Korea Settlement Possible If Cheney Gang Shut Their Mouths
by Kathy Wolfe
Aug. 5 (EIRNS)Developments on the Korean peninsula show that South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China are moving to bring the U.S. and North Korea to a settlement of their weapons dispute which is threatening the nuclear incineration of millions of people in Seoul and Tokyo. A settlement can hold, however, only if Vice President Dick Cheney and his lunatic neo-conservatives are kept out of the process and shut up.
The Russian Foreign Ministry announced July 31 that North Korean Ambassador to Moscow Pak Ui-Chun had delivered a message to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov, accepting the proposal for "Six Power" peace talks made by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on April 10. Ivanov, after meeting with the South Koreans and Chinese, had proposed that the U.S., Japan, Russia, China, and both Koreas agree to a six-way mutual security guarantee. This would diffuse the crisis which began when the Bush Administration last October accused Pyongyang of a secret uranium weapons program, and scrapped the 1994 peace pact between North Korea and the Clinton Administration.
Agreeing to the Six Power plan is a shift by Pyongyang, which till now has insisted on only two-party talks with the U.S., after Washington in January 2002 began to threaten that it "reserves the right" to make a first strike against the North. North Korea's point was to demand that the U.S. recognize its right to exist.
Russia, China, and South Korea all proposed again Aug. 1 that the other five powers guarantee the North's national security, in exchange for Pyongyang's dismantling any nuclear weapons program. To keep Pyongyang talking, Washington needs to agree.
U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has strongly supported a Six Power solution since 1994, and has widely circulated an economic policy for it, for all six parties to build up the Trans-Korean Railroad and the Eurasian Land-Bridge "from Tokyo to Pusan to Paris." - Neo-Con Lunacy -
The Bush Administration welcomed the North Korean acceptance of the Six Power plan. "We are very glad that the North Koreans have apparently accepted President Bush's proposal," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, trying to give the clueless President the credit. The talks could take place in Beijing as early as September, officials said.
Yet, the day before the breakthrough, on July 30, neo-con U.S. arms negotiator Undersecretary of State John Bolton had attacked North Korea in the most provocative way. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il "seems to care more about enriching uranium than enriching his own people," he said in a Seoul speech. "While he lives like royalty, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps, with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food. For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare."
Bolton also insisted that even while sitting down to any multilateral talks with North Korea, the U.S. would be "pursuing simultaneously" its inflammatory April 9 initiative to haul North Korea before the UN Security Council for world condemnation. Russia and China vetoed the last attempt at that in April, and North Korea has referred to it as a "cause for war."
North Korea, in an Aug. 4 statement, condemned Bolton as a "beast man," a reference to Nieztsche and the philosophy of Leo Strauss, which LaRouche has exposed as being at the center of the neo-con world view. "Such a human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled" to have anything to do with Korean negotiations, the North said. Voicing a desire to continue talks with more reasonable folk in Washington, they added, "We have decided not to consider [Bolton] as an official of the Administration."
North Korea is no paradise, but the point is that since Cheney and his salon put Pyongyang in the No. 2 slot of an "axis of evil," of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, in the January 2002 State of the Union speech, it has been Cheney lunatics such Bolton, who have been threatening a U.S. first strike. But North Korea, if attacked, could, in return, obliterate large parts of Seoul (population 13 million) and Tokyo (population 21 million), something no sane man would risk.
The New York Times and other Western media loudly reported Aug. 1 that North Korea's quid pro quo call for a U.S. non-aggression pledge has been rejected by Washingtonwhich seems odd, since otherwise there is no explanation for Pyongyang's Aug. 1 compromise.
"American officials say they would be willing to consider making a statement to that effect as part of an accord, but the idea of a treaty was ruled out this week by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell," the Times sniffed. "A senior administration official, speaking anonymously, was more blunt. 'Non-aggression agreements went out with the 1920s,' he said." - Phony October Blow-up -
Sane men in fact are raising their voices, to ask if the neo-cons' intelligence last October was cooked up, when they suddenly insisted that North Korea was building uranium bombs, and ripped up the 1994 treaty.
The latest issue of Naval War College Review presents documentation that "Senior Administration officials" deliberately created from whole cloth the October 2002 confrontation with Pyongyang, by charging that North Korea is enriching uranium to weapons grade, despite the fact that evidence gathered by the CIA and other agencies "is far from definitive."
EIR has been told separately by U.S. diplomatic sources that it was Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice who wrote a "fixed script" which Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly took to Pyongyang last October, to pick that fight. Naval War College Review author Dr. Jonathan Pollack warns sharply that as a result, "the severest of future crises could yet loom."
Reprinted from the Aug. 11 New Federalist.
|