Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  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 accepted 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 insensitive 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.

  I wondered what Kim might be persuaded to do now that he was changing his country’s ideology. In my most optimistic daydream I imagined a very high-level envoy from a U.S. president or presidential nominee meeting Kim, perhaps in the early autumn of an election year, and saying, “Mr. Chairman, I know that you would like to meet with the man I represent. With your permission I will speak frankly on that point. In view of what we have learned about treatment of North Korean citizens who are deemed to have deviated politically from the official line, it would be hard for him to agree to meet with you. There is growing public concern in the United States regarding that situation.

  “You and I have discussed measures that might begin to resolve our other mutual problems. But you are asking that we not insist upon your country’s immediate nuclear disarmament. You ask that we accept simply a freeze of your capacity to make such weapons during a period of-watching and waiting, while the two sides develop mutual trust. Without a breakthrough on human rights, I have to tell you, it would be politically difficult to justify a deal that offered no more than the Agreed Frame-work of 1994 had provided—a deal, moreover, that would hinge on trust. Let me also suggest that it would be difficult for you. to trust our professions of non-hostility in such circumstances. After all, you might think, whenever American public opinion became seriously aroused by news of the human rights situation here, a policy reversal in Washington could lead to renewed hostility. So let’s talk about how we might fast-forward the development of trust.”

  In my daydream Kim Jong-il would listen intently as the interpreter turned those words into Korean, before the American envoy continued: “The man who sent me understands that many of the prisoners were incarcerated originally because their attitudes and class backgrounds, or those of their parents or grandparents, were considered unsuitable in the sort of economy and social system your country was building from the 1940s. He knows of your reported instruction to ‘avoid making internal enemies.’ He knows about the adjustments you have begun to make to modernize the economic system. He wonders whether you might have contemplated going farther to create a role for the surviving political prisoners—and their jailers—as free people working in the new economic enterprises that you expect to see formed. If you were to free the prisoners, he would meet with you gladly.”

  We have seen how decisively (or, if you prefer, impetuously) Kim Jong-il had reacted to frank but polite talk in his meetings in 2000 with Kim Dae-jung and Madeleine Albright. His responses in person had been a far cry from the usual bloody-min
ded stone-walling his subordinates resorted to when they negotiated on his behalf.66 At the conclusion of our hypothetical envoy’s human-rights pitch, I imagined the Dear Leader grinning conspira-torially and asking, “So he wants me to make him the Great Emancipator here in the DPRK, in time for what your political writers call an ‘October surprise’?” The envoy at this point would smile and reply, a bit playfully “What’s wrong with your letting him take some of the credit? But seriously he wants you. to be the Great Emancipator.”

  And then, who knows? Kim might turn to one of his functionaries and say, “Get the State Security and Public Security chiefs into my office immediately. Call the governors in from all the provinces for a meeting tonight to plan for turning those camps into ordinary communities. I’ll probably regret this, but I’m taking down the fences—-within the month.”

  Such an approach would be a long shot indeed, but something of the sort seemed to me worth a try. The polite talk would be essential. A former U.S. president would have the appropriate stature to serve as envoy. “In dealing with a nation that is attempting to reform, the form matters as much as the content,” writes political scientist David C. Kang. “You can’t tell a Korean anything, but suggestions of a solution might be met by receptive ears.”67

  One could dislike or even loathe Kim Jong-il. In my personal opinion, North Korea and the rest of the world would have been far better off if the boy called Yura had drowned in that wading pool with his little brother Shura back in 1948. Under the circumstances existing as of early 2004, however, it was no more relevant to ponder what might have been than to decide whether one liked or disliked the Dear Leader. What was essential, I thought, was to avoid overlooking anything about Kim that might point the way to a satisfactory, non-military resolution.