Stardate 20030414.0024

(On Screen): Last October, for reasons which remain mysterious, a top official of North Korea told an American diplomat that North Korea had been working on enriching uranium to weapons grade for the last several years. This was a direct violation of a deal made between North Korea and the US in 1994. As part of that deal, the US had been delivering half a million tons of refined petroleum per year to North Korea at no charge.

Shortly thereafter, the shipments stopped. This was not NK's only source of petroleum, but it hurt nonetheless. The North Korean economy is a complete wreck in any case, and this didn't help any. (I've previously written about North Korea here and here.)

Starting late last year, North Korea began its patented "foaming at the mouth" act internationally and diplomatically, making paranoid claims about American plots to invade, and threats of terrible consequences, and doing nearly everything possible to create an incident. It now looks as if what they were attempting to do was to create panic, while demanding bilateral talks with the US, in hopes of forcing us to come to a quick agreement in order to reduce the tension that North Korea was doing everything in its power to create.

If they could force such talks, and induce a sense of urgency and panic in the US administration, they'd be in a reasonably good position to try to force us to buy them off in order to get them to stop raising a ruckus. It didn't work.

In the first few weeks there did seem to be a lot of worry, especially in South Korea and Japan, and pressure on the US. But President Bush is nothing if not unflappable, and paid no attention to it. It was clearly the judgment of the US that NK was bluffing and trying to manufacture a crisis, and the Bush administration decided to ignore it and wait them out.

It now looks as if NK's gambit was timed to coincide with the beginnings of serious force buildup in Kuwait prior to operations in Iraq. At the time many wondered if there might actually be some sort of deal between Saddam and Kim, with Saddam paying Kim to do what he did. I don't think that was the case. However, it is evident that during a period when the US had the majority of its military force assigned elsewhere, we'd be least able to send forces to the Korean peninsula in case war also broke out there. Thus that would be the best time to threaten such a war in hopes of trying to wring concessions out of a fearful American administration. Unfortunately for NK, we don't have a fearful administration.

There have been rumors that the US reacted to the situation by delivering a message to the Chinese: this is your problem, you do something about it. And if you don't, and if NK actually gets nuclear weapons and starts making threats using them, then we'll give nuclear weapons to Japan.

And, of course, the war in Iraq went very smoothly and resulted in total annihilation of Saddam's regime in a very short time, using a much smaller ground force than anyone had actually thought would get used. That, too, seems to have gotten Chinese attention.

North Korea's only remaining source of energy is an oil pipeline from China, and there is word that the Chinese actually shut it off for a few days, and then let the government of North Korea know that if they didn't tone it down, and especially if they didn't stop threatening to develop nukes, that China would not oppose efforts to impose trade sanctions against NK. NK responded publicly to this by raving about how it would consider trade sanctions an act of war, but by this point the other nations in the region had come to realize that the US was right and that NK's lunatic ravings and wild threats were largely empty.

And now that operations in Iraq are winding down, the US is beginning to release forces. One carrier has already been ordered home and two more will leave soon. One of those is USS Kittyhawk, which is based in Japan and which will be returning there. We're also beginning to pull Air Force units out of the Middle East. The military window of vulnerability is rapidly closing, with more and more US forces of all kinds again becoming available to reinforce Korea if it were actually to become necessary.

And North Korea is beginning, very slowly, and still with great fervor and a strong taint of lunatic raving, to soften its position. Maybe. (It's kind of hard to tell, but that's how the diplomats are interpreting this.)

"If the U.S. is ready to make a bold switchover in its Korea policy for a settlement of the nuclear issue, the DPRK will not stick to any particular dialogue format," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.

Well, it's something anyway. They've relaxed the demand that they only negotiate directly with the US, and may be willing to consider multilateral talks which might also include South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. Maybe.

Of course, there's still that "bold switchover" requirement, which may really be a demand and may simply be rhetoric. Still, the other nations in the region think this is hopeful, especially the government of South Korea, which is directly crediting this change to the results of the war in Iraq.

"North Korea's softening position seems to have mainly come because it wasn't in an advantageous position internationally," Ra Jong-il, the security adviser, told reporters.

Analysts have speculated that a long and difficult war in Iraq would encourage North Korea to resist U.S. and international pressure to open up its nuclear facilities for inspection.

"This war on Iraq seems to have become a significant opportunity in deciding the landscape of international politics," Ra said.

President Bush's reaction is extremely interesting:

"That's very good news for the people in the Far East who are concerned about North Korea and their willingness to develop nuclear weapons," Bush said in Washington.

Which conspicuously leaves out whether it's good news for the United States. In other words, China, this is still your problem, and we're happy that you're starting to make progress in solving it.

I don't know that NK was impressed directly by the rapid outcome in Iraq, really.

The typically dreadful performance of Soviet weapons must surely have been noticed, but not so much in the sense of making NK feel less confident in its own abilities as in the sense of making NK feel less confident about how everyone else would feel about its own abilities. Their legendarily huge park of older Soviet tanks must now seem less formidable, for instance, given that this is about ten out of ten times now that they've been meat-on-the-table for western weapons in direct open war.

But I do think that the outcome of the war did impress the Chinese, and implicit in Bush's message which I think was sent to China was that if China didn't solve the problem, we'd have to and then they'd find American forces sitting right on the Chinese border. The clear message all this time has been that the Bush administration was not going to panic and buy off the North Koreans. And any other solution we ended up going with that didn't involve multilateral negotiations was going to be something the Chinese were really not going to like, so it was definitely in their interest to straighten it out and not force us to do so.

I don't think that NK was impressed by the rapid outcome in Iraq, but they certainly understand that it means we are again growing stronger, and that the window of weakness is closing. The largest American commitment to Iraq in the forseeable future will be from the Army. In any hypothetical reignition of war in Korea, our primary contribution in terms of reinforcements would be air and naval, and soon most of those kinds of forces will again be available. (Most ground combat would be handled by the South Korean army. We couldn't get significant ground forces into Korea soon enough to make any difference.)

In the mean time, NK's situation is dire and they're running out of time, and that's why we're beginning to see the faintest hints of them pulling back.

Even though our reasons for fighting in Iraq were entirely self-interested, it remains the case that we did just remove a brutal and evil regime there, and the people of Iraq are already immeasurably better off than they were just a month ago. North Korea is actually just as bad if not even worse, but we probably can't bring about a regime change there any time soon. It's beginning to look less and less likely that there will be a war there.

Which is good news for everyone except the people of North Korea, who will continue to live and die in one of the two worst remaining hell holes on Earth.