Sad to contemplate, there was the possibility that Kim Jong-il himself was the North Korean with the most realistic chance of pulling off a Park Chung-hee–style act, as a dictator whose encouragement of economic reform might promise better times for his people. Perhaps it was as fortunate as it was predictable that the Chinese showed no apparent interest in the Pentagon’s imaginative scheme to initiate a military coup against Kim.
Instead of a coup, for the time being at least a consensus built in Washington in favor of an in-between policy that essentially meant simultaneously containing and engaging Pyongyang, giving Kim Jong-il a chance to show that negotiations could work to resolve the problem. Or as pessimists saw it, Kim would be given enough rope to hang himself by demonstrating incon-trovertibly to other countries that negotiations would not suffice. Then Washington could do a better job of lining up international support for a get-tough approach than it had managed regarding Iraq in 2002–03. Korea specialists Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang called that sort of policy “hawk engagement.45
The State Department’s Kelly described a U.S. policy in which “North Korea has an opportunity to change its path. As some Americans might put it there is a chance for redemption. … With continued international solidarity, there is good reason to believe that North Korea will eventually rethink its assumptions and reverse course.46
If the policy worked smoothly, perhaps it was possible to imagine a result similar to Libya’s 2004 agreement to give up its nuclear weapons program. Sensing the determination of the United States, Kim Jong-il might realize that refusal to deal with all issues fully would mean further isolation, economic sanctions and other measures to destabilize his regime or destroy it outright. At that point he might decide to submit, relinquish even his existing nukes (if he actually had any; their existence was mainly a matter of rumor and surmise) and take his chances on the American guarantees given in return. But imagining such an outcome required considerable optimism.
Here is how the deputy chief of the North’s delegation to the six-party talks laid out his country’s position: “If the U.S. fundamentally changes its hostile policy toward North Korea, we would also give up our nuclear deterrent. That is, only when a legal and systematic security mechanism guaranteeing that the U.S. will not threaten us is in place, and a certain level of trust is built and we no longer feel threatened by the U.S., will we be able to discuss with the U.S. issues relating to nuclear weapons we have already built. The criteria for judging that the U.S. has given up its hostile policy toward North Korea are as follows: First, provide in a manner believable to us a non-aggression guarantee stating that the U.S. will not attack us. Second, diplomatic relations between North Korea and the U.S. must be established. Third, the U.S. must not interfere with North Korea’s economic transactions with South Korea and other nations.”47
Six-party negotiations in Beijing in February 2004 made few discernible advances toward resolving the issues. John Kerry the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, complained that progress was “so slow, and it’s begrudging” because the Bush administration refused to build on Clinton administration initiatives and talk one-on-one with Pyongyang. Some analysts thought Pyongyang was dragging its feet just as much as Washington was— but in the hope that Kerry would defeat Bush and change the tone of the confrontation.48
Pyongyang reacted with alarm in March 2004 when the South Korean National Assembly impeached President Roh Moo-hyun on charges of election law violations, incompetence and corruption. The South raised its level of military vigilance while the North said it was taking steps to strengthen its “nuclear deterrent.” During a little more than a year in office, Roh had followed predecessor Kim Dae-jung’s sunshine policy. Officials in the North worried that hard-line conservatives incited by the United States were about to take over in Seoul and reverse the policy.49 South Korean voters weighed in on Roh’s side, giving his supporters a big victory in National Assembly elections in April.
Whatever transpired in the South, it seemed unlikely that the North Koreans would become convinced, in the course of negotiating sessions over a period of only weeks or months, that the United States had abandoned all its hostility to the regime. (That would represent the flip side of Washington’s own inability to trust Pyongyang enough to drop its hostility.) Kelly addressed that by saying Washington did not necessarily expect to “resolve the nuclear problem in a matter of a few weeks or even a few months,”50 but patience inside the Belt-way certainly was not unlimited.
What would happen if the engagement phase of “hawk engagement” failed to produce a resolution? Next would come the hawkish part, efforts to remove the regime—but how? It would be foolish for Americans to presume that they knew the will of the North Korean people, beyond the certainty that refusing to kowtow to the American devils remained a top priority. Still indoctrinated, still proud, North Korean citizens would welcome any would-be American military liberators with bullets and bombs, not flowers. Their society was not one that anyone outside the country would choose, but a great many North Koreans still endorsed much of its ideological foundation.51
There was the danger that if an unconvinced Kim refused to budge on the matter of his existing weapons of mass destruction, at least some in Washington would be tempted to seize on his obduracy as justification for war in one form or another. President Bush, in a February 2004 television interview, had provided a minimalist justification for the invasion of Iraq when he described Saddam Hussein as “a dangerous man” who “had the ability to make weapons, at the very minimum.”52 Obviously a similar argument could be put forward to justify military action against Kim Jong-il. Kim had the ability to make weapons and, to at least that extent, was dangerous.
For the United States and any allied forces that might launch even a limited preventive attack—say, a “surgical” strike against identified nuclear facilities—initial success might not come anywhere near as cheaply in terms of casualties as in Iraq. North Korea’s “response would be prompt,” a Russian specialist in East Asian studies wrote in a Seoul newspaper following a visit to Pyongyang in July 2003. “After studying this matter for a long time, the North Korean leadership reached the conclusion that since a limited attack could lead to an even more lethal attack, they must respond immediately with all their strength before their military strength becomes ineffective.” The target of their retaliatory attack could be Seoul, he wrote.53 Recall the vow Kim Jong-il was rumored to have made when he was promoted to marshal (see chapter 28), that he would “destroy the world” rather than accept military defeat. General Gary Luck, former commander in chief of U.S. forces in Korea, calculated that a second Korean war would cost a million lives and $1 trillion in damages and lost business.54
A prudent U.S. administration obviously would stop to think very hard about whether it really needed to go to such extremes to remove all of Kim’s weapons of mass destruction right away. In an imperfect world, would Washington eventually hold its nose and strike an interim deal guaranteeing a halt to North Korea’s weapons’ manufacture and export, demolishing the plants and establishing a thorough inspection regime—but leaving any already deployed nukes and missiles in place for the time being, pending development of the sort of trust neither side yet felt? While an improved tone at the June 2004 talks in Beijing might have pointed vaguely in that direction, little overt support for such a compromise could be heard in Washington.55 Then again, Washington was trying to speak with one voice about the proposition that Pyongyang had better forswear its nuclear ambitions now, or else.
The most desirable “or else,” some in Washington seemed to feel, would be imposition by a united global community of sanctions far more stifling than the ones already in effect.56
The United States had accepted the entry into the unofficial nuclear club of India, Pakistan and Israel. Catching Pakistan red-handed in a global scheme of-wildly extravagant proliferation to various U.S. enemy countries, including North Korea, the George W Bush administration ac
cepted a solution in which a single scientist took the rap and Islamabad promised it wouldn’t happen again. Washington’s rationale was to avoid doing anything that would destabilize Pakistan, whose own stockpiled bombs—even if the country ceased to proliferate—posed a grave long-term danger to the United States. An Islamic militant takeover of Pakistan and its atomic arsenal seemed a horrifying but real possibility down the road. Helping a friendly government stay in power there seemed almost a no-brainer.
But there was little sign of a substantial constituency in Washington for forming an alliance with North Korea—something that might be possible, in my view, since the two countries’ fundamental needs could with some patience be reconciled—as a means of ensuring that Pyongyang’s arsenal would not be used against U.S. interests.
If the United States should feel compelled to fight with North Korea, I had been saying and writing for a decade, the war should be fought with information rather than bullets. Defector Ko Jun, a former truck driver, told me in a 1998 interview, “If North Korea’s citizens knew the outside world, how students demonstrate on campuses, 100 percent of the citizens would rise. They wouldn’t care if they got shot. But they don’t know how. They have no idea of the outside world.” Bills pending in Congress in early 2004 called for such means of breaking the information barrier as dropping radios into North Korea and broadcasting longer each day in the Korean language over AM and FM. frequencies.57 Fortunately there was the precedent of some pretty nasty states, the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, that had changed their ways on their own—-without foreign occupation or the direct application of outside force—at least in part thanks to outside broadcasting.
Expanding broadcasts was a good idea regardless of the overall policy that might be chosen, I felt, if the broadcasters kept to straight news and did not resort to shrill and one-sided propaganda. Even if the United States chose to avoid suddenly destabilizing the North Korean regime, it still would make sense to try to improve the people’s understanding of the outside world. In any case, successes in changing hearts and minds via broadcasting would be relatively gradual, cumulative.
As drafted by a private organization concerned with religious freedom, the Senate bill in particular had many flaws. It would inject congressional micromanagement into policy decisions beyond the competence of the U.S. legislative branch. The draft went so far as to settle upon an economic model—the Vietnamese model—for North Korea to follow. And it called for active U.S. efforts to reunify Korea—at a time when South Korea wanted only to postpone unification. It sought, in short, to legislate regime change.
The bills would authorize handing tens of millions of dollars to nongovernment organizations, which would be entrusted with performing aid work or public diplomacy (that’s a euphemism for propaganda) on behalf of the U.S. government. Prominent among the organizations apparently in line to receive such grants were certain religious groups, commendably in the vanguard of a growing movement to expose North Korea’s human rights violations and help the victims. Such groups also had a separate agenda. Their other and deeper interest beyond promoting human rights was in preaching religion, typically evangelical Christianity, to North Koreans. When they prepared balloon drops of small transistor radios, the packets also included Bible literature. The Senate bill’s drafter, especially, apparently sought to encourage groups to tap into President Bush’s proposed spending of tax funds on “faith-based initiatives.”58
Recall how missionary zeal was mixed up in the final voyage of the General Sherman, which got the U.S.-Korean relationship off to such a tragic start in 1866 (see chapter 2). I much preferred that religious groups continue to rely on free-will private contributions to finance their good works. Tax funds allocated for aid and public diplomacy directed to North Koreans could best be administered by dedicated, professional experts. The sort of communication expertise called for had resided in the U.S. Information Agency—until the end of the Cold War prematurely signaled that the agency was no longer needed, and it was disbanded. In view of America’s enormous problems with foreign opinion—not only in North Korea but in the Muslim world and pretty much everywhere else, as well—I felt the time had come when the government should revive the agency, recall some of its retirees and put their experience to work. As for U.S. government food aid to North Koreans, it could continue to be funneled through the UN’s World Food Program.
Whatever the ultimate decision might be, Americans could not afford to decide another war-and-peace question on the basis of misunderstanding and false information. A clearheaded, factual approach was needed. Thus I was concerned as I watched many people fail to let the facts get in the way of stories that cast Kim Jong-il as an offender in every category—as evil incarnate.
An example seemed to be a lobbying campaign that persuaded President Bush to impose sanctions against North Korea in September 2003 for what some human rights groups alleged was “human trafficking.”59 Their case looked weak. First there was that old canard about “forced” labor by North Koreans in Siberia. (See chapter 22 for my view that sending guest workers to Russia had far more positive than negative implications, from the standpoint of freedom and human rights.) Second, North Korean refugee women were being sold as wives and concubines to Chinese men. The evidence presented by human rights groups actually pointed mainly to Chinese nationals, acting on Chinese soil, as the guilty parties in such trafficking.60 Pyongyang had not authorized the women’s flight to China and authorities had shown disapproval of such liaisons by forcibly terminating the pregnancies of women who returned to North Korea—a human rights abuse documented far more thoroughly than was any official North Korean involvement in the trafficking of the women.61
A Washington psychiatrist who had done profiling work for the CIA decided that Kim suffered from “a serious mental illness.” In a draft report circulated in Washington and “widely quoted in news media accounts, the psychiatrist backed his long-distance psychoanalysis with a lengthy recital from the public record of negative information about Kim Jong-il.62 We have seen that Kim grew up as a pampered prince, permitted to have his way on whatever his little heart might desire. That, the doctor said, inclined him toward a narcissistic personality. I had no argument there. But then, surmising that even the mature Kim Jong-il (by then in his sixties) must have felt inadequate compared with his father, the profiler followed that train of thought to suggest that Kim’s narcissism qualified as what he described as the most dangerous form, the malignant version. Justifying that extreme call, he sweep-ingly characterized the North Korean ruler as so self-absorbed and grandiose that he completely lacked capacity to empathize—not only with enemies including Americans, South Koreans and Japanese but also with his own people. No capacity to empathize? The doctor had overlooked plenty of evidence that this was an exaggeration.63
I hoped that Americans, whenever they might start to hear a loud chorus of political and opinion leaders calling for the invasion of one more country led by one more dangerous “madman,” would subject the diagnosis to elementary scrutiny. I’m no doctor, but I thought Kim Jong-il was crazy—like a fox. To scare off invaders and extort aid, he and his publicists had encouraged enemies to believe that the Dear Leader—-who was in fact genuinely peculiar—might be seriously nuts and on that account should not be provoked. I thought it would be helpful if Western analysts, rather than breathlessly buying into the seriously nuts part, looked more closely before making up their minds. As Seoul-based Pyongyang-watcher Michael Breen put it, “while being neutral in the face of bad leadership is unacceptable, being objective is essential in assessing it.”64
Missing in the accounts by those who demonized Kim was any hint that there might be two sides to the story.65 Surely there are unrelievedly evil people. Saddam Hussein’s sadistic sons Uday and Qusay perhaps qualified. But I could not fit the real Kim Jong-il comfortably into the role of total monster. Having studied Kim rather intensively for years, I would describe him as an often insensiti
ve and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and—increasingly, as he matured—charming. He was an incompetent economic manager during the decades when stubbornness or insecurity kept him from risking needed changes in the system. But then, having found somewhere a new decisiveness, he had become the apparent sponsor of reform efforts. Sale of his regime’s weapons of mass destruction to other enemy nations could cause the United States, both at home and in its role as global policeman, immense problems—but for a price he appeared “willing to relinquish at least his capacity to make and sell them.
North Korea’s human rights situation truly piled atrocity upon atrocity as readers of chapters 14, 16 and 34 know. The system in which secret police fed political prisoners to the gulag was his father’s creation, but Kim Jong-il had either actively or passively preserved it. There was precious little on the positive side of the ledger page to balance the horrors of the camps. After complaints by human rights groups, the regime had closed some of those. But the prisoners had been transferred to locations that were more remote, where the eyes of the outside world could not penetrate. The most favorable inference from that incident was that Kim could be moved by outside opinion. Then there were his moderating instructions to “avoid creating internal enemies” and his encouragement of more attention to legality. In the end, still, there was no sign that he had come close to phasing out the camps and the oppressive system of surveillance.
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 99
