Left Flank

With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its «deterrent», test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: «none was asked for, none was given.»

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to «acknowledge» American «concerns» about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!

Putting the al-Kibar «reactor» disclosures into a geostrategic framework is necessary. Stratfor's George Friedman discusses a possible Israel-Syria agreement:

Iran will not be happy about all this. Tehran has invested a fair amount of resources in bulking up Hezbollah, and will not be pleased to see the militia shift from Syrian management to Syrian control. But in the end, what can Iran do? It cannot support Hezbollah directly, and even if it were to attempt to undermine Damascus, those Syrians most susceptible to Tehran's Shiite-flavored entreaties are the Alawites themselves.

The other player that at the very least would be uneasy about all of this is the United States. The American view of Syria remains extremely negative, still driven by the sense that the Syrians continue to empower militants in Iraq. Certainly that aid — and that negative U.S. feeling — is not as intense as it was two years ago, but the Americans might not feel that this is the right time for such a deal. Thus, the release of the information on the Syrian reactor might well have been an attempt to throw a spoke in the wheel of the Israeli-Syrian negotiations.

This interpretation is further reinforced by independent analyses of those videos from al-Kibar.

Professor William Beeman at the University of Minnesota passed along a note today from «a colleague with a U.S. security clearance» about the mysterious Syrian site targeted in a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike.

The note raises more questions about the evidence shown last week by U.S. intelligence officials to lawmakers in the House and Senate.

1. Satellite photos of the alleged reactor building show no air defenses or anti-aircraft batteries such as the ones found around the Natanz nuclear site in central Iran.
2. The satellite images do not show any military checkpoints on roads near the building.
3. Where are the power lines? The photos show neither electricity lines or substations.
4. Here is a link to a photo of the North Korean facility that the Syrian site was based on. Look at all the buildings surrounding it. The Syrian site was just one building.

The author of the note pinpoints irregularities about the photographs. Beeman's source alleges that the CIA «enhanced» some of the images.

Gee, I feel so empowered to be a minor dupe in a diplomatic ploy!

Image via Wikipedia

Joshua at OFK must be one of the few intelligible pundits on the planet who still seriously takes the CIA at its word. From Total Wonkerr: «Too bad there isn't some international agency with the capacity to provide an independent assessment of this sort of thing…»

Well, perhaps ACW can give us some technical details?

Despite early press reports that the fuel channels atop the Al Kibar reactor core were identical to Yongbyon, I and others — including Geoff Forden, Cheryl Rofer and Richard Wendland — see some pretty significant differences that suggest Al Kibar might have been quite a bit smaller than its North Korean cousin.

To be clear, I don't doubt that Al Kibar was a reactor and, although I think the evidence of North Korean involvement is less impressive than early press reports suggested, that's my working hypothesis too.

But I don't understand the claim that Al Kibar is a copy of Yongbyon in the strict sense — in particular, I don't understand how the IC concluded that Al Kibar is the same size as Yongbyon.

Noah Schachtman is still calling it a 'mystery'.

So, there's something to wait for. If, that is, you don't just believe the CIA!

Image by peace chicken via Flickr

There has already been much discussion about the remaining mysteries surrounding the Syrian plutonium-generation reactor. My own guess (and it is just a guess) is that the Syrian reactor was the fruit of a three-way partnership composed of Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Iran provided the money, idea, and leadership. Iran ordered Syria to provide the site and some of the labor. North Korea provided the expertise, for which Iran paid (directly or indirectly) in cash.

But where Westhawk is even more helpful is the other half of his post: , the NPT system is broken, so he asks, «What will replace the broken NPT-IAEA system?» I would argue that the system is fundamentally sound, if only nuclear powers with intelligence assets would share information and let the IAEA do its job.

The challenge of proliferation control lies not in the lack of proven techniques but in the absence of moral suasion and sustained diplomacy by the world leaders. The American government subsidized the spread of nuclear knowledge through the Atoms for Peace program to counter Soviet influence, and at virtually every critical juncture since then successive administrations have set aside long-term proliferation goals in favor of short-term strategic priorities. (Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets, and How We Could Have Stopped Him, p. 1844, Palm e-book)

Collins and Frantz advocate the following proposals to fix the system:

• a moratorium on enriched uranium;
• revision of the NPT, including eliminating the right to opt-out and a UN commitment to sanction violators;
• the reduction of nuclear arsenals and a moratorium on the creation of a new generation of weapons;
• restrictions on sales of nuclear technology;
• monitoring of civilian nuclear industries;
• intelligence-sharing

With the exception of sanctions, which are generally a worse remedy than the problems they seek to cure, this is a sane international nuclear policy

I'm still decelerating from a guest lecture by Johan Galtung, "Peace in the Global Era and Perspectives of the Unification on the Korean Peninsula", I attended this afternoon at Dong-A University. As usual I forgot my camera, because I honestly thought the panel discussion would be an examination of Galtung's work by South Korean professors applied to the North Korean problem, not a guest lecture. OK, he's not Beckham, but now I can but a face to articles I have read in IR grad classes. And, his treatment of the North Korean problem was inspiring.

Galtung deviated from the script immediately. Kudos to the Dong-A professor who suddenly was forced into the role of translator. The younger South Korean and Galtung exchanged some tense words, and Galtung often had to repeat for him, but the man did an admirable job. Well, his boss, the dean, who is "friends" with Galtung, was sitting right there at the table, too. But, that was nothing compared to the fireworks later, when another professor lit into Galtung for his arguments. The dean had to wave him off! More later...

After a late start (15 minutes), and the dean's fulsome praise (which bordered on lavish), Galtung quickly laid out his five-point lecture. He began with his distinction between negative and positive peace, and applied it the Korean peninsula. The goal of resolving the Korean armistice precedes political unification. After characterizing the North Korean state as "fundamentalist Confucian", Galtung then argued that unification only necessitated the free flow of people, goods and services, and information and ideas between the two Korean states, not the dissolution of ROK and DPRK into a single Korean state. Galtung buttressed this point by that of three other scenarios, conquest, collapse, or peaceful dissolution, the first two were violent, and the last has never occurred in human history. Galtung termed this "national reconciliation without the unification of two states". Galtung subsequently considered confederation as a starting political point, but unnecessary.

Topically, Galtung predicted that DPRK, following Hu Jintao's lead in this 17th Party Congress address would adopt Chinese economic reforms, and experience double-digit economic growth in the next ten years. The stumbling point before now was the Chinese emphasis on "jungle capitalism" and the Juche emphasis on distribution. But with Hu's embrace of distribution, Kim Jong-il can now embrace the PRC model. So, let's put a marker on that prediction.

Also, Galtung examined the Six-Party dynamics, as the historical result of a century's worth of diplomacy beginning with the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905. With DPRK and PRC on one side, and Japan and US on the other, ROK has vacillated between the two sides. Under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, Seoul favored the DPRK-PRC axis, but Lee Myung-bak looks fit to swing back to the Japan-US side. Galtung predicted this latest swing would fail, and ROK would swing back again in the future. But, as an honest broker between the US and DPRK, ROK can take a step toward positive peace. Galtung criticized the decision not to award both Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize for the June, 2000 Summit. For Galtung, ROK has to act a third-party mediator, or escrow account, as he used for an example, between DPRK and US.

The US wants denuclearization; DPRK wants normalization. Both states should give the instruments of both processes to Seoul, after which Seoul can decide to verify both simultaneously. Or, another organization, such as the UN Security Council (minus the US), the IAEA, or the remaining four parties in the Six-Party process can also be alternative mediators. Galtung emphasized, though, that ROK's role was insignificant in the regional and global contest between DPRK and US, if it did not operate even-handedly between DPRK and US. Galtung remained hopeful, that, if ROK and DPRK can become diplomatic equals, the human rights situation will improve, but that the US, and those still desiring collapse or conquest, are "arrogant". "Peace is a relation," Galtung stated.

It was during the Q&A, that Professor X launched into an emotional tirade (in English) about North Korean human rights abuses. He also correctly lectured about the persecution of religious denominations in the DPRK, including the Confucian religion Galtung had argued typified the North Korean state. Although I agreed, this man was rude. The dean prompted him to repeat his comments in Korean for the audience, but then had to quiet the man repeatedly afterwards. Galtung repeated his argument and agreed with the professor, that the North Korean regime is "terrible". At this point, he emphasized again, that peace is relational.

I asked about the South African and Libyan cases as models for denuclearization, which Galtung acknowledged as examples of successes. I also argued that political unification is impossible geopolitically on a peninsula. Here Galtung emphasized, that "unification is not important", but the free flow of people and goods is. He also advocated an "East Asian Community", to integrate the Korean peninsula into a regional and global framework.

Galtung's emphasis on reconciliation without unification is a thousand times more agreeable to me than an internecine conflict over how to unifiy the peninsula into one state. The tension in the auditorium, full of students, who honestly were more concerned with verifying their attendance than listening, rose and hit newer levels every time Galtung slighted ROK, or dissed unification. I don't believe these students knew who the man was, or respected his career. I think the only South Korean who admired him was the dean. Unfortunately, whatever Galtung argued was binned as another foreigners' lack of appreciation for the present situation, not as an application of Galtung's peace studies to a current crisis. As the one professor demonstrated, engaging with arguments dispassionately might be utopian in an emotionally-charged political situation where even students feel Koreans own the debate.

It's another reason to drink black tea rather than coffee.

But now the team of scientists led by Professor Les Baillie from Welsh School of Pharmacy at Cardiff University and Doctor Theresa Gallagher, Biodefense Institute, part of the Medical Biotechnology Centre of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore, has found that the widely-available English Breakfast tea has the potential to inhibit the activity of anthrax, as long as it is black tea.

Anthrax - a potentially fatal human disease - is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. A very serious and rapidly progressing form of the disease occurs when bacterial spores are inhaled making anthrax a potent threat when used as a biological warfare agent.

Published in the March issue of the Society for Applied Microbiology's journal Microbiologist, Professor Baillie said: «Our research sought to determine if English Breakfast tea was more effective than a commercially available American medium roast coffee at killing anthrax. We found that special components in tea such as polyphenols have the ability to inhibit the activity of anthrax quite considerably.»

The study provides further evidence of the wide range of beneficial physiological and pharmalogical effects of this common household item.

The research also shows that the addition of whole milk to a standard cup of tea completely inhibited its antibacterial activity against anthrax.

Add to this what Graeme Wood terms black tea's "subtler" defense against terror, why not toddle today?

Mathew Yglesias brings up a good link on McCain's 1999 DPRK arguments:

From Senator McCain's 1999 Landon Lecture at Kansas State University:

But procrastination defined the administration's response to North Korea's nuclear ambitions -- the greatest, most immediate danger to the United States and our closest allies in Asia.

The "Agreed Framework" between North Korea and the United States promised North Korea food and energy support, as well as state-of-the-art nuclear reactors, in exchange for the de facto cessation of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. In essence, the agreement constituted a dangerous gamble that time would inevitably work to our advantage.

Rather than take difficult coercive measures such as sanctions to stop an irrationally hostile North Korean regime from possessing nuclear weapons, we chose a prevent defense. We made concessions to the North Koreans, accepted whatever fissionable material they already possessed, and hoped that they would delay their nuclear advances until their collapsing economy forced them to recognize the necessity of peaceful integration into the world community, and a carefully managed reunification with the South.

Five years later, the North Korean economy has not just collapsed, but practically disappeared. Most North Koreans are starving. The exception, of course, are large elements of the North Korean military, which the regime has managed to sustain -- partly with food and energy it has received from the United States and its allies. Far from delaying its nuclear program, North Korea simply moved the program from the reactor site that they ceased operating as part of the agreement to another facility underground.

Worse, while we have waited for North Korea to recognize the reality of its desperate straits, the regime has managed to greatly improve its missile technology. And to underscore just how aggressive and irrational they remain, they fired a three-stage missile at Japan.

A firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price. Moreover, refusing to help ease the deprivations in the North, and hastening the collapse of the regime might have also resulted in war as the North's last desperate measure, or at least a very messy reunification with the South. Instead, we have sustained North Korea long enough for it to develop missiles that might be capable of striking the United States, and allowed it to proceed with its program to develop nuclear warheads. North Korea is still inexorably nearing total collapse, and its leaders remain quite capable of launching in their country's death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.

Hmmmm...perhaps a little too much temper, John!