Category: north Korea

The real story on North Korea and its healthcare

By Stephen Gowans

The United States has announced that it is adding a new tranche to the Himalaya of sanctions it has built up since 1950 against North Korea, sanctions I outlined in my last article Amnesty International botches blame for North Korea’s crumbling healthcare. Calling the new sanctions “measures” – perhaps to escape the disfavor the word has fallen into after sanctions wiped out the lives of half of million Iraqi children in the 1990s — US secretary of state Hillary Clinton purred reassuringly that the new “measures are not directed at the people of North Korea.” [1] She didn’t predict, however, whether they would add to the misery the previous umpteenth round of sanctions has already visited upon the lives of North Koreans, even if she says they aren’t directed at them, but we can be pretty sure they will.

At the same time preparations were underway to launch Operation Invincible Spirit, a four day joint US-South Korea military exercise to take place in the Sea of Japan, involving 8,000 troops, 200 warplanes and an armada of warships led by the aircraft carrier USS George Washington. The point of the exercise, according to the US commander in the Pacific, Robert Willard, is to “send a strong signal to Pyongyang and Kim Jong-il regarding the provocation that Cheonan represented” [2](the Cheonan being the South Korean warship that sunk in disputed waters in May.) Inasmuch as the Cheonan’s sinking appears to be a replay of the Gulf of Tonkin incident [3] – the alleged attack on a US Navy destroyer by North Vietnamese patrol boats used by US president Lyndon Johnson as a pretext to step up war on Vietnam – the military exercises represent the second stage of what looks like a plan to increase pressure on Pyongyang, with a view to producing what US policy has been trying to produce north of the 38th parallel for the last 60 years: the collapse of the anti-imperialist governments led by Kim Il-sung and now Kim Jong-il. The first part of the plan was to blame North Korea for the Cheonan’s sinking. The second part is to launch military exercises using the pretext of the first.

US secretary of war Robert Gates: Neglects to mention that North Korea’s “stagnation and isolation” may have more than a little to do with US economic warfare and the unrelenting threat of US military intervention.

China calls the exercises, scheduled to begin this Sunday, provocative. And University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings points out that the North Koreans become agitated whenever the United States and South Korea carry out joint military exercises, because they “see them as a prelude to a possible attack.” [4] Indeed, since it is impossible to distinguish troops, warships and warplanes massing on one’s borders for the purposes of conducting war games from troops, warships and warplanes massing on one’s borders for the purposes of an invasion, it is hardly surprising that the North Koreans are agitated. And that’s the point: keep the DPRK on a continual war-footing, so that it diverts its sanctions-starved economy into military preparedness and away from productive investments and provision of healthcare, education, housing and so on. Joint US-South Korea military exercises aren’t just a sometimes thing. They happen every year, and Operation Invincible Spirit adds another provocation to the annual cycle.

Forcing its ideological opponents to spend heavily on defense — when they always start off poorer and weaker than the United States and can therefore ill-afford to do so if they’re ever going to progress — is a tactic Washington has been using for decades to contain, cripple and ultimately defeat countries that offer a humane and progressive alternative to integration into a worldwide capitalist system of imperial relations.

On top of the advantages of this tactic abroad, at home the defense spending needed to threaten target countries transfers wealth upwards, from working Americans through their taxes to the investors and businesspeople in the armaments industry who benefit in two ways: first, from the profits they reap from arms contracts and second from interest on the bonds they buy to finance US defense spending. The tab is picked up by US taxpayers with their labor and, if a war is waged against their country, by foreigners with their lives, or with crippled standards of living, if their governments are forced to skimp on civilian spending to build a credible defensive force to deter the threat of US military intervention. As the dues-payers for the US warfare economy along with its foreign victims, US citizens have more in common with the citizens of official enemy countries than they think. Who’s the real enemy?

The tactic of spending ideological opponents into bankruptcy has two dimensions: a physical one, of suffocating an alternative economy until it either breaks down or is left staggering under the weight of economic warfare and the costs of preparing to repel the unrelenting ominous threat of military intervention, and an ideological one, of attributing the break-down to the inherent characteristics of the alternative system itself. In this way a warning is sent on two levels: a surface one aimed at ordinary people, which says, while this alternative may seem like a good idea, it doesn’t work and only leads to disaster. To work, this necessitates the cover up of the real causes of the break down.

William Blum: Every socialist experiment has “had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies.”

At the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas yesterday, both Clinton and US secretary of war [5] Robert Gates, played up the message that North Korea’s dire straits are endogenous, and not the product of a systematic campaign of breaking the country’s back. Gates said: “It is stunning to see how little has changed up there (in the North) and yet how much South Korea continues to grow and prosper. The North by contrast, stagnates in isolation and deprivation.” [6] Clinton said much the same. Of course, neither mentioned that sanctions, and the continual harassment of North Korea by US forces, might have something to do with North Korea’s isolation and stagnation. On a deeper level, a warning is sent to would-be leaders of oppressed classes and peoples: try to break free from the US imperial orbit, and this will happen to you, too.

Forty years ago, Felix Greene outlined how Washington had used this tactic against China and Cuba, but his description also fits North Korea today.

“The United States imposed a 100 percent embargo on trade with these countries; she employs great pressure to prevent her allies from trading with them; she arms and finances their enemies; she harasses their shipping; she threatens them with atomic missiles which she announces are pre-targeted and pre-programmed to destroy their major cities; her spy ships prowl just beyond these countries’ legal territorial waters; her reconnaissance planes fly constantly over their territory. And having done all in their power to disrupt these countries’ efforts to rebuild their societies by means of blockades to prevent essential goods from reaching them, any temporary difficulties and setbacks these countries may encounter are magnified and exaggerated and presented as proof that a socialist revolutionary government is ‘unworkable’.” [7]

Author William Blum, who writes an Anti-Empire Report monthly, elaborates on Greene’s point:

“…every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exception — was either overthrown, invaded, corrupted, perverted, subverted, destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States and its allies. Not one socialist government or movement — from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in El Salvador — not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. It’s as if the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon these catastrophes, nodded their heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humankind shall never fly.” [8]

Disputed Territory

Cumings offered insight into the context surrounding the Cheonan affair in a May 27, Democracy Now interview. The incident, Cummings observed:

“happened very close to the North Korean border, we’ve had incidents like this, somewhat different ones, but with large loss of life, going back more than ten years. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. That’s a larger total of casualties than this one. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames. We don’t know how many people died in that. This is a no man’s land, or waters, off the west coast of Korea that both North and South claim. And the Cheonan ship was sailing in those waters…” [9]

University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings: “The US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally.” An incident waiting to happen.

The hypocrisy need not be pointed out. When North Korean ships are sunk, there’s no provocation, except to North Koreans, who, in the view of Western governments and the propaganda apparatus of private-sector mass media, don’t matter (in the same way Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas, matters to Western governments and Western mass media while the countless Palestinians who have been kidnapped by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza and have since disappeared into the bowels of Israeli prisons are invisible.) But when a South Korean ship is sunk in the same disputed waters, North Korea is immediately blamed (by the politicians of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, though not by the South Korean military, which for weeks, said it had no evidence of North Korean involvement.) And the sinking is used to justify more sanctions and more military exercises to ratchet up the pressure.

Cumings went on to explain that the waters in which the South Korean warship went down in May “is a no man’s land, where the US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally. The North has never accepted it. The North says that this area is under the joint jurisdiction of the North and South Korean militaries. So you have an incident waiting to happen.” [10] Into this cauldron of roiling waters waiting for an incident to happen will soon be tossed Operation Invincible Spirit.

The World Health Organization Weighs In

While the Western media lighted on Amnesty International’s portrayal of North Korea’s healthcare system as a horror show with the eagerness of flies on road-kill, the World Health Organization had a more sober assessment of the rights organization’s Cold War-era hatchet job. WHO spokesman Paul Garwood faulted the report for being “mainly anecdotal, with stories dating back to 2001, and not up to the UN agency’s scientific approach to evaluating healthcare.” [11]

“All the facts are from people who aren’t in the country,” Garwood said. “There’s no science in the research.” [12]

In contrast, WHO chief Margaret Chan visited North Korea in April and returned with an assessment that makes Amnesty’s report look like it was written to cater to US foreign policy propaganda requirements.

Chan noted that:

“The health system requires further strengthening in order to sustain the government policy of universal coverage and, of course, to improve the quality of services. More investments are required to upgrade infrastructure and equipment and to ensure adequate supplies of medicines and other commodities, and to address the correct skill mix of the health workforce.” [13]

WHO chief Margaret Chan: Her assessment of North Korea’s healthcare system makes Amnesty’s look like a Cold War-era hatchet job.

All of this is consistent, in a way, with what Amnesty says. Of course, the ability of the government to invest in infrastructure, upgrade equipment, and secure adequate supplies of medicines, is severely hampered by the US-led campaign of economic warfare and by Pyongyang’s need to raid its civilian budget to secure it borders against incessant US military harassment. Lifting sanctions and removing the military sword of Damocles that dangles menacingly above North Koreans’ collective heads (I wonder whether the US nuclear missiles targeted on Pyongyang are, as Clinton claims with sanctions, not directed at the North Korean people) would go far to improving the provision of healthcare in North Korea. Which is one big reason it will never happen. The point of sanctions and unremitting military threat is to destroy what the US government calls North Korea’s Marxist-Leninist system (inaccurately) and its non-market economy, not to make life better, healthier and happier for North Koreans.

Despite these challenges, DPR Korea appears to have secured what Chan describes as “advantages over other developing countries,” including:

o No shortage of doctors and nurses.
o No brain drain of healthcare professionals (a particularly acute problem in Africa.)
o An elaborate health infrastructure and a developed network of primary health care physicians. [14]

Chan also noted that “the government has done a good job in areas such as immunization coverage, effective implementation of maternal, newborn and child interventions, in providing effective tuberculosis treatment and in successfully reducing malaria cases.” [15]

Perhaps, the real story about North Korean healthcare isn’t the challenges it faces, or the systematic efforts of the United States to make it collapse, but the fact that it hasn’t collapsed despite these challenges, and has managed to earn the praise of the WHO as the envy [16] of many developing nations.

1. Justin McCurry, “US announces fresh North Korea sanctions”, The Guardian (UK), July 21, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Stephen Gowans, “The sinking of the Cheonan”, PSLweb.org, May 27, 2010. http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=14044&news_iv_ctrl=2801
4. “Historian Bruce Cumings: US Stance on Korea Ignores Tensions Rooted in 65-Year-Old Conflict; North Korea Sinking Could Be Response to November ’09 South Korea Attack”, Democracy Now, May 27, 2010. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/nk
5. The US military is all about offense not defense, unless defense refers to the defense of capital accumulation within a system of imperial relations. Calling Gates the secretary of defense stupidly reinforces this deception. No one, but the Japanese and its Axis allies, would have called Japan of the 1930s and 1940s the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism, even though Japan bestowed the self-serving and misleading title upon itself. Why, then, should we refer to Gates by the equally self-serving and misleading title of secretary of defense?
6. McCurry
7. Felix Greene, The Enemy: What Every American Should Know about Imperialism, Vintage, New York, 1970, p. 292.
8. William Blum, “The Anti-Empire Report,” September 2, 2009. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html
9. Cumings: Democracy Now
10. Ibid.
11. Bradley S. Klapper, “WHO criticizes Amnesty report into NKorea health”, The Associated Press, July 16, 2010.
12. Ibid.
13. Lisa Schlein, “WHO chief notes N. Korean achievements in public health care”, Voice of America News, April 30, 2010.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Klapper

Amnesty International botches blame for North Korea’s crumbling healthcare

“Economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health.”
–The New England Journal of Medicine [1]

By Stephen Gowans

Amnesty International has released a report condemning the North Korean government for failing to meet “its obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to health of its citizens”, citing “significant deprivation in (North Koreans’) enjoyment of the right to adequate care, in large part due to failed or counterproductive government policies.” The report documents rundown healthcare facilities which “operate with frequent power cuts and no heat” and medical personnel who “often do not receive salaries, and many hospitals (that) function without medicines and essentials.” Horrific stories are recounted of major operations carried out without anaesthesia. Blame for this is attributed solely to the North Korean government. [2] While unstated, the implication is that DPR Korea is a failed state, whose immediate demise can only be fervently wished for (or worked toward.)

The attack is joined by Barbara Demick, the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, writing in the British newspaper, The Guardian. She acknowledges the DPR Korea’s considerable social achievements – an acknowledgement that would never have been permitted in the pages of a major Western newspaper in the depths of the Cold War – but does so only in order to show how far the country has regressed.

If we recognize that “economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health” and acknowledge, as a former US president has, that North Korea is “the most sanctioned nation in the world,” it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that the crumbling of North Korea’s healthcare system is due to sanctions. How is it, then, that a new Amnesty International report blames Pyongyang’s “failed or counterproductive” policies, while saying not a word about sanctions?

“The country once had an enviable healthcare system,” Demick writes, “with a network of nearly 45,000 family practioners. Some 800 hospitals and 1,000 clinics were almost free of charge for patients. They still are, but you don’t get much at the hospital these days.” Demick continues: “The school system that once allowed North Korea’s founder Kim Il-Sung (father of the current leader) to boast his country was the first in Asia to eliminate illiteracy has now collapsed. Students have no books, no paper, no pencils.” [3]

Nowhere is the role of sanctions mentioned in Demick’s account of North Korea’s “giant leap backwards” [4] or in Amnesty’s condemnation of Pyongyang for failing to safeguard the basic healthcare rights of its citizens. Instead, Demick and Amnesty point to a botched currency reform, as if it alone accounts for the country’s deep descent into poverty. Neither mention that no country has been subjected to as long and determined a campaign of economic warfare as North Korea, or that in recent years, a UN sanctions regime little different from the one that destroyed the healthcare system of Iraq in the 1990s, and led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under the age of five from 1991 to 1998 [5], has been imposed on a country that has struggled with food shortages since the collapse of the Soviet-led socialist trading community and as a result of a series of natural calamities. No mention either is made of Washington’s efforts to “squeeze North Korea with every financial sanction possible” with the aim of bringing about the collapse of the country’s economy, [6] and with it, its public healthcare and educational systems. What’s more, while Demick acknowledges that South Korea and other countries have sharply reduced food aid to the North, she blames North Korea’s leadership for refusing to dismantle its nuclear program and for “provocations” against the South, for inviting the aid reduction. (The provocations Demick refers to include the sinking of a South Korean corvette in March, attributed, with not a lot of evidence – and over the initial denials of the South Korean military [7] – to a North Korean submarine.) Demick and Amnesty could have condemned South Korea and the United States for using food as a weapon. Instead, Demick censures North Korea for putting itself in the position of being sanctioned, while Amnesty counsels major donors not to base food aid on political considerations, without acknowledging that this is exactly what major donors have done.

Both Amnesty and Demick operate within the framework of Western propaganda. As the North Korea specialist Tim Beal points out, Western propaganda invokes economic mismanagement as the explanation for North Korea’s collapsing economy, despite an obvious alternative explanation: sanctions. “The results — those malnourished babies,” Beal wrote prophetically three years ago, “can be blamed on the Koreans, which in turn is produced as evidence that the sanctions are desirable and necessary.” [8]

Sanctions of Mass Destruction

“In contrast to war’s easily observable casualties, the apparently nonviolent consequences of economic intervention seem like an acceptable alternative. However, recent reports suggest that economic sanctions can seriously harm the health of persons who live in targeted nations.” [9] This has been well established and widely accepted in the cases of Iraq in the 1990s and the ongoing US blockade of Cuba. Political scientists John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote an important paper in Foreign Affairs, in which they showed that economic sanctions “may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.” [10]

While unstated, the implication of Amnesty International’s new report on North Korea’s healthcare is that DPR Korea is a failed state, whose immediate demise can only be fervently wished for (or worked toward.) The rights organization covers up the role played by the United States and its allies in undermining the conditions that would allow Pyongyang to fulfill the healthcare rights of North Koreans, and then blames the disaster on Pyongyang.

“The dangers posed today by such enfeebled, impoverished, and friendless states as Iraq and North Korea are minor indeed”, they wrote in 1999. It might be added that the dangers posed by North Korea to the physical safety of US citizens are not only minor but infinitesimally small. Notwithstanding the fevered fantasies of rightwing commentators, North Korea has neither the means, nor the required death wish, to strike the United States. However, the danger the country poses to the idea of US domination – and hence, to the banks, corporations, and major investors who dominate US policy-making – are admittedly somewhat greater.

“Severe economic sanctions”, the Muellers contend, ought to be “designated by the older label of ‘economic warfare’”. “In past wars economic embargoes caused huge numbers of deaths. Some 750,000 German civilians may have died because of the Allied naval blockade during World War I.” [11]

“So long as they can coordinate their efforts,” the two political scientists continue, “the big countries have at their disposal a credible, inexpensive and potent weapon for use against small and medium-sized foes. The dominant powers have shown that they can inflict enormous pain at remarkably little cost to themselves or the global economy. Indeed, in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated…” [12] And with devastated economies, come crumbling healthcare systems and failure to provide for the basic healthcare rights of the population.

Sixty Years of Sanctions

From the moment it imposed a total embargo on exports to North Korea three days after the Korean War began in June 1950, the United States has maintained an uninterrupted regime of economic, financial, and diplomatic sanctions against North Korea. [13] These include:

o Limits on the export of goods and services.
o Prohibition of most foreign aid and agricultural sales.
o A ban on Export-Import Bank funding.
o Denial of favourable trade terms.
o Prohibition of imports from North Korea.
o Blocking of any loan or funding through international financial institutions.
o Limits on export licensing of food and medicine for export to North Korea.
o A ban on government financing of food and medicine exports to North Korea.
o Prohibition on import and export transactions related to transportation.
o A ban on dual-use exports (i.e., civilian goods that could be adapted to military purposes.)
o Prohibition on certain commercial banking transactions. [14]

In recent years, US sanctions have been complemented by “efforts to freeze assets and cut off financial flows” [15] by blocking banks that deal with North Korean companies from access to the US banking system. The intended effect is to make North Korea a banking pariah that no bank in the world will touch. Former US President George W. Bush was “determined to squeeze North Korea with every financial sanction possible” until its economy collapsed. [16] The Obama administration has not departed from the Bush policies of financial strangulation.

Washington has also acted to broaden the bite of sanctions, pressing other countries to join its campaign of economic warfare against a country it faults for maintaining a Marxist-Leninist system and non-market economy. [17] This has included the sponsoring of a United Nations Security Council resolution compelling all nations to refrain for exporting dual-use items to North Korea (a repeat of the sanctions regime that led to the crumbling of Iraq’s healthcare system in the 1990s.) Washington has even gone so far as to pressure China (unsuccessfully) to cut off North Korea’s supply of oil. [18]

Dual-Use Sanctions: 1990s Iraq Redux

The Amnesty report blames Pyongyang for a shortage of syringes at hospitals. Yet in the 1990s Iraq suffered from a similar shortage, not due to failed government policies, but because “the importation of some desperately needed materials [had] been delayed or denied because of concerns that they might contribute to Iraq’s WMD programs. Supplies of syringes were held up for half a year because of fears they might be used in creating anthrax spores.” [19] Like Iraq in the 1990s, North Korea is under sanctions that ban dual use items – goods that have important civilian uses but might also be used in the production of weapons. “Medical diagnostic techniques that use radioactive particles, once common in Iraq, [were] banned under the sanctions, and plastic bags needed for blood transfusions [were] restricted.” [20] On October 14, 2006 the United Nations Security Council banned the export to DRP Korea of any goods, including those used for civilian purposes, which could contribute to WMD-related programs – the very same sanctions that led, at minimum, to hundreds of thousands of deaths in 1990s Iraq when the export of potentially weapons-related material, also essential to the maintenance of sanitation, water treatment and healthcare infrastructure, was held up or blocked. Not a word of the escalating sanctions regime against North Korea is mentioned in the Amnesty report, an omission so glaring as to resemble a report on the post-World War II devastation of Europe that says nothing of the string of Nazi aggressions that caused it.

Kaesong, the vast industrial park of South Korean factories employing North Korean workers situated near the South Korea-North Korea border, provides an example of how ridiculously wide the dual-use sanctions net can be cast. “U.S. officials blocked the installation of a South Korean switchboard system at Kaesong on grounds that the equipment contained components that could have been adapted for military use. As a result…the 15 companies operating at Kaesong share a single phone line, and messages must often be hand-delivered across the border.” [21] While dual-use sanctions may appear to be targeted, just about any item required for the provision of basic healthcare, sanitation, and educational rights – chlorine, syringes, x-ray equipment, medical isotopes, blood transfusion bags, even graphite for pencils – can be construed to have military uses and therefore banned for export.

Most of North Korea’s trade after the fall of the Soviet Union was with China, Japan and South Korea. In 2002, Japan banned the export of rice to North Korea and effectively prohibited North Korean ships from using Japanese ports. [22] In 2009, Tokyo went further, imposing a total ban on exports to the beleaguered country. [23] No wonder former US President George W. Bush called North Korea “the most sanctioned nation in the world”. [24]

Food as a Weapon

The Amnesty report recommends that “major donors and neighbouring countries…ensure that the provision of humanitarian assistance in North Korea is based on need and is not subject to political conditions”. In making this recommendation, the rights organization tacitly acknowledges that humanitarian assistance has indeed been subject to political conditions. (If this practice was unheard of, why make the recommendation?) In fact, the United States, Japan and South Korea have used food aid as a weapon. “After Pyongyang test-fired missiles in July (2006), South Korea announced plans to eliminate the 500,000 tons in annual food aid it provides directly to North Korea.” At the same time, food aid from China dropped one-third. [25] And in 2005, the Bush administration cut off all food aid to North Korea. [26] In all instances, humanitarian assistance was withheld to exact concessions from Pyongyang.

Amnesty International and Imperialism

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognized in 1997 that sanctions “often cause significant disruptions in the distribution of food, pharmaceuticals and sanitation supplies, jeopardize the quality of food and the availability of clean drinking water, severely interfere with the functioning of basic health and educational systems, and undermine the right to work.” [27] These disruptions were evident in Iraq in the 1990s, and led to the crumbling of the country’s healthcare system, contributing to what the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, called “a de facto genocide.” [28] Additionally, the deleterious effects of US economic warfare on the Cuban healthcare system are uncontested except by anti-Castro émigrés and the US government. [29] If we recognize that “economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health” and acknowledge, as a former US president has, that North Korea is “the most sanctioned nation in the world,” it is difficult not to draw the obvious conclusion: that North Korea’s crumbling healthcare system and “great leap backwards” are not due in large measure to Pyongyang’s “failed or counterproductive” policies, but to the inhumane policies of the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Amnesty International’s contributions to US imperialism are not unprecedented. In 1991 the rights organization claimed that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies from incubators, a hoax, perpetrated by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. When US President George H.W. Bush appeared on television to announce that he was readying for war on Iraq, he had a copy of the Amnesty report in his hands.

Amnesty’s failure to point to the role played by the United States and its allies in undermining the conditions that would allow Pyongyang to fulfill the healthcare and other rights of North Koreans, and its willingness to play a part in legitimizing Washington’s foreign policy agenda, is not without precedent. While Amnesty was critical of the human rights record of apartheid South Africa, it alone among human rights organizations refused to denounce apartheid itself. [30] The organization also refused to condemn the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia [31], even though it was an exercise in imperial predation that denied the rights of many innocent Yugoslavs to life, security of the person and employment. Amnesty excused its inaction on grounds that it is not an antiwar organization, as if war and human rights are not often inextricably bound. The war on Yugoslavia certainly was, at least rhetorically, since NATO invoked the language of human rights to justify its attack. But Amnesty’s most egregious service to the propaganda requirements of US foreign policy came in 1991, when the rights group released a report in the run-up to the Gulf War claiming that Iraqi soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies from incubators. This was a hoax, perpetrated by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, orchestrated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which had been hired to launch a propaganda campaign to galvanize public support for a US war on Iraq. When US President George H.W. Bush appeared on television to announce that he was readying for war on Iraq, he had a copy of the Amnesty report in his hands. [32]

Conclusion

A Western-based organization, Amnesty has proven itself time and again to be incapable of operating outside the propaganda system of Western governments, and at times has acted to justify the imperialism of dominant powers or turned a blind eye to it. In its latest North Korea report it has made an invaluable contribution to the campaign of the United States and its East Asian allies to bring down one of the world’s few remaining top-to-bottom alternatives to capitalism and Third World dependency on the United States and former colonial powers. It has done so by fulfilling the two requirements needed for an anti-North Korea propaganda campaign to work: First, to cover up the role played by the United States, Japan and South Korea in starving the country’s healthcare and educational systems of necessary inputs, and second, to blame the ensuing chaos on the North Korean government. The action of Amnesty in misdirecting responsibility for this tragedy is no less shameful than that of the governments that have perpetrated it.

1. Eisenberg L, “The sleep of reason produces monsters—human costs of economic sanctions,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1997; 336:1248-50. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/336/17/1247
2. Amnesty International, “The crumbling state of health care in North Korea”, July 2010. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA24/001/2010/en/13a097fc-4bda-4119-aae5-73e0dd446193/asa240012010en.pdf
3. Barbara Demick, “North Korea’s giant leap backwards”, The Guardian (UK), July 17, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/17/north-korea-famine-fears
4. Ibid.
5. “Iraq surveys show ‘humanitarian emergency’”, UNICEF.org, August 12, 1999. http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm
6. The New York Times, September 13, 2006.
7. Stephen Gowans, “The sinking of the Cheonan”, PSLweb.org, May 27, 2010. http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=14044&news_iv_ctrl=2801
8. Tim Beal, “Invisible WMD- the effect of sanctions”, Pyongyang Report, Volume 9, Number 4, October 2007. http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/pyr9_4.mht
9. Karine Morin and Steven H. Miles, “Position paper: The health effects of economic sanctions and embargoes: The role of health professionals”, Annals of Internal Medicine, Volume 132, Number 2, 18 January 2000. http://www.annals.org/content/132/2/158.abstract
10. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of mass destruction”, Foreign Affairs, Volume 78, Number 3, May/June 1999.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic sanctions”, Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2006. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl31696.pdf
14. Ibid.
15. Mark Landler, “Envoy to coordinate North Korea sanctions”, The New York Times, June 27, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/world/americas/27diplo.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
16. The New York Times, September 13, 2006.
17. According to Rennack, the following US sanctions have been imposed on North Korea for reasons listed as either “communism”, “non-market economy” or “communism and market disruption”: prohibition on foreign aid; prohibition on Export-Import Bank funding; limits on the exports or goods and services; denial of favorable trade terms.
18. The Washington Post, June 24, 2005.
19. Mueller and Mueller.
20. Ibid.
21. The Washington Post, November 16, 2005.
22. Rennack.
23. “KCNA dismisses Japan’s frantic anti-DPRK racket”, KCNA, June 23, 2009.
24. U.S. News & World Report, June 26, 2008; The New York Times, July 6, 2008.
25. The Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2006.
26. The Washington Post, May 16, 2008.
27. United Nations Economic and Social Council, “The relationship between economic sanctions and respect for economic, social and cultural rights”, December 12, 1997. http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/0/974080d2db3ec66d802565c5003b2f57?Opendocument
28. Denis J. Halliday, “The Deadly and Illegal Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the People of Iraq”, Brown Journal of World Affairs, Winter/Spring 2000 – Volume VII, Issue 1. http://www.watsoninstitute.org/bjwa/archive/7.1/Essays/Halliday.pdf
29. Richard Garfield and Sarah Santana, “The Impact of the Economic Crisis and US Embargo on Health in Cuba”, American Journal of Public Health, January 19997, Volume 87, Number 1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1380757/
30. Francis A. Boyle and Dennis Bernstein, “Interview with Francis Boyle. Amnesty on Jenin”, Covert Action Quarterly, Summer, 2002. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=4573
31. Alexander Cockburn, “How the US State Dept. Recruited Human Rights Groups to Cheer On the Bombing Raids: Those Incubator Babies, Once More?” Counterpunch, April 1-15, 1999. http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005098.html
32. Boyle and Bernstein.

The sinking of the Cheonan: Another Gulf of Tonkin incident

By Stephen Gowans

While the South Korean government announced on May 20 that it has overwhelming evidence that one of its warships was sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine, there is, in fact, no direct link between North Korea and the sunken ship. And it seems very unlikely that North Korea had anything to do with it.

That’s not my conclusion. It’s the conclusion of Won See-hoon, director of South Korea’s National Intelligence. Won told a South Korean parliamentary committee in early April, less than two weeks after the South Korean warship, the Cheonan, sank in waters off Baengnyeong Island, that there was no evidence linking North Korea to the Cheonan’s sinking. (1)

South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Tae-young backed him up, pointing out that the Cheonan’s crew had not detected a torpedo (2), while Lee Ki-sik, head of the marine operations office at the South Korean joint chiefs of staff agreed that “No North Korean warships have been detected…(in) the waters where the accident took place.” (3)

Notice he said “accident.”

Soon after the sinking of the South Korean warship, the Cheonan, Defense Minister Kim Tae-young ruled out a North Korean torpedo attack, noting that a torpedo would have been spotted, and no torpedo had been spotted. Intelligence chief Won See-hoon, said there was no evidence linking North Korea to the Cheonan’s sinking.

Defense Ministry officials added that they had not detected any North Korean submarines in the area at the time of the incident. (4) According to Lee, “We didn’t detect any movement by North Korean submarines near” the area where the Cheonan went down. (5)

When speculation persisted that the Cheonan had been sunk by a North Korean torpedo, the Defense Ministry called another press conference to reiterate “there was no unusual North Korean activities detected at the time of the disaster.” (6)

A ministry spokesman, Won Tae-jae, told reporters that “With regard to this case, no particular activities by North Korean submarines or semi-submarines…have been verified. I am saying again that there were no activities that could be directly linked to” the Cheonan’s sinking. (7)

Rear Admiral Lee, the head of the marine operations office, added that, “We closely watched the movement of the North’s vessels, including submarines and semi-submersibles, at the time of the sinking. But military did not detect any North Korean submarines near the country’s western sea border.” (8)

North Korea has vehemently denied any involvement in the sinking.

So, a North Korean submarine is now said to have fired a torpedo which sank the Cheonan, but in the immediate aftermath of the sinking the South Korean navy detected no North Korean naval vessels, including submarines, in the area. Indeed, immediately following the incident defense minister Lee ruled out a North Korean torpedo attack, noting that a torpedo would have been spotted, and no torpedo had been spotted. (9)

The case gets weaker still.

It’s unlikely that a single torpedo could split a 1,200 ton warship in two. Baek Seung-joo, an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis says that “If a single torpedo or floating mine causes a naval patrol vessel to split in half and sink, we will have to rewrite our military doctrine.” (10)

The Cheonan sank in shallow, rapidly running, waters, in which it’s virtually impossible for submarines to operate. “Some people are pointing the finger at North Korea,” notes Song Young-moo, a former South Korean navy chief of staff, “but anyone with knowledge about the waters where the shipwreck occurred would not draw that conclusion so easily.” (11)

Contrary to what looks like an improbable North-Korea-torpedo-hypothesis, the evidence points to the Cheonan splitting in two and sinking because it ran aground upon a reef, a real possibility given the shallow waters in which the warship was operating. According to Go Yeong-jae, the South Korean Coast Guard captain who rescued 56 of the stricken warship’s crew, he “received an order …that a naval patrol vessel had run aground in the waters 1.2 miles to the southwest of Baengnyeong Island, and that we were to move there quickly to rescue them.” (12)

Some members of South Korea’s opposition parties – which have been highly critical of the government for blaming North Korea for the disaster– “contend that the boat was sunk either by a ‘friendly fire’ torpedo during a training exercise or that it broke part while trying to get off a reef.” (13) Whatever the cause, they don’t believe the findings of the official inquiry.

So how is it that what looked like no North Korean involvement in the Cheonan’s sinking, according to the South Korean military in the days immediately following the incident, has now become, one and half months later, an open and shut case of North Korean aggression, according to government-appointed investigators?

South Korean president Lee Myung-bak is a North Korea-phobe who prefers a confrontational stance toward his neighbor to the north to the policy of peaceful coexistence and growing cooperation favored by his recent predecessors. His foreign policy rests on the goal of forcing the collapse of North Korea.

The answer has much to do with the electoral fortunes of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, and the party’s need to marshal support for a tougher stance on the North. Lurking in the wings are US arms manufacturers who stand to profit if South Korean president Lee Myung-bak wins public backing for beefed up spending on sonar equipment and warships to deter a North Korean threat – all the more likely with the Cheonan incident chalked up to North Korean aggression.

Lee is a North Korea-phobe who prefers a confrontational stance toward his neighbor to the north to the policy of peaceful coexistence and growing cooperation favored by his recent predecessors (and by Pyongyang, as well. It’s worth mentioning that North Korea supports a policy of peace and cooperation. South Korea, under its hawkish president, does not.) Fabricating a case against the North serves Lee in a number of ways. If voters in the South can be persuaded that the North is indeed a menace – and it looks like this is exactly what is happening – Lee’s hawkish policies will be embraced as the right ones for present circumstances. This will prove immeasurably helpful in upcoming mayoral and gubernatorial elections in June. (14)

What’s more, Lee’s foreign policy rests on the goal of forcing the collapse of North Korea. When he took office in February 2008, he set about reversing a 10-year-old policy of unconditional aid to the North. He has also refused to move ahead on cross-border economic projects. (15) Lee’s goal, as Selig Harrison, the US establishment’s foremost liberal expert on Korea describes it, is to “once again [seek] the collapse of the North and its absorption by the South.” (16) Forcing the collapse of North Korea was the main policy of past right-wing and military governments to which Lee’s government is historically linked. The claim that the sinking of the Cheonan is due to an unprovoked North Korean torpedo attack makes it easier for Lee to drum up support for his confrontational stance.

But it does more than that. It also helps Lee move ahead with his goal of re-unifying the Korean peninsula by engineering the collapse of the North. Lee has used the Cheonan incident to: cut off trade with the North; block the North’s use of the South’s shipping lanes; argue for stepped up international sanctions against Pyongyang; call for the beefing up of the South’s military; and issue a virtual declaration of war, branding North Korea the South’s principal foe and announcing that “It is now time for the North Korean regime to change.” (17) Seoul already spends $20 billion per year on its armed forces, almost three times more than the $7 billion Pyongyang allocates to military spending. South Korea has one of the most miserly social welfare systems in the industrialized world, in part because it spends so much on defense. (18) Only 28 percent of the South’s working population is covered by a government pension plan, a state of affairs that has given rise to “’silver’ job fairs, established to find jobs for people aged 60 and over.” (19) Even so, the South’s military spending as a percentage of its GDP is a drop in the bucket compared to the North’s. With a smaller economy, North Korea struggles (and fails) to keep up with its more formidably armed neighbor, channeling a crushingly large percentage of its GDP into defense. It is caught in a difficult bind in which it not only has to defend its borders against South Korea, but against the 30,000 US troops stationed on the Korean peninsula and twice as many more in nearby Japan. By expanding the South’s military budget, and using the Cheonan affair to put the country on a virtual war footing, Lee forces the North to either divert even more of its limited resources to its military – a reaction which will ratchet up the misery factor inside the North as guns take even more of a precedence over butter – or leave itself inadequately equipped to defend itself.

This meshes well with calls from the RAND Corporation for South Korea to buy sensors to detect North Korean submarines and more warships to intercept North Korean naval vessels. (20) An unequivocal US-lackey – protesters have called the security perimeter around Lee’s office “the U.S. state of South Korea” (21) – Lee would be pleased to hand US corporations fat contracts to furnish the South Korean military with more hardware. Lee’s right-wing party and US military contractors win, while North Koreans and the bulk of Koreans of the south are sacrificed on the altar of South Korean militarism.

The United States, too, has motivations to fabricate a case against North Korea. One is to justify the continued presence, 65 years after the end of WWII, of US troops on Japanese soil. Many Japanese bristle at what is effectively a permanent occupation of their country by more than a token contingent of US troops. There are 60,000 US soldiers, airmen and sailors in Japan. Washington, and the Japanese government – which, when it isn’t willingly collaborating with its own occupiers, is forced into submission by the considerable leverage Washington exercises — justifies the US troop presence through the sheer sophistry of presenting North Korea as an ongoing threat. The claim that North Korea sunk the Cheonan in an unprovoked attack strengthens Washington’s case for occupation. Not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has seized on the Cheonan incident to underline “the importance of the America-Japanese alliance, and the presence of American troops on Japanese soil.” (22)

Given these political realities, it comes as no surprise that from the start members of Lee’s party blamed the sinking of the Cheonan on a North Korean torpedo, (23) just as members of the Bush administration immediately blamed 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, and then proceeded to look for evidence to substantiate their case, in the hopes of justifying an already planned invasion. (Later, the Bush administration fabricated an intelligence dossier on Iraq’s banned weapons.) In fact, the reason the ministry of defense felt the need to reiterate there was no evidence of a North Korean link was the persistent speculation of GNP politicians that North Korea was the culprit. Lee himself, ever hostile to his northern neighbor, said his “intuition” told him that North Korea was to blame. (24) Today, opposition parties accuse Lee of using “red scare” tactics to garner support as the June 2 elections draw near. (25) And leaders of South Korea’s four main opposition parties, as well as a number of civil groups, have issued a joint statement denouncing the government’s findings as untrustworthy. Woo Sang-ho, a spokesman for South Korea’s Democratic Party has called the probe results “insufficient proof and questioned whether the North was involved at all.” (26)

Lee announced, even before the inquiry rendered its findings, that a task force will be launched to overhaul the national security system and bulk up the military to prepare itself for threats from North Korea. (27) He even prepared a package of sanctions against the North in the event the inquiry confirmed what his intuition told him. (28) No wonder civil society groups denounced the inquiry’s findings, arguing that “The probe started after the conclusions had already been drawn.” (29)

Jung Sung-ki, a staff reporter for The Korean Times, has raised a number of questions about the inquiry’s findings. The inquiry concluded that “two North Korean submarines, one 300-ton Sango class and the other 130-ton Yeono class, were involved in the attack. Under the cover of the Sango class, the midget Yeono class submarine approached the Cheonan and launched the CHT-02D torpedo manufactured by North Korea.” But “’Sango class submarines…do not have an advanced system to guide homing weapons,’ an expert at a missile manufacturer told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity. ‘If a smaller class submarine was involved, there is a bigger question mark.’” (30)

“Rear Adm. Moon Byung-ok, spokesman for [the official inquiry] told reporters, ‘We confirmed that two submarines left their base two or three days prior to the attack and returned to the port two or three days after the assault.’” But earlier “South Korean and U.S. military authorities confirmed several times that there had been no sign of North Korean infiltration in the” area in which the Cheonan went down. (31)

“In addition, Moon’s team reversed its position on whether or not there was a column of water following an air bubble effect” (caused by an underwater explosion.) “Earlier, the team said there were no sailors who had witnessed a column of water. But during [a] briefing session, the team said a soldier onshore at Baengnyeong Island witnessed ‘an approximately 100-meter-high pillar of white,’ adding that the phenomenon was consistent with a shockwave and bubble effect.” (32)

The inquiry produced a torpedo propeller recovered by fishing vessels that it said perfectly match the schematics of a North Korean torpedo. “But it seemed that the collected parts had been corroding at least for several months.” (33)

Finally, the investigators “claim the Korean word written on the driving shaft of the propeller parts was the same as that seen on a North Korean torpedo discovered by the South …seven years ago.” But the “’word is not inscribed on the part but written on it,’ an analyst said, adding that “’the lettering issue is dubious.’” (34)

On August 2, 1964, the United States announced that three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched an unprovoked attacked on the USS Maddox, a US Navy destroyer, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The incident handed US president Lyndon Johnson the Congressional support he needed to step up military intervention in Vietnam. In 1971, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon report, revealed that the incident had been faked to provide a pretext for escalated military intervention. There had been no attack.

The Cheonan incident has all the markings of another Gulf of Tonkin incident. And as usual, the aggressor is accusing the intended victim of an unprovoked attack to justify a policy of aggression under the pretext of self-defense.

1. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010.
2. Nicole Finnemann, “The sinking of the Cheonan”, Korea Economic Institute, April 1, 2010. http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/kei/issues/2010-04-01/1.html
3. “Military leadership adding to Cheonan chaos with contradictory statements”, The Hankyoreh, March 31, 2010.
4. “Birds or North Korean midget submarine?” The Korea Times, April 16, 2010.
5. Ibid.
6. “Military plays down N.K. foul play”, The Korea Herald, April 2, 2010.
7. Ibid.
8. “No subs near Cheonan: Ministry”, JoongAng Daily, April 2, 2010.
9. Jean H. Lee, “South Korea says mine from the North may have sunk warship”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
10. “What caused the Cheonan to sink?” The Chosun Ilbo, March 29, 2010.
11. Ibid.
12. “Military leadership adding to Cheonan chaos with contradictory statements”, The Hankyoreh, March 31, 2010.
13. Barbara Demick, “In South Korea, competing reactions to sinking of warship”, The Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2010.
14. Framing the Cheonan sinking as an act of unprovoked north Korean aggression did not benefit Lee Myung-bak and his GNP party as much as Lee and the party may have hoped. Indeed, the GNP was disappointed with its showing in the June 2 elections. Even so, on the eve of the election, Martin Fackler, writing in the New York Times of June 1, 2010 (Ship sinking aids ruling party in S. Korean vote) noted that:

“Soon after taking office two years ago, Mr. Lee appeared at risk of losing public support, as he faced mass demonstrations on the streets of Seoul against the import of United States beef. Now, political experts are talking about the “Cheonan effect,” as polls show that more than half of expected voters approve of the president and his tougher line toward the North.

“Nowhere is the current upwelling of popular support more apparent than in polling for the local elections to be held across South Korea on Wednesday. Mr. Lee’s Grand National Party, whose candidates once faced tight races in some districts, now appears poised to sweep the most important races, including hotly contested mayoral elections in Seoul and the nearby port of Incheon.

“Kim Moon-soo, the conservative governor of a province outside Seoul, just two weeks ago was in an uphill battle for re-election against a liberal opponent. Now, polls show him with a comfortable 15 percentage point lead. ”

Fackler continued:

“Politicians and political analysts agree that voters decisively turned to the Grand National Party after the announcement on May 20 of the results of an international inquiry into the sinking that found North Korea responsible. Political analysts said the results were enough to persuade many undecided voters to swing to the conservatives, who are seen as stronger on defense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/asia/02seoul.html?ref=world

15. Blaine Harden, “Brawl Near Koreas’ Border,” The Washington Post, December 3, 2008.
16. Selig S. Harrison, “What Seoul should do despite the Cheonan”, The Hankyoreh, May 14, 2010.
17. “Full text of President’s Lee’s national address”, The Korea Times, May 24, 2010.
18. Selig S. Harrison, “What Seoul should do despite the Cheonan”, The Hankyoreh, May 14, 2010.

According to Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, writing in The New York Times of May 30, 2010 (“U.S. aid to South Korea with naval defense plan”), there are 28,500 US troops in south Korea. South Korea has between 600,000 and 700,000 troops. The North has 1.2 million active-duty military personnel, but “many are poorly trained, or put to work building housing.” The core of the north Korean military is comprised of 80,000 special operations forces.

Hence, there are about 1 million combat ready US and south Korean troops on the Korean peninsula posed against slightly more north Korean troops, many of whom are performing non-military functions. The rough equality in number of troops is preponderated by the sophistication of south Korean’s military equipment and its ability to call on US military superiority in the event of a conflict.

19. Su-Hyun Lee, “Aging and seeking work in South Korea,” The New York Times, September 11, 2009.
20. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, The Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.

Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, writing in The New York Times of May 30, 2010 (“U.S. aid to South Korea with naval defense plan”) noted that:

(i) senior American officials were surprised “how easily [the Cheonan] was sunk by what an international investigation concluded was a North Korean torpedo fired from a midget submarine”; and

(ii) the waters in which the Cheonan sunk were considered too shallow to allow a submarine to operate and therefore did not warrant close monitoring.

There are two inferences that can be drawn from these observations:

(A) The inquiry’s findings are improbable;
(B) The north Koreans are devious and more formidable than we thought and therefore the south Koreans need to buy monitoring equipment from US arms manufacturers to plug this national security hole.

Predictably, The New York Times reporters opted for inference B. Inference A wasn’t considered, presumably unthinkable in the newspaper’s newsroom.

21. The New York Times, June 12, 2008.
22. Mark Landler, “Clinton condemns attack on South Korean Ship”, The New York Times, May 21, 2010.
23. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010.

According to the JoongAng Daily of May 29, 2010 (“Probe member summoned on false rumor allegations”) Shin Sang-cheol, a member of the taskforce that investigated the sinking of the Cheonan, but who was replaced for “arousing public mistrust in the probe”, “has repeatedly claimed that the sinking was just an accident, and that the South had tampered with evidence to blame the North.” Shin, linked to the opposition Democratic Party, served on a south Korean patrol boat in the Yellow Sea as a Navy second lieutenant. Later he worked for seven years at a shipbuilding firm.

Meanwhile, Park Sun-won, former south Korean president Roh Moo-hyun’s secretary for national security, and now a visiting fellow at the Brooking Institution, has accused the Lee administration of concealing information about the sinking.

Both men are under investigation by south Korean authorities for “spreading false rumors,” clearly an effort by Seoul to deter anyone in the South from pointing out the weaknesses of the inquiry’s findings.

Shin’s and Park’s motivations for calling the probe’s findings into question, however, may be the same as the motivations of GNP politicians for accusing the north Koreans of sinking the warship: partisan political advantage. Both Shin and Park are associated with the Democratic Party, whose electoral fortunes in the impending elections are likely to suffer as a result of the GNP concocting a “red-scare” incident to rally support around. It’s in their partisan interests to poke holes in the inquiry’s findings.

24. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.
25. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010; Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korean sailors say blast that sank their ship came from outside vessel”, The New York Times, April 8, 2010.
26. Cho Jae-eun, “Probe satisfies some, others have doubts”, JoongAng Daily, May 21, 2010.
27. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, The Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.
28. “Seoul prepares sanctions over Cheonan sinking”, The Choson Ilbo, May 13, 2010.
29. Cho Jae-eun, “Probe satisfies some, others have doubts”, JoongAng Daily, May 21, 2010.
30. Jung Sung-ki, “Questions raised about ‘smoking gun'”, The Korea Times, May 20, 2010.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.

Most of the articles cited here are posted on Tim Beal’s DPRK- North Korea website, http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Korea.

Updated June 3, 2010.

A failed system’s failed promises

By Stephen Gowans

With Communism’s demise, and the return of Warsaw Pact countries to the capitalist fold, the world was promised a new age of peace and prosperity. The shadow of war would lift. Military expenditures would be cut back, and troops would be brought home from Cold War postings. There would be more money for new wars — on poverty and homelessness, this time. And capitalism, the single sustainable model of success (it had, after all, emerged triumphant in a decades-long battle with Communism) would deliver the poor from poverty, and bless the world with a bonanza of consumer goods.

Talk about failed predictions.

In place of peace, we got the lone remaining superpower waging war to sweep up the few remaining stragglers that continued to resist integration into the US dominated global economy. Iraq was conquered, at the expense of countless dead, homeless, mangled and ruined; campaigns of intrigue and bombing in the former Yugoslavia pushed the region into the US orbit; and a war on Afghanistan continues to blast away thousands of peasants but cements a US military presence in a Central Asia pregnant with the promise of oil and gas wealth. Wars on Iran and north Korea are real possibilities.

Today, the United States is asserting its military might over the face of the globe more audaciously than ever. There are 368,000 US troops deployed in nearly 130 countries around the world. (1) US citizens think their military protects their interests abroad and defends host countries from threats. They rarely pause to wonder whether what’s called “their” interests are really their own personal interests or those of people who live in bigger houses and get bigger tax breaks and have sizeable investment portfolios. Nor do they make a habit of wondering how it is that with the US exercising a virtual military monopoly over the world, host countries could be under a threat so imminent they would require a US force presence. Exactly which of the tiny collection of countries not hosting US troops are threatening the remaining 130?

Could it be that US troops gird the globe to enforce the access of US firms and investors to the land, labor, markets and resources of others? Do “our” interests equate to Iraq’s oil, Indochina’s tin, Central Asia’s natural gas, Kosovo’s mines, the Balkan’s pipeline routes, Africa’s treasure trove of minerals and oil, and Indonesia’s sweatshops? “A lot of people forget,” remarked Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO and Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, that the presence of US troops in Europe is “the bona fide of our economic success…it keeps European markets open to us. If those troops weren’t there, those markets would probably be more difficult to access.” (2) A lot of people forget, because they were told something quite different: That US troops were stationed in Europe to deter a Soviet invasion, not to put a gun to the head of Europeans to keep their markets invitingly open to US firms and investors. The obvious question, With the threat of a Soviet invasion long passed, why are US troops still there?, is rarely asked. So it doesn’t really matter that we’ve forgotten. The most blatant of Washington’s latest exercises in imperialism run amok has a similar character. It was said that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein was hiding banned weapons. None were found. But US forces stay in Iraq anyway, to ensure the conquered country remains the refashioned paragon of free markets and free trade Washington’s policy makers have turned it into.

Which is to say, the emergence of US capitalism triumphant hasn’t given us peace, as promised; it has given us a bold US military prepared to wage war. And it seems to be waging war to facilitate US capital settling everywhere, nestling everywhere and establishing connections everywhere, to paraphrase a shockingly topical passage from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a document whose irrelevance was said to have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt when the Berlin Wall was razed to the ground. Yet, today, it seems to be more relevant than ever; certainly more relevant than when a competing ideology forced the stewards of capitalism to tidy up the image of their vaunted system lest the rabble get it into their heads that they could do better. It’s said in newspapers and on TV that Washington’s wars have to do with fighting terrorism, but the documents which define the US national security strategy are long on paeans to free markets and free trade and capitalism and short on concrete measures to protect the lives of US citizens from attacks by radicalized West Asians bearing legitimate grievances against the United states. On the contrary, the strategy is a recipe for provoking terrorist attacks.

Marx and Engels: While the irrelevance of Communist Manifesto was said to have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt when the Berlin Wall was razed to the ground, today it seems to be more relevant than ever

Bourgeois society,” to use Marx’s and Engels’ phrase, hasn’t given us prosperity either, unless by “us,” you mean the people who own and control the economy. For the bulk of humanity things are a lot worst materially than they were when communists, socialists, and nationalists kept upsetting the capitalist apple cart by bringing vast tracks of national economies under public control, and putting the public welfare ahead of the profit interests of bondholders and investors.

According to the United Nations, 54 countries are poorer today than they were in 1990, about the time Communism was declared failed, and capitalism lionized as the single sustainable model of success. More children under the age of five are dying in 14 countries, and enrollment in primary schools is down in 12. Extreme poverty remains the fate of over one billion people. And in former Soviet republics — cradle to what has been dismissed as a failed system — poverty had tripled one decade into their liberation from Communism. Seventeen countries in Eastern Europe and the countries that made up the former Soviet Union have hardly become dynamos of prosperity, which should leave anyone with an ounce of gray matter wondering by what standard success is measured; surely not by the majority’s well-being. (3)

After having been demonized for decades by a capitalist establishment bent on making Communism radioactive (along with anyone so cavalier about their standing in polite society to utter a kind word about it) it’s sometimes forgotten, if ever apprehended in the first place, how impressive Communism’s economic achievements were…and still are, considering the barren and poisoned ground in which the lone holdouts have been forced to eke out precarious existences.

Let’s start with the most reviled of the hold-outs: north Korea. The idea that north Korea is a threat to the United States is about as believable as the idea that a colony of ants is a threat to the elephant whose foot hovers three inches over its hill. North Korea hasn’t a single solider stationed outside its borders. Washington, on the other hand, has 37,000 troops deployed, on, or near, the north Korean border, 65,000 troops stationed in nearby Japan, the Seventh Fleet lurking in nearby waters, and bombers within striking distance. It has dismissed Pyongyang’s pleas to sign a nonaggression treaty, declaring bizarrely that it will not succumb to blackmail. And what has north Korea done to threaten the United States (or to blackmail the country)? It has fired up a mothballed nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons grade material, and withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but only after Washington reneged on an agreement to build light water reactors and provide fuel oil shipments. And only after Washington issued a virtual declaration of war, designating north Korea part of “an axis of evil.”

Could a north Korea with one or two crude nuclear bombs pose much of a threat to the United States poised to strike with overwhelming force? Quite the other way around. Indeed, north Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons can be said to be a rational response to an overwhelming US threat. And there have been plenty of signs the threat is real.

“This is just the beginning,” a Bush administration official told the New York Times, after US and British troops marched on Baghdad. “I would not rule out the same sequence of events for Iran and north Korea as for Iraq.” (4) The Pak Tribune cited CIA sources that revealed a “list of countries where replacement of government has been declared essential.” (5) The list included north Korea. US undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, warned Pyongyang to “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.” (6) It has. “The DPRK (north Korea) would have already met the same miserable fate as Iraq’s had it compromised its revolutionary principle and accepted the demand raised by the imperialists and its followers for ‘nuclear inspection’ and disarmament,” declared the official daily of the ruling Korean Workers Party, Rodong Sinmun. (7) Later, the government issued this statement: “The Iraqi war teaches a lesson that in order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent.” (8)

Washington ultra-hawk, Paul Wolfowitz, anticipating similar words US Secretary of state Hilary Clinton would utter seven years later, warned, “north Korea is headed down a blind alley. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons will not protect it from the real threat to its security, which is the (internal) implosion brought about by the total failure of its system. Indeed the diversion of scarce resources to nuclear weapons and other military programs can only exacerbate the weakness of the (government).” (9) So what’s the choice? Head down a blind alley, or turn over the country to Washington, and the multinational corporations it represents? Who’s the blackmailer?

History has not been kind to the tiny country. The mountainous north was once the center of the peninsula’s heavy industry, the south its breadbasket. The Korean War, which saw US bombers destroy every building in the north over one story, changed that. The north was reduced to rubble. But it rebuilt, and until the 1980s, outpaced the south economically. By 1961, it was self-sufficient in agriculture. North Korean children were better vaccinated than their counterparts in the United States, according to the World Health Organization and United Nations, who commended the country for its delivery of health care. And life expectancy was higher than in the capitalist south. (10)

Then disaster struck. The socialist trading bloc collapsed, depriving Pyongyang of its major trading partners. Oil subsidies from Russia ended. And if that weren’t enough, floods and droughts ravaged crops. Famine followed. But, for a time, the country had enjoyed impressive material gains, an affirmation of what can be achieved outside the capitalist system, even where resources are diverted to defense against an unrelenting foe than remains poised on your borders to strike. Imagine what the country could have achieved without the United States breathing fire down its neck.

Cuba, in many respects, fits the same mold: Astonishing social and economic gains under a communist government, the implacable and unrelenting hostility of the United States, and some backsliding after the collapse of its major trading partners. (The United States has maintained an economic blockade for half a century.) Still, despite these challenges, Cuba is a much kinder and egalitarian place today than it was before the revolution, under the rule of the US-backed Batista regime, when the country’s economy was an appendage of that of the United States. The United States fears Cuba, journalist Seamus Milne observes, not because it is a threat to the safety of US citizens, but because it’s an example of what can be accomplished outside the US dominated capitalist model. (11 )

In 1953, the illiteracy rate in Cuba exceeded 22 percent. Today it is under one percent. Three percent of those over the age of 10 had a secondary school education. Today, almost 60 percent do. Back then, at the height of the sugar harvest, when unemployment was lowest, eight percent were jobless. Today, the unemployment rate is three percent, making Cuba one of the few countries in the world to boast full employment.

Well over 80 percent own their own homes, and pay no taxes. The remainder pays a nominal rent.

No other country has as many teachers per capita. Education is free through university. The country also provides free university educations to 1,000 Third World students every year. And classroom sizes put those of Western industrialized countries to shame.

Health care is free. And while the United States has deployed over 300,000 troops in almost 130 countries to keep markets open to US investment, Cuba has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 Third World countries to heal the sick. (12)

Infant mortality is lower than in any other Third World country and even some Western capitalist countries (it’s higher in Washington, DC.) Life expectancy is 76 years, and is expected to rise. (13) By comparison, the return of capitalism has pushed life expectancy down in former communist countries.

These gains, seldom mentioned in the United States, place the country head and shoulders above other Latin American countries firmly ensconced in the US orbit, for which Washington’s single sustainable model of success continues to deliver grinding poverty, misery, and gross inequality, but the profits necessary to keep the capitalist system afloat and the capitalist class awash in mansions, retinues of servants, stables of luxury cars, exclusive schools and private clubs.

There are elections, and, contrary to Washington’s anti-Cuba propaganda, Cubans do vote. But they don’t choose among two largely identical parties, as in the United States, where the parties, and their candidates, are almost invariably in thrall to, or are representatives of, the capitalist class. As for human rights, Cuba stands as a model of what can be achieved by way of economic and social rights, the basic rights to food, housing, clothing, health care, education and jobs, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but not recognized as human rights in the United States. (14) Washington, on the other hand, has made a fetish of civil and political liberties, which, in the case of its relations with Cuba, has everything to do with giving its agents in the country, mistakenly called “independent” journalists and “independent” librarians (they’re not independent of Washington, which bankrolls their activities), room to maneuver to organize destabilization, with the object of overthrowing the revolution and banishing economic and social rights in favor of investors’ rights. That Cuba, a poor country, has been able to guarantee the right to food, clothing, shelter, health care, education and jobs, despite trying economic circumstances and US hostility, can be seen as extraordinary, or simply what can be readily accomplished outside the strictures of capitalism. If a poor Third World country, harassed by a powerful neighbor, can deliver high quality health care and education for free, why can’t the world’s richest country do the same? The answer: Capitalism drives towards better profits, not better lives.

Ever since the US-dominated global economy has, with the collapse of Eastern Bloc Communism over 10 years ago, more boldly sought purchase everywhere, US military imperialism has run amok, wars of aggression have been started, and poor, and formerly communist, countries have become poorer. The leaders of the Western world declare capitalism to be the single sustainable model of success, but countries that rejected capitalism, and committed to egalitarianism, have done better in terms of guaranteeing economic and social rights than comparison countries, despite difficult circumstances. Meanwhile, those that have rejected egalitarianism in favor of a return to capitalism have regressed. The promises of peace and prosperity that attended Communism’s collapse were a fraud based in the self-interest of a narrow band of wealthy people in the world’s richest countries. That it is a fraud is richly evident in the failed promises and dismal record of the post-communist era.

1. “Where are the Legions? Global Deployments of US Forces,” GlobalSecurity.Org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm)
2. UPI, January 7, 2002.
3. “UN report says one billion suffer extreme poverty,” World Socialist Web Site, July 28, 2003.
4. “Pre-emption: Idea With a Lineage Whose Time Has Come,” The New York Times, March 23, 2003.
5. “Iran to be US next target: CIA report,” Pak Tribune (Online) March 24, 2003.
6. “U.S. Tells Iran, Syria, N. Korea ‘Learn from Iraq,” Reuters, April 9, 2003.
7. “North Korea vows to make no concessions,” Agence France-Presse, March 29, 2003.
8. “Administration Divided Over North Korea,” The New York Times, April 21, 2003.
9. “Wolfowitz Visits US Military Base In Korean Buffer Zone,” AFP, June 1, 2003.
10. “Peace, the real resolution to famine in North Korea, ZNet, July 23, 2003.
11. “Why the US fears Cuba,” The Guardian, July 31, 2003.
12. Ibid.
13. Speech by Fidel Castro on the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks, July 26, 2003.
14. Karen Lee Wald, “Democracy, Cuba-Style,” Canadian Dimension, July/August, 2003.

Originally written in August 2003, revised and updated May 2010.

The Nuclear Posture Review

Brendan Stone and Stephen Gowans discuss the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review on Unusual Sources radio.

Phil Taylor and Stephen Gowans discuss the same subject on The Taylor Report.

Nuclear Posture Review 2010

Inducing potential victims to surrender their right to self-defense under threat of nuclear annihilation

By Stephen Gowans

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington named Iraq, Iran and north Korea as forming an axis of evil. Soon after, the first of these countries was invaded by US and British forces on entirely spurious grounds. The invading forces met little resistance, for Iraq had effectively disarmed under a regime of international sanctions championed by Washington and London that led to the deaths of more than one million over its decade-plus-long existence. The pretext for the aggression was that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction. It had none.

Around the same time, Washington tore up an accord with north Korea that committed the latter to shuttering its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon and forswearing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the former to building light water reactors and delivering fuel oil while the reactors were being built. Washington tarried on the reactor construction, convinced the Juche regime would collapse before the United States had to make good on its commitment. As the date for completion of the reactors drew near, and with only the foundations of the reactors having been built, Washington declared that north Korea had admitted to operating a secret uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang denied the charge. One Bush administration official warned the north Koreans to draw the appropriate lesson from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. They did. North Korea fired up its Yongbyon reactor and embarked upon development of a nuclear deterrent.

US president Barack Obama has stayed true to form, obscuring his pursuit of his predecessors’ policies beneath honeyed phrases that create the impression of change, where no change of substance exists.

Whether Iran drew the same lesson is unclear. The National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus of the US intelligence community, is that Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program until 2003, the year of the US-British invasion of Iraq, but has since abandoned it. Iran has worked to develop its own capability to generate enriched uranium for use in civilian nuclear power plants, while at the same time working on long range missiles. Irrespective of its nuclear weapons intentions, which Tehran says it doesn’t have, both activities converge on providing the country with the capability of developing nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them. While Tehran is not in the position to present a nuclear deterrent today, it may in the not too distant future be able to rapidly develop one to deter a US or Israeli attack.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from the above and a third that is axiomatic.

1. The United States and Britain have long records of highly provocative behavior based on policies of military aggression, the most conspicuous recent example of which is the invasion of Iraq. Naming countries as forming an axis of evil is a virtual declaration of war. Invading one of them, without provocation and on entirely contrived grounds, is a repugnant act and an international crime of the highest order. North Korea and Iran, the two remaining countries of the US-designated axis, have reasonable cause to fear military aggression by the United States or its proxies.

2. If the case of Iraq is definitive, US policy is to pressure its targets to surrender their means of self-defense to facilitate US pursuit of a subsequent war of aggression.

3. Countries that possess a nuclear weapons capability reduce the Pentagon’s room for manoeuvre and therefore reduce the probability that they will become the object of US military aggression.

From these three points may be drawn a fourth: The United States, as the world’s major agent of military aggression, is the principal cause of nuclear proliferation.

If read superficially, Washington’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) would lead you to believe that US policy makers have finally figured out that the cardinal rule of nonproliferation is to abjure military aggression. Countries that aren’t threatened by nuclear powers have no need to develop nuclear weapons for self-defense. However, a closer reading of the review shows that nothing has changed. US president Barack Obama has stayed true to form, obscuring his pursuit of his predecessors’ policies beneath honeyed phrases that create the impression of change, where no change of substance exists.

The NPR declares “that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states”, even if they attack the United States, its vital interest or allies and partners with chemical or biological weapons. This differs, but only on the surface, from the policy of preceding administrations which refused to renounce the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. There are a number of reasons why the difference is apparent only.

While nuclear weapons are widely regarded as being unparalleled in their destructive power (and they are), the United States is able to deliver overwhelming destructive force through its conventional military capabilities. A promise not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states is not the same as an assurance not to use or threaten to use devastating military force. Six decades ago it was possible to obliterate a city through conventional means, as the United States and Britain demonstrated in the firebombing of Dresden. If a city could be destroyed by conventional means more than half a century ago, imagine what the Pentagon could do today through conventional forces alone. Indeed, the NPR makes clear that the United States is prepared to shrink its nuclear arsenal partly because “the growth of unrivalled U.S. conventional military capabilities” allows Washington to fulfill its geostrategic goals “with significantly lower nuclear force levels and with reduced reliance on nuclear weapons.”

The NPR also provides a number of escape hatches that allow Washington to continue to dangle a nuclear sword of Damocles over the heads of the two remaining axis of evil countries. One is that nuclear weapons can be used, or their used threatened, against a country that is not “party to the NPT” (the nuclear non-proliferation treaty) even if the country doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons, or it is unclear whether it does. This is the north Korea escape clause. It allows Washington to continue to threaten north Korea (which may or may not have a working crude nuclear weapon) with nuclear obliteration, just as it has done since the early 1990s when the US Strategic Command announced it was re-targeting some of its strategic nuclear missiles on the DPRK (the reason why north Korea withdrew from the NPT.)

Another escape hatch allows Washington to reach for the nuclear trigger whenever it deems a country to have fallen short of “compliance with [its] nuclear non-proliferation obligations,” even if the country doesn’t have nuclear weapons and is a party to the NPT. This is the Iran escape hatch, intended to allow Washington to maintain the threat of nuclear annihilation vis-à-vis Iran or any other country Washington unilaterally declares to be noncompliant with the treaty’s obligations. Washington has a history of fabricating casus belli. 10-100,000 Kosovo Albanian dead and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, neither of which were ever found, represent recent examples of the United States waging war on entirely fictitious grounds. Washington could readily produce “sexed up” intelligence to declare Iran or any other NPT signatory to be in breach of its treaty obligations, thereby justifying the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.

As for the United States’ commitment not to reach for its nuclear arsenal in response to a chemical or biological attack on itself, its vital interests (a term that defies geography and democracy, for how is it that the United States’ vital interests extend to other people’s countries?) its allies and its partners, this too is verbal legerdemain. As a careful reading of the NPR makes clear, the truth of the matter is that the United States will attack any country with nuclear weapons if such an attack is deemed necessary by Washington to protect its interests, which is to say, the interests of the corporations, banks and investors whose senior officials and representatives dominate policy formulation in Washington and provide the major funding, and post-political jobs, to the country’s politicians. According to the NPR, “the United States reserves the right to make any adjustment in [its commitment] that may be warranted…” Translation: We won’t attack non-nuclear weapons states with nuclear weapons unless we decide it’s in our interests to do so.

Washington’s attachment of escape clauses and reservations to its commitment calls to mind Rajani Palme Dutt’s description of how the great powers made a mockery of the Kellog Pact, an agreement to renounce recourse to war as an instrument of foreign policy.

“The United States government exempted from its operation any action for the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine. The French Government insisted that the pact must not be understood to refer to wars of self-defense or in fulfillment of treaty obligations. The British Government made the most sweeping reservation of all…

“Not content with the ‘defense’ of the Empire, covering a quarter of the world, Britain…reserved for itself full ‘freedom of action’ in any unspecified ‘regions of the world,’ where it might at any time claim ‘a special and vital interest.’ This sweeping claim of British imperialism left the Monroe Doctrine behind as a parochial affair in comparison. Needless to say, this claim was thereafter taken as equally applicable to themselves by the other Powers: thus the Italian representative at Geneva specifically referred to it as justifying Italy’s claim that its war on Abyssinia was no breach of the Kellog Pact.

“What, then, remained of the Kellog Pact even on the day that it was signed? Wars of ‘defense’ were clearly understood to be excluded from its operation. Wars for the maintenance of colonial possession or in execution of treaties were equally understood to be excluded. So were wars on behalf of ‘special and vital interests’ in any ‘regions of the world.’ With these small exceptions the imperialist signatories ‘renounced’ war.” (R. Palme Dutt, World Politics: 1918-1936, Random House, New York, pp. 151-152.)

What, then, remains of the Obama administration’s assurance, even on the day the NPR was published, that Washington won’t attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons? Countries that may or may not have nuclear weapons are excluded. Countries that don’t have nuclear arms and are party to the NPT, but which may develop a nuclear arms capability, and importantly, are independent of the United States, are excluded. Countries which, through their pursuit of independent economic development policies, threaten the special and vital interests of the United States in any region of the world, are excluded. With these small exceptions, Washington has renounced the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.

US foreign policy carries on in its characteristic imperialist and war-like manner, despite the elevation of a black Democrat, and now Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the highest elected office of the land.

The NPR is said to be based on “the President’s agenda for reducing nuclear dangers and pursuing the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.” But it’s clear from the very beginning of the review that US policy stands in the way of the president’s ostensible aim. “As long as nuclear weapons exist,” the review begins, “the United States will maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal…to deter potential adversaries…” The implication is that the country to first develop nuclear weapons, and the only country to have ever used them, intends to be the last country to have them, arrogating onto itself the monopoly right to maintain a nuclear arsenal to deter potential adversaries. Only if every other country surrenders their rights to deter potential adversaries, and yields this right exclusively to the United States, can the implications of the president’s aim be realized. But given the United States’ sanguinary history of busting down the doors of weak countries to lay claim to their land, labor, resources and markets on behalf of its economic elite, only the insane, opportunistic, unprincipled, cowardly or co-opted would yield their right to self-defense to such a predatory country. The president’s agenda for reducing nuclear dangers and pursuing the goal of a world without nuclear weapons is more aptly described as an agenda for inducing potential victims to surrender their right of self-defense, and under the threat of nuclear annihilation. In other words, US foreign policy carries on in its characteristic imperialist and war-like manner, despite the elevation of a black Democrat, and now Nobel Peace Prize winner, to the highest elected office of the land.

Washington Post: North Korean, Iranian nuclear capability threatens US imperialism

By Stephen Gowans

Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus has put his finger on what’s wrong with north Korea and Iran developing nuclear weapons, or having the capability to do so.

The problem is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent, which means that if either country possesses a credible nuclear arsenal and the means of delivering warheads, their conquest by US forces isn’t in the cards. And that is something Pincus seems to regard as regrettable.

In his March 30 column Pincus points to General Kevin P. Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command.

Chilton reminded US legislators that, “Throughout the 65-year history of nuclear weapons, no nuclear power has been conquered or even put at risk of conquest, nor has the world witnessed the globe-consuming conflicts of earlier history.” [1]

Pincus regarded this as a warning, “a thought others in government ought to ponder as they watch Iran and North Korea seek to develop nuclear capability.” [2]

Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus thinks north Korea and Iran should be conquered before their pursuit of nuclear capability makes them unconquerable.

In other words, the implication of Chilton’s view, as Pincus interprets it, is that there is little chance that a nuclear-armed north Korea or Iran could be conquered or even put at risk of conquest, a prospect so alarming to him, that he urges government officials to think through what would happen if Tehran and Pyongyang developed a credible threat of self-defense.

Pincus’s circularity (we ought to conquer these countries before they’re no longer conquerable) invites the question: Why conquer them at all? The standard answer, that both countries are threats to their neighbors, doesn’t work, for two reasons.

First, the real threat, as Pincus implicitly acknowledges, isn’t one of north Korea endangering south Korea or Iran wiping Israel off the map, but of both countries acquiring the means to make themselves effectively unconquerable.

Second, other countries have acquired large nuclear arsenals, and far from being treated as threats that must be pressed to relinquish their nuclear arms, are aided by the United States in acquiring more of them.

Consider India. The very same issue of The Washington Post that found Picus worrying about north Korea and Iran becoming unconquerable carried an article on negotiations between the United States and India, the outcome of which is that the latter will soon import spent nuclear fuel from the former. [3]

India will be able to extract plutonium from the fuel it imports to make nuclear weapons. Although India has pledged not to do so, “it diverted civilian nuclear fuel to build its first nuclear weapons three decades ago.” [4] Already India has manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for an estimated 100 warheads and has “has built weapons with yields of up to 200 kilotons.” [5]

Washington portrays the nuclear programs of north Korea and Iran as threats, while preparing to export spent fuel to India, a country that refuses to join the nonproliferation treaty.

What’s more, the country is not part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran, portrayed by Pincus’s colleagues as a looming nuclear threat is a treaty signatory, while north Korea was, until Chilton’s predecessors at Strategic Command announced in 1993 that the DPRK would be targeted with strategic nuclear missiles.

Strange that Pincus wasn’t warning government officials to ponder Chilton’s words about nuclear powers avoiding the risk of conquest as they watch India strengthen its nuclear capability, with US assistance.

But then India is already part of Washington’s informal empire. Plus, exporting nuclear fuel to India promises to fatten the bottom line of the US nuclear industry.

It’s not so curious to discover that north Korea, a country Pincus seems to think really should be conquered before it’s too late, comes in dead last on the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index, a ranking of how congenial countries are to the profit-making interests of banks, corporations and wealthy investors. Countries that have low tax rates, welcome foreign investment and trade, and spend little on government programs are considered economically free, while countries whose governments intervene in the economy to achieve public policy goals, or to prohibit exploitation, are relegated to the basement of the list.

Generally speaking, where a country appears on the list, offers a pretty good gauge of whether a country is in or out of favor with Washington, whose foreign policy since the Bolshevik Revolution and before has been guided by how open other countries are to US investment and exports. US policy leans toward prying open closed economies and rhapsodizing about open ones.

The places of selected countries on the Heritage Foundation 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, are shown below. (The index ranks 179 countries.)

• North Korea, 179
• Zimbabwe, 178
• Cuba, 177
• Myanmar (Burma), 175
• Venezuela, 174
• Iran, 168

Notice that the bottom dwelling countries are the objects of various Western efforts of regime change, some involving the threat of military intervention and all involving destabilization carried out, in most cases, with the participation of “pro-democracy nonviolence activists,” groups that profess to be progressive and anti-imperialist but are in reality lieutenants of the US foreign policy estblishment. No surprise that their major funding comes from such wealthy individuals as Peter Ackerman and George Soros, who play prominent roles in US ruling class circles. Ackerman is a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations and was head of the CIA-interlocked Freedom House. Soros is a veteran anti-communist warrior.

It’s no accident that the countries that are on Washington’s regime change hit list also happen to be on the Heritage Foundation’s list of countries that are least accommodating to business interests, no accident because US corporations, investors and banks dominate the formulation of US foreign policy. It makes sense that they would go after “closed economies” (i.e., closed to export of capital and commodities on favorable terms) since these economies represent an unrealized potential for profit-making, and also the threat of a bad example if they’re allowed to get away with shaping economic policy to serve local interests rather than those of foreign capital.

While not among the Index of Economic Freedom stars, India ranks much higher on the list (124) and has been praised for moving “forward with market-oriented economic reforms” and opening its trade regime.

North Korea, Cuba and Zimbabwe: Dead last on the Heritage Foundation’s index of countries that offer themselves up as profitable investment opportunities for US capital. Iran is also among the basement-dwellers. It’s no accident that the same countries are on Washington’s regime change hit list.

We might ask why anyone would create an index of economic freedom in the first place. It is safe to say that the only people interested in creating a map of favourable opportunities for the export of capital and commodities are those with capital and commodities to export. You won’t find north Koreans, Cubans or Zimbabweans surveying the world to find out whose policies are geared toward promoting attractive returns for investors, largely because they haven’t surplus capital to export. In these countries, the development of internal productive forces is the top priority. And north Korea and Cuba haven’t structural compulsions to export capital. But imperialist countries have plenty of surplus capital, which is why “economic freedom” and rolling over governments that oppose it, is an obsession in Washington and other major capitals.

Pincus strays from the script in calling for north Korea and Iran to be conquered before they can make themselves unconquerable, rather than repeating the accustomed nonsense about the dangers of first strikes launched against neighbors, Europe or even the United States. At the same time, his employer makes US hypocrisy plain by running a story about the United States preparing to export spent nuclear fuel to a country that refuses to join the nonproliferation treaty and has amassed a substantial nuclear arsenal. Finally, the failure of north Korea and Iran to serve themselves up as profitable fields for US investment, while India displays a greater willingness to cater to the profit-making requirements of US corporations, offers a glimpse into the real reasons behind Washington’s double-standard.

1. Walter Pincus, “As missions are added, Stratcom commander keeps focus on deterrence”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
2. Ibid.
3. Rama Lakshmi and Steven Mufson, “US, India reach agreement on nuclear fuel reprocessing”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
4. Ibid.
5. James Lamont and James Blitz, ‘India raises nuclear stakes,’ Financial Times, September 27, 2009.

The NED, Tibet, north Korea and Zimbabwe

By Stephen Gowans

Vin Weber, a former chairman and current board member of the US National Endowment for Democracy, has written an article in The Washington Times defending the NED against calls to eliminate its funding. [1]

The NED was established by the Reagan administration after the CIA’s role in covertly funding efforts to overthrow foreign governments was brought to light, leading to the discrediting of the parties, movements, journals, books, newspapers and individuals that received CIA funding. This undermined the efficacy of these agents as tools of US foreign policy.

As a bipartisan endowment, with participation from the two major parties, as well as the AFL-CIO and US Chamber of Commerce, the NED took over the financing of foreign overthrow movements, but overtly and under the rubric of “democracy promotion.”

As the NED’s president Carl Gershman explained,

“It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.” [2]

Thus, the NED was founded, as New York Times reporter John Broder explained in 1997, “to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.” [3]

As part of the NED-program of regime change, governments the US foreign policy establishment targets for overthrow are demonized as anti-democratic while the recipients of NED largesse are angelized as pro-democratic. What links targeted governments is not their electoral democratic practices – which can range from absent to present — but their economic policies, which tend to be restrictive of foreign investment, imports, and property rights. What links the recipients of NED grants is not their attitude to electoral democracy, but their embrace of US policy.

Tibet

The NED’s angelization of the Dalai Lama is a case in point. The Dalai Lama is hardly a democrat, yet he has received Washington’s lucre for decades, including from the CIA and later the NED. Tibet’s “spiritual leader”, as he has been anointed in the West, presided over a backward theocratic feudal society, before fleeing to India after a botched uprising against the Chinese government, which had supported the dismantling of Tibetan feudalism. As Michael Parenti explains,

“Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas…The Dalai Lama himself ‘lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.’

“There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land–or the monastery’s land–without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.

“As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.” [4]

The NED calls the former feudal overlord, the Dalai Lama, seen here with George W. Bush, “a devoted democrat.” The slaves and serfs of the old Tibet might disagree.

The old Tibet, then, was hardly a society of peace and tranquility ruled over by a benign ruler. It was a class society torn by conflict and predicated on brutal, naked, exploitation. Despite this, a February 16, 2010 NED press release describes the former Tibetan feudal overlord “not only as a moral and religious leader respected throughout the world but as a fellow democrat who shares America’s deepest values.” [5]

In the same press release, the NED urged the Obama administration “to express America’s strong support for him” (a “devoted democrat”) “and what he represents – genuine autonomy for the Tibetan people.” [6] But why should the NED urge the US administration to express support for autonomy in Tibet, when Washington has never supported autonomy for the Basques, Corsicans, the Kurds in Turkey, the Scots and Irish nationalists, or the South Ossetians?

“The answer is obvious: the United States does not support separatist movements in countries they consider their allies. The targets are either countries they consider rivals, like Russia or China, or countries that are too weak to resist, and where they can obtain totally dependent client states from the breakup – which is what happened with Yugoslavia.” [7]

Weber’s defense of the NED comes in response to a call from Shika Dalmia, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, urging the Obama administration to cut funding to the NED on grounds the organization has outlived its original mandate, overthrowing communism.

In a Washington Times article, Dalmia wrote that the NED,

“…was founded by President Reagan in the heyday of the Cold War to contain communism. Communism has since evaporated, and democracy has spread like wildfire in the former Soviet Union, Still, President Obama proposes to hand the NED $109 million this year. This despite the fact that NED has been dogged by controversy, the least of which being that it once spent $1.5 million to defend democracy in the Soviet bastion called France. Worse, although NED gets all its funding from the government, it is structured like a private entity over whose board – an improbable hybrid of representatives of business, unions, and other concerns—Congress has little control. The upshot is that sitting presidents have used it to do things abroad that Congress wouldn’t approve. In the mid-1980s, for instance, it directed funding to the political opponents of the then-president of Costa Rica—long a beacon of democracy—simply because he opposed Reagan’s Nicaragua policy.” [8]

Predictably, Weber rejects Dalmia’s arguments. “Take the example of her contention that communism has ‘evaporated’,” he counters, “and tell that to the defectors who have risked everything to escape the hell on earth that is nuclear-armed North Korea.” [9]

Hell on earth? Is this like the hell on earth that is a ghetto in the hyper-nuclear-armed United States, or the hell on earth that is the Gaza blockaded by a nuclear-armed Israel backed by the hyper-nuclear-armed Pentagon?

North Korea

As a member of the US foreign policy establishment, Weber ought to be careful about talking of hell on earth, for Washington is among the principal authors of unnecessary torment in this world. Iraq, site of the greatest contemporary humanitarian catastrophe, is a hell on earth, and it was created by the United States, for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with what Washington said motivated the country’s Iraq sanctions policy and invasion. What did US B52 bombers create in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia if not hell on earth? And what condition prevailed after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and the fire-bombing of Dresden?

Hell on earth in north Korea didn’t begin with the US demolishing every building over one-story, but it did nothing to relieve it. The torment didn’t end either when Washington practiced nuclear terrorism by deploying battlefield nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula or when in 1993 it announced it was targeting strategic nuclear missiles on north Korea, a country which, at the time, had no nuclear weapons.

The NED’s role in overthrowing communism played its own part in creating hell on earth in north Korea by bringing about the collapse of the country’s markets. Decades-long sanctions have also made life tougher, precisely as intended by US policy makers. And unremitting military pressure from the United States, a military behemoth, has forced north Korea, a military pipsqueak, to channel a punishingly high percentage of its meagre resources into self-defense, depriving the country of the capital it needs for productive investment. If there is a hell on earth in north Korea, it exists because the United States has created one, deliberately, systematically, and with the intention of crushing a top-to-bottom alternative to Third World dependency on the United States.

Jestina Mukoko

Meanwhile, the NED has celebrated Jestina Mukoko, a Zimbabwean who was arrested in December 2008 by Zimbabwe state security agents, who Mukuko claims tortured her.

Mukoko is variously connected in leadership roles with organizations funded by the NED and United State Agency for International Development (USAID.) She is, for example, “the executive director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a grantee of the” NED [10], as well as a member of the board of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, an organization interlocked with a number of other Western-funded anti-Mugabe groups, and which receives its funding from the NED and USAID.

Jestina Mukoko, center, feted in Washington for her role as a US government-funded regime change agent. Honored by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and US First Lady Michelle Obama for services to the empire.

To understand why Mukoko was arrested, it helps to place her activities in the context of the Mugabe government’s efforts to carry through land reform, the West’s opposition to the expropriation of white settler farmland, and the efforts of the United States to enforce respect for private property rights through a campaign of regime change in which Mukoko plays a role.

The following points, therefore, are salient:

1. The United States is openly working to exclude Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF party (which champions land reform and economic indigenization) from government, and to replace it with the Movement for Democratic Change (which advocates policies that would inevitably strengthen foreign domination of Zimbabwe’s land, labor and natural resources.)
2. The US-sponsored regime change campaign operates through the NED and USAID-financing of domestic activists, like Mukoko.
3. While the ostensible objective of NED and USAID-sponsored activities in Zimbabwe is the promotion of democracy and human rights, the real aim is the installation of a government committed to facilitating the pursuit of US and Western interests, including allowing the sale of agricultural land to foreign investors. That the United States and its foundations have the slightest concern for promoting democracy and human rights is belied by the US practices of detaining people without charge in secret prisons, the scandals of Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo, the furnishing of aid and support to such notorious autocracies as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the backing of the Israeli blockade of Gaza to punish Gazans for exercising their democratic rights in electing Hamas. The NED does, however, care deeply about the interests of US corporations, banks and investors which, after all, play the dominant role in shaping US policy and whose representatives staff the key positions of the US state.

In other words, Mukoko is deeply connected to a US state which is openly hostile to Zimbabwe and its land reform and economic indigenization programs, and seeks to oust the Zanu-PF element of the current government. Is it any wonder she has drawn the attention of the Zimbabwe’s security services?

This mercenary on behalf of US interests recently travelled to Washington where she was feted by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and US First Lady Michelle Obama, an act not too much different from Petain traveling to Berlin to be showered with honors by Ribbentrop and Eva Braun. What would the US security state do to a US-based jihadist who took money from a foundation financed by the Iranian government to promote the rise of an Islamic Republic in the United States and who would later travel to Tehran to be personally presented with official honors by Mabouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister?

At the ceremony honouring Mukoko’s services to the empire, Michelle Obama expressed shock that Mukoko “was interrogated (by Zimbabwe security agents) for hours while forced to kneel on gravel…” [11] This was precious, coming from the wife of a president whose country has spent the last decade kidnapping militants who oppose their southwest Asian countries being dominated by the United States and its corrupt puppet regimes and then subjecting them to stress positions, water-boarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, when they’re not being shipped off to allied countries to face more unrestrained forms of torture, or are simply being assassinated. Belaboring the Eva Braun analogy, Obama’s shock was like Hitler’s partner complaining about the Soviets exchanging territory with Finland by force, long after the Nazis had gone on their rampage through Europe.

In his book Age of Empire, historian Eric Hobsbawm observed that,

“The age of democracy turned into an era of public political hypocrisy, or rather duplicity, where those who held power only said what they really meant in the obscurity of the corridors of power. Thus was born an enormous gap between public discourse and political reality”…

…a disparity all too evident in the NED’s public pronouncements.

[1] Vin Weber, “Vin Weber: Defending the well-endowed,” The Washington Times, March 11, 2010.

[2] David K. Shipler, “Missionaries for Democracy: U.S. Aid for Global Pluralism,” The New York Times, June 1, 1986.

[3] John M. Broder, “Political Meddling by Outsiders: Not New for U.S.,” The New York Times, April 1, 1997.

[4] Michael Parenti, “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth,” Michael Parenti Political Archive, http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

[5] National Endowment for Democracy, “How to welcome the Dalai Lama to Washington,” February 16, 2010.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Diana Johnstone, “Breaking Yugoslavia,” New Left Project, March 3, 2010, http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/breaking_yugoslavia/

[8] Shikha Dalmia, “Busting the well-endowed,” The Washington Times, March 4, 2010.

[9] Weber.

[10] Michael Allen, “Activist demands accountability and end to impunity in Zimbabwe,” Democracy Digest, March 12, 2010.

11. Ibid.

Nobel Peace Price Winner Scorns North Korean Peace Offer

Peace is “not what we’re offering,” says U.S. secretary of state

By Stephen Gowans

North Korea recently let Washington know that it will dismantle its nuclear weapons if the United States signs a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War. This, offered Pyongyang, could be negotiated through bilateral talks between the United States and north Korea.

Alternatively, Pyongyang said it was prepared to return to six-nation talks, aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, if the United Nations removes the sanctions it imposed after north Korea launched a satellite and conducted a nuclear test.

North Korea regards the sanctions as unjust, and with good reason – they are. Neither the satellite launch nor the nuclear test were illegal under international law.

No law prohibits a country from launching satellites, or even testing ballistic missiles — what Washington accuses north Korea of doing under cover of a satellite launch.

And since north Korea is no longer a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – it withdrew after the United States re-targetted some of its strategic nuclear weapons from the defunct Soviet Union to north Korea in the early 1990s — it is not prohibited from developing and testing nuclear arms.

The reality that north Korea’s satellite launch and nuclear test were not illegal, did not, however, stop the United Nations Security Council from imposing sanctions, while at the same time overlooking Washington’s repeated violations of international law, a double-standard made inevitable by Washington’s veto and domination of the council.

North Korea says that it would not have built nuclear weapons had the United States not threatened it with military aggression. This is almost certainly true.

In the early 1990s, long before north Korea developed a rudimentary nuclear weapons capability, Washington announced it was targeting north Korea with nuclear weapons. A month later, Pyongyang withdrew from the non-proliferation treaty. Cause and effect.

Washington, which quashed the basis for a nascent independent Korean government in 1945, has stationed tens of thousands of troops on Korean soil since (but for a single brief hiatus.) U.S. warships patrol the fringes of north Korea’s territorial waters, and U.S. warplanes patrol the margins of north Korean airspace … and not infrequently, intrude upon it. The U.S. military conducts annual war games with south Korea – the south’s military budget is much larger than the north’s – keeping the north off balance and on an unremitting war footing.

Soon after 9/11, the United States ratcheted up its sabre rattling when the Bush administration listed north Korea as one of three countries making up an axis of evil, along with Iraq and Iran. The illegal invasion of Iraq, carried out soon after and for fabricated reasons, made two things clear:

• North Korea could be next.
• Disarming – as Iraq had done – was not a good idea.

In the face of Washington’s threats — indeed, because of them — Pyongyang stepped up its entreaties to Washington to sign a peace treaty.

At the same time, it worked on developing a nuclear weapons capability that would make the Pentagon think twice about another illegal war.

But Washington was dismissive of Pyongyang’s overtures of peace. Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said “We don’t do peace treaties.”

North_Korea_by_Latuff2Today, a U.S. administration led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who wages wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, says it will only discuss a peace treaty if north Korea dismantles its nuclear weapons first. Washington promises only to discuss, not sign, a peace treaty. If Pyongyang delivers what the United States demands, Washington will think about signing a peace treaty…maybe. The United States, of course, won’t be dismantling its own nuclear weapons.

Washington also says that north Korea’s “appalling” human rights record stands in the way of normalizing relations, even though the appalling human rights records of Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Colombia and Afghanistan, hasn’t prevented Washington from maintaining normal, if not favored, relations with these countries, including showering Israel, Egypt and Colombia with billions of dollars in annual aid. And that’s to say nothing about Washington’s own appalling human rights record – one replete with restrictions on mobility rights (i.e., travel to Cuba), secret prisons, prisoner abuse, extrajudicial assassination, unlawful detention and torture.

Clearly, the United States is not interested in peace on the Korean peninsula. Its military intimidation leaves north Korea no option, short of surrender, but to allocate a punishingly high percentage of its meagre budget to defense, with unhappy consequences for the well-being of north Koreans and the civilian economy.

Washington uses north Korea (and a few other sanctioned and threatened countries) to send a message about what happens when countries try to chart an independent course, especially one that is a top-to-bottom alternative to Washington’s prescribed US investor-friendly free market, free trade, and free enterprise regime.

Washington’s real interest is to engineer the collapse or surrender of the pro-independence government in the north, to clear the way for U.S. domination of the Korean peninsula up to China’s borders.

And so it is that an offer of peace and denuclearization on the Korean peninsula – one that would seem to appeal to any administration led by a deserving Nobel Peace Prize laureate – has been summarily rejected. “That is what they want,” sniffed the peace prize-winning warmonger’s secretary of state, “but that is not what we’re offering.”