home.
The nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in Iran are simply top cover for the terrorist work of the clerics ruling Iran. It is not past or current U.S. behavior that is responsible for their rabid belief that Allah himself orders them to kill. The Iranian regime is murderous precisely because it believes that murder is the most useful tool to carry out its hopes of achieving hegemony in the Gulf, eventual leadership of the entire Muslim world, the eradication of Israel and a world "without America". A nuclear weapon in the hands of the revolutionary guards in Iran is a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of their terrorist allies and that much closer to being detonated in an American city. Whether or not the U.S. has 1,500 or 2,200 nuclear warheads is totally irrelevant.
For North Korea, it is not dissimilar. For many, the efforts of Pyongyang to build a stockpile of nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them is simply a matter of "regime survival." This kind of "fortune cookie" analysis sounds clever, even "nuanced." It accepts the North Korea charge that the United States was "hostile" to North Korea and the poor dears in Pyongyang are simply responding in kind.
But a review of the past half century of North Korean actions reveals terror attack after terror attack against Japan, the United States, the Republic of Korea and others. Only last year the Sri Lankan ambassador to the United States told a forum here in Washington of North Korean freighters loaded with weapons for the Tamil Tigers and Hezbollah being intercepted with the help of his government.
On top of their terror ways, the government of North Korea has assisted Iran with its ballistic missile programs. Pyongyang helped build a nuclear facility in Syria reportedly with Iranian funding. And recently, the U.S. began a process of shutting down a Chinese firm headquartered on the island of Kish off the coast of Iran which was providing the Mullahs with weapons technology and hardware from North Korea.
As Barry Blechman has warned us recently, the North wants nuclear weapons with which to coerce or blackmail the Republic of Korea and its allies and to eventually shape a reunification of the Korean peninsula under communist rule. And if to do so requires the use of military force, including the threatened or actual use of nuclear weapons that is the threat we now face.
So we come back to where we started this essay. The realities of the proliferation threats we face are such that require the constant vigilance of America and its allies. This requires the building and deploying of missile defenses. It requires the use of the American Navy to prevent the passage on the high seas of dangerous cargo. And it requires the skillful use of the international banking community and other economic levers to eliminate the financial basis that supports the building of such threatening arsenals.
In the U.S. Congress, legislation has been introduced with wide bipartisan support to curtail the ability of business entities from doing business with the United States if they also do business with the Iran and North Korea. Part of the bill would put an end to the refining of Iranian crude into refined petroleum products, as fully 40 percent of that countries gasoline is refined outside of its borders.
A similar bill has now been introduced by Irwin Cotler a Liberal Party member of the Canadian parliament and former Canadian Justice Minister. In Berlin recently, Cotler urged the German government to take action similar to his own proposal that would sanction companies refining petroleum for Iran and "disrupt the operation of businesses supporting Iran's military and nuclear sectors."
As for "reset buttons," the Russians are seeking to reincorporate former Soviet republics back into their fold, using natural gas supplies as a tool of economic blackmail, and aiding a hostile and terrorist state - Iran - with its weaponry. As for China, its investments in Iran and Venezuela, for example, show it to be part of an axis hostile to the United States and the furtherance of political and economic freedom and liberty.
These two countries should certainly "reset" their behavior. It is they which markedly contribute to the proliferation problems that so worry policy makers in Washington. And thus it was good to see the administration call for an end to Russia bullying of Georgia. And for it to move away from an explicit deal trading a missile defense of Europe for further reductions in nuclear weapons.
But pushing the fantasy of a world without nuclear weapons will get us sidetracked. And pushing for a fairy tale type ending to Russian and Chinese cooperation with Iran and North Korea without some very tough actions to back up our requests is simply not going to happen. And we should reject the "fortune cookie" type conventional wisdom that too often passes for analysis in Washington and elsewhere.
Secretary of Defense Gates recently said that the U.S. would not "buy that pony again" when speaking about whether we should induce North Korea to refrain from exploding nuclear bombs or launching ballistic missiles by sending them more food or fuel. I cheered when he said that. That was exactly the thing to say.
When combined with strategies such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, missile defense, economic divestment and the uprooting of financial connections that make the proliferation about which we worry possible, we might have created the conditions to see a sea-change in Russian and Chinese behavior and consequently secure their serious cooperation in eliminating the threats from Tehran and Pyongyang.
But on that score I have serious doubts. The administration is correct when they note Russia apparently remains mired in a world of "zero sum" outcomes where if they win the U.S. must lose. China may also have adopted the same outlook. That makes any "reset" button that much further away from being pressed by either the Russian bear or the Chinese dragon. The fact is hard realities may begin to replace great hopes as the real intentions of these countries are revealed.
We also do not have a great deal of time in which to stop these threats. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently warned, Iran could be as little as one year away from building a nuclear bomb. But should these "reset" buttons remain untouched, we will realize that there are indeed no easy or simple options for "providing for the common defense." That does not make the administration's job any easier, but it may make the direction in which we should go a little clearer.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Peter Huessy is a Senior Defense Associate of the National Defense University Association and President of GeoStratic Analysis.
Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.
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