BLOWBACK!

The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire

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"N KOREA CRITICIZES US MISSILE DEFENSE FOR HAWAII" -
(An Exhibit in CV05-00030 - U S Dept of Justice vs Harmon)

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

From: Bobby N. Harmon, CPCU

To: "President Barack Obama" , "U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder" , "David Farmer" , "Steven Guttman" , "Carol K. Muranaka" , "Judge David A. Ezra" , "Judge Kevin S.C. Chang" , "Judge Barry M. Kurren" , "Securities & Exchange Commission Enforcement Division" , "U.S. Treasury Dept. Office of Inspector General" , "Office of Inspector General US Dept of Justice" , "Executive Office for U.S. Trustees" , "Judge Robert Faris" , "SEC Office of The Inspector General" , "Hawaii State Bar Association" , "Charles Goodwin" , "Hugh Jones" , "Insurance Division Fraud Branch" , "Lawrence Reifurth" , "Linda Lingle" , "Jo Ann Uchida" , "Office of Inspector General Civil Rights Complaints" , "Mark Bennett" , "American Arbitration Association" , "Judith Neustadter" , "Benjamin J. Cayetano" , "Lokelani Lindsey" , "ACLU Hawaii" , "All Representatives" , "All Senators" , "Andrew Walden" , "Aon Insurance Managers" , "Arthur Rath" , "Benjamin Kudo" , "Bradley Tamm" , "Carl Morton" , "Charles Hurd" , "David Shapiro" , "Dee Jay Mailer" , "J C Shannon" , "James B Nicholson" , "James B. Farris" , "James Cribley" , "James Wriston" , "Jeffrey Watanabe" , "Jim Dooley" , "Joe Moore" , "John D. Finnegan" , "John Goemans" , "Judson Witham" , "Ken Conklin" , "Lyn Flanigan Anzai" , "Margery Bronster" , "Marsh Affinity Group" , "Michael N. Tanoue" , "Michelle Tucker" , "Nathan Aipa" , "Paul Alston" , "Randall Roth" , "Rick Daysog" , "Robert Bruce Graham" , "Robin Campaniano" , "Samuel P. King" , "William K Slate" , "Jim Terrack" , "Rocco Sansone" , "Ted Pettit" , "Laura Thielen" , "Vaughn & Lynda Robinson" , "Rebecca Christie" , "Catbird" , "James Duca" , "Ian Lind" , "Roy F. Hughes" , "Jack Cashill" , "Marshall Chriswell" , "Laser Haas" , "Lucy Komisar" , "Democrats.com" , "Debra Sweet" , "Jane Kirtley" , "John Jubinsky" , "Yamil Berard" , "Global Exchange" , "William K. Black" , "Carole Williams" , "Susan Tius" , "Human Rights in China" , "Michelle Malkin" , "Phil J. Berg" , "Amnesty International U.S.A." , "Michael Moore" , "California Anti-SLAPP Project" , "Thomas Fitton" , "Ron Branson" , "ACLU of Kentucky" , "ACLU Online" , "Louanne Kam"

N Korea criticizes US missile defense for Hawaii

By HYUNG-JIN KIM, The Associated Press

Monday, June 29, 2009; 1:00 AM

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea criticized the U.S. on Monday for positioning missile defense systems around Hawaii, calling the deployment part of a plot to attack the regime and saying it would bolster its nuclear arsenal in retaliation.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he ordered the deployment of a ground-based, mobile missile intercept system and radar system to Hawaii amid concerns the North may fire a long-range missile toward the islands, about 4,500 miles away.

"Through the U.S. forces' clamorous movements, it has been brought to light that the U.S. attempt to launch a pre-emptive strike on our republic has become a brutal fact," the North's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

The paper also accused the U.S. of deploying nuclear-powered aircraft and atomic-armed submarines in waters near the Korean peninsula, saying the moves prove "the U.S. pre-emptive nuclear war" on the North is imminent.

The commentary, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, said the North will bolster its nuclear arsenal in self-defense.

The North routinely accuses the U.S. of plotting to invade the North. But the U.S., which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, has said it has no such plan.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been running high since the North defiantly launched a rocket in April and conducted an underground nuclear test last month, prompting U.N. Security Council sanctions.

North Korea responded to the U.N. resolution on the nuclear test with threats of war, and pledged to expand its nuclear bomb-making program.

In what could be the first test of the U.N. sanctions, an American destroyer has been tracking a North Korean ship sailing off China's coast amid suspicions that it is carrying illicit weapons.

The Kang Nam, which left a North Korean port on June 17, is the first vessel monitored under U.N. sanctions that ban the regime from selling arms and weapons-related material. The resolution requires member nations to request permission to inspect the cargo of ships suspected of carrying banned goods.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on CBS television Sunday that Washington is "following the progress of that ship very closely." Rice would not say whether the U.S. would confront the Kang Nam.

North Korea has said it would consider any interception of its ships a declaration of war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/29/AR2009062900307.html

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July 1, 2009

Dear President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Trustee Farmer, Mr. Guttman, Ms. Neustadter, Judge Kevin Chang, Judge David Ezra, and All Concerned:

I am adding the referenced Exhibit as it directly relates to this lawsuit which violates my Constitutional Rights of Free Speech and a Fair Trial, and Federal and State Anti-SLAPP statutes.

You will find related information on-line at:

http://www.kycbs.net/BLOWBACK.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CarlyleGroup.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CIA.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Halliburton.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/KROLL.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/NuclearNests.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Pentagon.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-Witness-Akaka-Daniel.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-Witness-Cheney-Dick.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-Witness-Clinton-Hillary.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-Witness-Inouye-Dan.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-Witness-Panetta-Leon.htm

Mr. Farmer and Mr. Guttman, in spite of all this factual evidence (not just "political opinions" or "conspiracy theories" as you have previously alleged), I am again asking that we attempt to reach a global settlement of this matter through confidential negotiation or mediation rather than continuing these costly and seemingly-endless court proceedings.

However, if you, and your insurance carriers, are still not willing to attempt to negotiate or mediate a settlement, then I ask that you perform your mandated review of this new Exhibit in accordance with Judge Ezra's Order, and advise me, whether or not, you find it contains any so-called "protected subject matter", and whether or not you intend to OBJECT to my filing a Motion to reopen this case.

I respectfully request your immediate reply. If I do not receive a response from you or your insurance carrier within 15 days, I will assume that you have found no "PSM" in these updated pages, and that you will NOT file any objections to my Motion.

Very truly yours,

Bobby N. Harmon, CPCU, ARM

Additional References:
http://www.kycbs.net/
http://www.kycbs.net/Apartheid-Hawaii.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/BH-CHRON-88-96.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/BH-CHRON-97-99.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/BH-Settlement-Chronology.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Broken-Trust-Book.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Confessions.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/CV05-00030-OUST-vs-Harmon.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Freedom-To-Sing.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/HarmonArbitration.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/JUSTICE.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Lost-Generations.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/RICO-in-Paradise.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/SLAPP.htm
http://www.kycbs.net/Whistler.htm
http://voy.com/129276/
http://whistlersongs.blogspot.com
http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/ReferencesView.aspx?PersonID=912950374

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Excerpts from BLOWBACK, by Chalmers Johnson:

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From the Introduction: After 9/11 -

In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush posed this question: “Why do they hate us?”

His answer: “They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, or freedom of speech, or freedom to vote.” He commented later that he was amazed “that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us....I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”

But how “good” are we, really? If we’re so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much “blowback” upon ourselves?

This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback – a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.

Blowback was first published in the spring of 2000, some eighteen months before 9/11. My intention in writing it was to warn my fellow Americans about the nature and conduct of U.S. foreign policy over the previous half-century, focusing particularly on the period after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. I argued that many aspects of what the American government had done around the world virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples on the receiving end. I did not predict the events of 9/11, but I did clearly state that acts of retaliation were coming and should be anticipated.

“World politics in the twenty-first century,” I wrote, “will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.

During the first year after its publication, Blowback was largely ignored in the United States. Few of the mainstream book reviews took any notice of it, and the house organ of the Council of Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, wrote that “Blowback reads like a comic book.” Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere in the world was somewhat different. The book was quickly translated into German, Italian, and Japanese, and the foreign news editor of Der Spiegel even flew to California to interview me about it.

Domestic lack of interest changed dramatically after September 11, 2001. The book was reprinted eight times in less than two months and became an underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to, or at least desperate to know about, some of the realities of the world in which they lived.

The catastrophic events of the first year of the new millennium not only threw an unusual light on the self-proclaimed role of the United States as “indispensable nation” and “last remaining superpower,” but also posed serious questions and new dangers for other governments that were suddenly asked whether they were for or against our “war on terror.”...

Blowback

Actions that generate blowback are normally kept totally secret from the American public and from most of their representatives in Congress. This means that when innocent civilians become victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to put it in context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it.

In its most rigorous definition, blowback does not mean mere reactions to historical events but rather to clandestine operations carried out by the U.S. government that are aimed at overthrowing foreign regimes, or seeking the execution of people the United States wants eliminated by “friendly” foreign armies, or helping launch state terrorist operations against overseas target populations.

The American people may not know what is done in their name, but those on the receiving end surely do – including the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1961-73), Greece (1967-74), Chile (1973), Afgahanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present), to name only the most obvious cases.

In a broader sense, blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what is sows. Although individuals usually know what they have sown, they rarely have the same knowledge on a national level, especially since so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret. The unintended consequences of American policies and acts in country X lead to a bomb at an American embassy in country Y or a dead American in country Z....

But blowback is hardly restricted to such reasonably straightforward examples. In its extended sense, it also includes the decline of key American industries because of the export-led economic policies of our satellites, the militarism and arrogance of power that inevitably conflict with our democratic structure of government, and the distortions to our culture and basic values as we are increasingly required to try to justify our imperialism.

The term “blowback” first appeared in a classified government document in the CIA’s post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: “When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh and Iran’s prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last.

The CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the cold war, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done....Amid the sometimes curious argot of the spy world – ‘safebases’ and ‘assets’ and the like – the CIA warns of the possibilities of ‘blowback.” The word...has since come into use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of covert operations.”

The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever clandestine operation – the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujahideen) to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world.

Various member of the Bush cabinet were complicit in generating the blowback of 9/11. Former general Colin Powell certainly knows why “they” might hate us. He was Ronald Reagan’s last national security adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the George H.W. Bush administration. Others include former secretary of defense Dick Cheney, former confidant and emissary to Saddam Hussein Donald Rumsfeld, former Pentagon official in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations Paul Wolfowitz, and many more.

Throughout the 1980s, these official designed and implemented the secret war in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, made the decision to abandon America’s Islamic agents.

The USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was deliberately provoked. In his 2996 memoirs, former CIA director Robert Gates writes that the American intelligence services actually began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan not after the Soviet invasion of that country, but six months before it. ...

Brzenski, Carter, and their successors in the Reagan administration, including George H.W. Bush, Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Powell – none of whom has come forward to draw attention to this history – all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the “collateral damage” that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.

The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on. It 1986 it built for him the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost where he trained many of the 35,000 “Arab Afghans.” Bin Laden’s men constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincon Brigade of young volunteers from around the Musim world who wanted to fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union.

In August 1998, on President Bill Clinton’s orders, the Khost complex was hit with cruise missiles, in retaliation for bin Laden’s attacks that month on the American embassies in Kenya dn Tanzania. For once the CIA knew exactly where the targets were, since it had built them.

Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957), was well positioned to become a close ally with other friends of the CIA: Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieutenant General Hameed Gul, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which America used to funnel money and weapons to the mujahideen in order to maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. Since 1982, the ISI also took the lead in recruiting radical Muslims to come to Pakistan, receive training, and fight on the Afgan side.

It was only after the Russians had bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and the United States had walked away from the death and destruction the CIA had helped cause, that Osama bin Laden turned against his American supporters. The last straw as far as he was concerned was the way that “infidel” American troops – around 35,000 of them – remained in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War to prop ut that decadent, fiercely authoritarian regime. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom saw the troops’ presence as a humilitation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis began to launch attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. In June 1996, terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden bombed the Khobar Towers apartments dear Dhahran airport, killing nineteen American airmen and wounding scores more....

The Nature of Political Terrorism

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders, whose innocense is, of course, no different frm that of the civilians killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere...

In our globalizing world, the masses alienated by such overreactions may be anything but domestic. The bombing of Afghanistan that the United Stated launched on October 7, 2001, inflicted great misery on many innocent civilians, a pattern repeated in Iraq, where the death toll of civilians as of August 2003 stood at well over 3,000, a figure that informed observers think may go as high as 10,000 as more evidence is collected.

Altogether, instead of acting to resolve the post 9/11 crisis, the United States exacerbated it with massive military assaults of Afghanistan and Iraq, two ill-advised and unnecessary wars that inflamed passions throughout the Islamic world and repelled huge majorities in every democratic country on earth.

Afghanistan and Iraq

The two wars that the United States launched preemptively were the pet projects of special interest groups that used the attacks of 9/11 as a cover to hijack American foreign policy and implement their private agendas.

These interest groups include the military-industrial complex and the professional armed forces, close American supporters of and advisers to the Likud Party in Israel, and neoconservative enthusiasts for the creation of an American empire. This latter group, concentrated in right-wing foundations and think tanks in Washington D.C., is composed of “chicken-hawk” war lovers ... who seized on the national sense of bewilderment after 9/11 to push the Bush administration into conflicts that were neither relevant to nor successful in destroying al-Qaeda.

Instead, the wars accelerated the recruitment of more suicidal terrorists and promoted nuclear proliferation in countries hoping to deter similar preemptive attacks by the United States. Two years after 9/11, America is unquestionably in greater danger of serious terrorist threats that it has ever been before.

The Afgan and Iraq wars resulted in easy American victories, but both soon reerupted as guerrila struggles of attrition. Experience has shown that high-tech armed forces, such as those of the United States, are inappropriate, overly blunt instruments against terrorists and guerrillas. What was called for was international police cooperation to hunt down the terrorists and changes in foreign policy to separate militant activists from their passive supporters, whose grievances need to be addressed...

Instead, in the wake of 9/11, the United States came up with a particularly cynical and destructive strategy. It sent CIA agents to Afghanistan with millions of dollars to bribe the same warlord armies that the Taliban had defeated to reopen the civil war, promising them air support in their new offensive. The warlords, with a bit of help from the United States thus overthrew the Taliban government and soon returned to their old ways of regional exploitation.

Afghanistan descended into an anarchy religiously motivated Taliban. The propaganda apparatus of the Pentagon claimed a stupendous U.S. victory in Afghanistan, but, in fact, leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped and the country quickly became an even more virulent breeding ground for terrorists.

In the first year after Afghanistan’s “liberation,” the production of opium, heroin, and morphine, controlled by America’s warlord allies, increased 18-fold, from 185 to 3,400 tons.... Muslim governments that in the past have cooperated with the United States, especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan, are facing growing internal dissent.

In most of the world, the spectacle of the world’s richest and most heavily armed country using its air power against one of the world’s poorest quickly eroded the moral high ground accorded to the United States as the victim of the September 11 attacks. Our “preventive wars” insured that the Afghans, Iraqis, and their supporters will have ample motives long into the future to kill andy and all Americans, particularly innocent ones, just as the American military slaughtered their civilians with its “shock and awe” bombing campaigns against which there is no defense.

The war with Iraq that followed the Afghan conquest had even less justification and subverted the system of international cooperation that the United States had worked since World War II to create. Immediately following 9/11, American leaders began to fabricate pretexts for an invasion of Iraq. These were then uncritically disseminated by American print and television media, leading a majority of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to their own safety and that he had personally supported al-Qaeda in its attacks of 9/11. Since there was no evidence for any of these propositions, the American public formed its impressions based on stories planted by the president his followers and then endlessly repeated and embellished by complicit journalists and networks.

The United States will feel the blowback from this ill-advised and poorly prepared military adventure for decades...

The United States and East Asia

The preoccupation of the United States after 9/11 has been primarily with the Islamic world. Yet East Asia remains an area of great, perhaps even greater, concern. The richest satellites of the United States are Japan and South Korea, but they are anything but firm within the American orbit. In December 2002, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of national attitudes in forty-two countries. A stunning 44 percent of South Koreans were found to hold unfavorable views of the United States, exceeding France’s 34 percent and Germany’s 35 percent....

In Japan’s poorest prefecture, the tiny island of Okinawa, some thirty-eight American military bases are located under terms of the 1960 Japanese-American Security Treaty, and revolt against our military presence is endemic. As I discuss in this book, the situation in Okinawa is as volatile as that surrounding the Berlin Wall in 1989: when the inevitable anti-American explosion occurs, it is likely to unravel the entire U.S. presence in East Asia, just as the breaching of the Berlin Wall brought down the whole edifice of Soviet satellites in Easter Europe.

Elsewhere in East Asia, the United States has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic nation. The Pew survey cited above found that whereas in 2000, some 75 percent of Indonesians said that they had a favorable opinion of the United States, by 2003, 83 percent said that they had an unfavorable opinion....

Despite the salience of Islamic terrorism against the United States, the two superpowers of East Asia, China and Japan, as well as the militarized standoff between the United States and North Korea, are likely to matter more in the early decades of the twenty-first century. China is the fastest growing economy on earth, capitalist in orientation but not a democracy (refuting a cherished tenet of American ideology that the two inevitably go together). China has a highly educated population four time larger than that of the United States and is the only nation on earth that has the potential to defend itself militarily against the United States. A Sino-American war would be an even more catastrophic rerun of the Vietnam War.

The wages of Imperialism

Since 9/11, the number of significant terrorist incidents has grown and increased in intensity.... There have also been numerous assassinations of American officials and business people around the world and 184 American service personnel died in Iraq in the six months since May 1, 2003, when President Bush ostentatiously declared that the war was over.

Beyond terrorism, the danger I foresee is that we are embarked on a path not so dissimilar from that of the former Soviet Union a little more than a decade ago. It collapsed for three reasons – internal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. In every sense, we were by far the wealthier of the two Cold War superpowers, so it will certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do their work.

But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise and an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun.

Chalmers Johnson
Cardiff, California
October 2003

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CHAPTER 4

SOUTH KOREA: LEGACY OF THE COLD WAR

There were many differences between the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States’ satellites in East Asia, most importantly in the area of economic organization. ... The USSR demanded that all of these countries industrialize at the fastest possible pace, with absolute priority given to heavy industry.

In the period from 1947 to 1952, the Soviet Union imposed its own economic methods uncritically and without taking any cultural or other differences into account. It was a process in some ways similar to the one the International Monetary Fund imposed on the smaller, more open economies of East Asia during and after the financial crisis of 1997–and with similar results.

In contrast with the Soviet Union, the United States was much less doctrinaire about economic arrangements in its satellites during the Cold War. In Japan and South Korea, its two main dependencies in East Asia, it insisted on the institution of private property and opposed any steps toward the nationalization of industry, but it tolerated land reform, state guidance of the economy, protectionism, mercantilism, and the cartelization of industry as long as these methods produced economic growth and blunted the appeal of communism.

The United States used aid and preferred access to its vast market to bring these countries into its political orbit and keep them there. It disguised what it was doing–ultimately fooling only its own people–with euphemisms like “export-led growth” and “the separation of politics and economics.”...

Democracy finally began to appear in South Korea only in 1987, over four decades after the country came into being, largely because of the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, had attracted the Olympic Games for the following year and so had trapped himself into behaving in a civilized manner before a global audience when Koreans began to protest his rule.

Much as in 1989, when the Russians did not intervene militarily to stop the East Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, the United States in 1987 did not encourage its Korean military allies to use force, as it had done in the past. One reason was that American officials still had in mind the traumatic outcome of the Iranian revolution–when their down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime.

Just the previous year, in February 1986, they thought they saw similar events unfolding in the Philippines as a popular movement swept away another U.S.-supported but corrupt and incompetent dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. In that case, the United States did not support the repression of the rebels, and the results proved relatively satisfying when Corazon Aquino, the widow of an assassinated Marcos opponent, and a group of middle-class reformers came to power, backed by military men with strong ties to the United States. ...

The end of World War II had proved no more a “liberation day” for Korea than for Czechoslovakia or other nations of Eastern Europe. The Japanese had occupied, colonized, and exploited Korea since 1905, just as the Nazis, following the 1938 Munich Agreement, had divided, occupied, and ravished Czechoslovakia. Both countries now underwent transformations into colonies of the victors of World War II.

At about the same time in February 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was carrying out a coup d’état in Prague, right-wing forces in the southern half of divided Korea, then under the control of the United States, were slaughtering at least thirty thousand dissident peasants on the island of Cheju.

Although the Czech events are much better known (and led to the creation of NATO the following year), the killings in Korea were of essentially the same character as those in Czechoslovakia. The Cheju massacre was part of a process by which our puppet regime in South Korea ... consolidated power....

Following the departure of the Japanese, the people of Cheju, a remote island off the extreme southern coast of Korea, governed themselves through patriotic “people’s committees” that were socialist but not Communist in orientation ... On April 3, 1948, Rhee’s police fired on a demonstration commemorating the Korean struggle against Japanese rule. This incident led to a general insurrection on the island against the police and their attempt to integrate Cheju into the new South Korean regime.

Rhee responded with a campaign similar to that of the Indonesian Army in East Timor or of the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. His police carried out a merciless assault on the people of Cheju, killing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand of them in the course of a few months and forcing another forty thousand to flee to Japan.

On May 13, 1949, the American ambassador to the Republic of Korea, John Muccio, wired Washington that most rebels and sympathizers on Cheju had been “killed, captured, or converted.”

By far the most ruthless of Rhee’s agents was a paramilitary vigilante organization called the Nortwest Youth League, composed of refugees from North Korea, whom the U.S. Army tolerated with full knowledge of their reputation for brutality. The American occupation authorities, in fact, directly funded and trained a similar organization, the Korean National Youth League, under its leader Yi Pom-sok (known to the Americans as “BumSuk Lee”), a right-wing paramilitary organization. The “youths” were aged eighteen to fifty. Northwest Youth League members, who were not funded by the U.S. Army, were, of course, rabidly anti-Communist but they also were interested in securing their own livelihoods by acquiring wealth and wives in South Korea. They were responsible for the widely documented sadistic treatment of Cheju’s women, including forcing female survivors of families they killed to marry them and cede their land to them. Some of these men still reside in Cheju today, having profited from the island’s contemporary status as a beach and golf resort.

In April 1996, when President Kim Young-sam used the beachfront Cheju Shilla Hotel as the site of his summit meeting with President Clinton, no American journalist mentioned Cheju’s past, much less the similarity between Clinton’s mindless visit to Cheju and former President Reagan’s mindless visit to a cemetery for former SS soldiers in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985. At an August 1998 international conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cheju uprising held in Cheju City, many speakers noted that Clinton had played golf on the unmarked graves of Syngman Rhee’s victims.

For at least forty-five years after the Cheju massacre, any Korean who so much as mentioned it was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998....

Only in 1995, after the arrests of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for mutiny, corruption, and murder did the Cheju Provincial Assembly finally feel secure enough to create a committee to investigate the massacre, whose research produced the names of 14,504 victims. The committee’s best estimate of the total killed was thirty thousand, about 10 percent of the island’s population. Some 70 percent of the island’s 230 villages were burned to the ground and a staggering 39,000-plus homes destroyed.

The consolidation of a pro-Soviet regime in North Korea and a pro-American one in South Korea led to a war that began in June 1950. The North Koreans have consistently claimed that this was a war of national liberation against American imperialism, while Americans have generally characterized it as an international conflict in which North Korea invaded South Korea. ... From my personal perspective as a veteran of the period immediately following the armistice of 1953, it was also clearly a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil....

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CHAPTER 5

NORTH KOREA: ENDGAME OF THE COLD WAR

North Korea long claimed a greater legitimacy in the struggle against Japanese colonialism than South Korea...

The Seoul Olympics of 1988, which the North boycotted, brought worldwide attention to the prosperity of South Korea, Russia and China ...

The U.S. news media have dismissed North Korea as a “rogue state” and its leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, as a “mad prince...whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam Hussein of North Asia.” What we know about the land, however, suggests that it is less a rogue state than a proud and desperate nation at the end of its tether. Having been driven into a corner, it has offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a muscle-bound but poorly informed competitor.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 precipitated an acute crises in North Korea. Even if it was not prepared to abandon its ideology and reform its economic system of juche (self-reliance), the northern leadership still could not help noting that the endgame of the Cold War was particularly dangerous for players on the Communist side. The former leaders of Romania were put up against a wall and shot; the former leaders of East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a newly unified Germany.

Meanwhile, in another sign of the North’s potential fate, the United States persisted in its boycott and embargo of Communist Cuba even though that island’s regime no longer posed any kind of threat to it....

As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War–which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support–had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang.

In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party-Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital....

As it turned out, Kanemura’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets...

Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim-Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both.

In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports...

Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons–including fear of Japan, energy demands, post-Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” against Japan and a triumphant South Korea–North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least it convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had....

The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,: a la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.

American policy on nuclear nonproliferation has long been filled with obvious contradictions, and the officials in charge of the Korean branch, through overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played right into the North’s hands. Until the five Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, the United States had more or less refused to acknowledge that in addition to Britain, France ,China, and the Soviet Union, proliferation had already occurred in Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Taiwan had technologically proliferated without testing; and that Iraq–perhaps Iran, too–were almost surely pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.

The U.S. doctrine of nonproliferation also ignores the fact that there is something odd about a principle that permits some nations to have nuclear weapons but not others and that the United States has been only minimally willing to reduce its own monstrously large nuclear strike force.

North Korea has ample reason to build a nuclear-power generating capacity, given its vulnerability to a cutoff of crude oil. From a national security standpoint, Japan’s nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder reactor program, its plutonium stockpile, and its solid-fuel rockets with ICBM capabilities could all plausibly appear threatening to a country that it once colonized and exploited.

Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30 percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity through nuclear power by the year 2010.

The North Koreans must also have come to the conclusion that, whatever the American threats, a military strike against it was wholly unlikely. For one thing, South Korea is deeply opposed, not least because of memories of the way its capital, Seoul, only thirty-five miles from North Korean troops at the DMZ, was totally destroyed during the Korean War. In March 1999, when the United States was once again stridently issuing warnings about possible North Korean weapons of mass destruction and insisting that Pyongyang was developing ballistic missiles to deliver them, the South Korean defense minister ruled out participation by his country in a U.S. plan to create a regional missile shield, the theater missile defense (TMD). He further stated in the clearest possible terms that Seoul was opposed to any preemptive attack on North Korea even if war tensions were to rise to unbearable heights on the peninsula.

Equally important, a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American alliance....

The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did reveal to the American government how little its strategic thinking fits the actual complexities of the region...

Once the Americans had started to talk about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale analysis of what might be involved. The secret report that resulted was subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju. It revealed Japan as North Korea’s second most important trading partner after China, and the organization of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Cosen Soren, as a remitter of huge amounts of foreign currency to the North, as well as large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean banks. ... Thus, even if the Americans had gotten U.N. approval of sanctions and avoided a Chinese veto, Japan concluded, they could not have successfully been implemented.

In 1994, the American ambassador to South Korea, James T. Laney, a former missionary in Korea and president of Emory University in Atlanta, was a close friend of Carter’s and was aware of the former president’s willingness to undertake personal diplomacy whenever it seemed he might be helpful. Laney also knew that Kim Il-sung regarded Carter as less hostile that most American officials because of his aborted attempts in the late 1970s to bring peace to Korea. ...

At it turned out, Carter almost surely kept the United States from making a tragic mistake in the region long dominated by the military. ... Carter’s visit, like Nixon’s to China, was also testimony to the legitimacy of an isolated regime, something the United States had long denied. Kim Il-sung therefore agreed to freeze his nuclear program and opened negotiations on what he would require in order to permanently stop his weapons project and shift to a Western-approved form of nuclear power generation....

Talks to implement the Carter-Kim agreement opened on July 8, 1994, the day Kim Il-sung unexpectedly died, and as a result were immediately suspended. His death and the lack of credible information about his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, which might have set back the negotiations, actually seemed to have little effect on the discussions. But they did create serious problems in South Korea, where the government prohibited any public expressions of grief over Kim’s death and banned a church-sponsored human chain that was to extend to the Demilitarized Zone on the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan. ... The police even entered elite Seoul National University’s campus to arrest some 1,400 students who were calling for U.S. troops to get out of Korea and quit blocking unification.

On August 5, 1994, talks between North Korea and the United States resumed in Geneva, leading to an “Agreed Framework,” which the two sides signed that October 21. According to this agreement the United States was to arrange for the construction by the year 2003 of two 1,000-megawat light-water reactors in North Korea to replace its current graphite-moderated reactors (a Soviet design from which plutonium can rather easily be extracted for possible use in nuclear weapons). The United States was also to provide fuel oil to replace energy lost by the closing of North Korea’s current reactors, and it was to guarantee that it would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. Finally, the United States pledged to open trade and some form of diplomatic relations.

For its part North Korea agreed to stop using and then dismantle its Russian reactors, ship its used nuclear fuel rods out of the country, remain a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and allow IAEA inspections of its nuclear sites.

The new reactors the United States was to provide were estimated to cost in the range of $4 billion to $4.5 billion. By March 1995, South Korea had agreed to pay about 70 percent of their cost and Japan 20 percent (with the remainder covered by various, mainly European countries). Although the United States negotiated the agreement, it agreed to pay nothing. All three nations–the United States, the Republic of Korea, and Japan–set up a new organization called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) to do the construction work.

The Japanese government supplied an initial $5.8 million so that KEDO could go into operation, but it has since regularly suspended funds whenever something has happened in North Korea that has not met its approval. In addition, elements in the U.S. government keep undercutting the agreement. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, for instance, said in Seoul in April 1997 that the United States intends to keep its forces stationed in Korea even if the two Koreas reunite. He gave no reason for this astonishing one-sided commitment, which implies an unending American imperial role in East Asia.

He also predicted that North Korea was on the verge of collapse, which may explain why the United States has been so slow to implement the agreement. Instead of delivering fuel oil, as promised, or opening diplomatic and economic relations, as the North Koreans expected, the U.S. government has vacillated, often blaming Congress for its failure to fund the new relationship. ... Unexpectedly, with the onset of the global economic crisis in 1997, South Korea itself came close to collapse and proved incapable of paying its share of the new North Korean reactors. The American government made no effort to find or raise replacement funds. ...

Frustrated by the failure of the United States to deliver on what Pyongyang expected to get from the Agreed Framework, North Korea continued development of a medium-range and potentially an intercontinental-range missile force. The North had long worked on copying, improving, and manufacturing the Soviet-designed Scud short-range liquid-fueled battlefield missle, which it then exported to ear hard currency or barter wherever it could. Thoughout the 1980s, it traded weaponry to Iran for oil, accounting for as much as 40 percent of all Iranian arms imports during the Iran-Iraq War.

After the Scud, the North’s next big project was to build an intermediate-range missile that conceivably might deter the massive forces the United States arrayed against it at bases in Japan and on the ships of the Seventh Fleet....

However, in August 1998, a truly explosive development transformed this relatively benign environment into a paroxysm of Japanese and American overreaction and worst-case scenarios. On August 31, 1998, the United States government announced that North Korea had test-fired a two-stage (later revised to a three-stage) liquid-fueled missile over Japan. ... The Japanese, at least metaphorically, went ballistic. They condemned North Korea for a dangerous military provocation and an implied threat to Japan’s security. They cut off all contacts with the North and announced that they would launch their own spy satellites specifically to keep track of what was going on in North Korea and to end their dependence on military intelligence from the United States. They even professed to be thinking about withdrawing from the Agreed Framework.

It turned out that the North Koreans had used a three-stage rocket to launch a rather modestly designed satellite in connection with the celebration of the country’s fiftieth anniversary...

The United States has continued to harp on the threat posed by North Korea’s millile capability. It ostentatiously flew B-52 and B-2 strategic bombers to its Pacific bases in Guam. Among the reasons for this belligerence was a desire on the part of the Defense Department and the arms industry to continue workin on an antimissile defense system, an idea now considerably scaled down from the Reagan administration’s lasers in outer space but still devoted to intercepting an incoming missile by firing a defensive missile at it.

The techinological requirements of hitting a bullet with another bullet are fierce, and there is always a possibility that nuclear fallout and debris from a successful interception will kill more people than if the warhead had been allowed to proceed to its target.

The American government has so far spent billions trying to make the theater missile defense (TMD) work but has repeatedly met with failure. One of the things it had most wanted was to get the Japanese to help fund the project (which even if it does not work will be very lucrative for the companies trying to build it) and provide technical input into it.

The Japanese had consistently balked. The TMD seemed to them a probable violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, in terms of deterrence theory, utterly destabilizing. If one country should ever achieve a successful missile defense (or believe that it had), it would have a strong incentive to launch a preemptive strike against its opponents before they too achieved such a defense. This is the main reason why China has consistently denounced America’s infatuation with the TMD, as well as because it does not want to be drawn into a ruinously expensive arms race to develop it.

North Korea’s launch of a missle with a range of several thousand miles transformed this debate. The Japanese finally agreed to buy into the TMD. On September 20, 1998, to the jubilation of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Japan reversed itself and joined the missile defense research program....

The unraveling of the Agreed Framework was not entirely caused by Pyongyang. The drumbeat demonizing North Korea has continued unabated in Washington. In February 1999, Republican congressman Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, was convinced that “North Korea could nuke Seattle,” and the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the senators, “I can hardly overstate my concern about North Korea.” It seemed evident in the spring of 1999 that North Korea was being groomed as Public Enemy Number One until events in Yugoslavia overtook this campaign.

Even though it remains a small, failed Communist regime whose people are starving and have no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington, If the military needs a post-Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China. Politicians seek partisan advantage by claiming that others are “soft” on defending the country from “rogue regimes.” And the arms lobby had a direct interest in selling its products to each and every nation in East Asia, regardless of its political orientation.

There is considerable evidence that since the signing of the Agreed Framework in 1994, a series of mysterious incidents has been created deliberately to undermine diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions. In September 1997, for instance, the United States, South Korea, China, and North Korea were scheduled to hold negotiations on replacing the forty-five-year-old Korean armistice with a peace treaty. In the same month the United States also said it hoped to obtain North Korea’s adherence to an international agreement first negotiated in 1987 called the Missile Technology Control Regime. The agreement sought to bring under control the transfer of technologies that could be used to make intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States had indicated in advance that it would lift some of its economic sanctions against North Korea if it would halt deployment and sales of its missiles.

On August 22, 1997, the eve of the talks, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt, a key player in North Korea’s missile sales to the Middle East, “defected” to the United States. R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter for the Washington Post, quoted a CIA source as saying, “There will be people in the intelligence community who will be salivating to see this guy.”

In the New York Times Steven Lee Myers noted that the defection threatened the peace talks but quoted another U.S. official as saying, “The alternative of turning down a bona fide plea for asylum from a state like North Korea is pretty unthinkable.”...

Then Newsweek revealed that the former ambassador had in fact been on the CIA payroll. Informed observers concluded that he had not so much defected as been called in from the cold at a time of the CIA’s choosing and with an eye toward scuttling the upcoming talks. North Korea in retaliation declined to attend either set of scheduled meetings....

To be continued...

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