Left Flank

Could beef start a war?

As I was sitting here in Busan, working on a paper about natural resources and civil war and listening to news of South Korean protests against the importation of American beef, I discovered the War of the Farrapos. According to the Correlates of War database, this civil war between Brazilians resulted in over 200,000 deaths on both sides and lasted ten years. The cause was trade.

The uprising is believed to have began due to the difference between the economy of Rio Grande do Sul and the rest of the country. Unlike the other provinces, the state economy focused in the internal market rather than exporting commodities, the state's main product, the charque (bovine dried and salted meat), suffering badly from the competition of charque imported from Uruguay and Argentina, which had free access to Brazilian market while the gauchos were charged high tariffs inside Brazil.

Crazy, huh? Maybe, but Seoul Searcher thinks South Koreans are even crazier.

Incidentally, watching and reading about the protests against American beef imports, I was quite mystified by the meek, almost inaudible, protests, much less action, against harmful products imported from China. So many Chinese goods, including foodstuff as well as toys, have been scientifically proven to be toxic and harmful to our health and yet not a «boo» has been uttered against their import.

Does this mean that we, Koreans, are such a gullible people that we can only react when the biased media and some unconscionable politicians and entertainers spread groundless rumors and unalloyed lies? Yes, this, I am afraid, is true to a large extent.

But what makes us so gullible? Are we collectively naïve or stupid so that we can easily be manipulated and swayed by politicians or other interest groups? I don't think so. We may be often blinded by or made to believe in something because of monetary and material greed, but never because of naivety or stupidity.

If anything, Koreans, on the whole, are very emotional and hasty rather than coolly rational and deliberate in making judgments on any social and political issue. And let's face it, we are also a pretty insecure and paranoiac bunch of people as we have long been suffering from an inferiority complex.

Because of these regrettable national traits, we easily become prey to the demagoguery of a few unscrupulous people who have their own ax to grind or political hay to make at our expense. But we are smart enough and are living in an advanced society where we should be able to make our own judgments and decisions based on objective facts, not just listen to other people and follow them blindly.

Yet, USTR Susan Schwab might be the wackiest of all! But, just in case, I'll be looking out for South Korean gauchos!

Image via Wikipedia

The US needs Beijing to tackle the DPRK issue, but not how you might think.

Realizing this, the US, South Korea, and Japan should urge the one state with true leverage of Pyongyang - China - to press its own model of economic reform on the North's leadership.

Two complimentary reasons stand out for this long-term policy course. The first is that, as hinted above, without doing so, there will be little incentive for Pyongyang to cease its involvement in the trade of illicit goods. There is a much greater chance of reigning this activities in if sustainable revenue - with positive consequences for the state that do not threaten its neighbors, international security, or international markets - is a tangible reality for North Korea.

The second is that there is no alternative. A maintenance of the status quo does little to rescue North Korea's incentives to remain mired in the black market. Seeking to choke the regime, as Washington was doing until recently, can only force it into a desperate corner. Moreover, forcing a state collapse in Pyongyang is not, and probably never will be, an attractive or feasible option for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it assumes that Washington is capable of doing so, which in turn assumes that the US has any real leverage over North Korea. This is not the case so long as Beijing remains the regime's true financier and largest external source of goods. Furthermore, North Korea's neighbors have no desire to see the regime collapse anytime soon primarily because they will be the ones tasked with picking up the pieces. China, for instance, already struggles with the flow of refugees from North Korea and knows very well that in the event of a North Korean collapse, those problems will worsen exponentially and might even materialize a host of unknown (and perhaps worse) scenarios. South Korea, for its part, fears a North Korean collapse that would force it to absorb the poverty-stricken Northern state into its territorial protection - an immediate reunification that no one would have anticipated or truly planned for. The result would be a premature merging of the world's twelfth largest economy with one of the world's weakest states. Seoul is not opposed to Korean reunification in principle, but it is not willing to do so at the expense of its own economic growth, hence its emphasis on raising the standard of living in North Korea (something designed to soften the eventual blow, apart from the obvious humanitarian reasons).

This argument sounds familiar! Didn't a Heritage or AEI fellow characterize DPRK as a failed Stalinist state that needed to return to orthodoxy, by abandoning the quirky leader cult and military-first policy?

One of the reasons this site was down was, because I was celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday at a Korean-style sashimi place down the hill from our house. BTW, it's my favorite meal (and, obviously my mother-in-law likes it, too!) A few photos were lost to the...ahem! drunkenness of photographer, including the last hour at a nearby pub with family and friends. A big messy table full of side dishes, soju and beer, and raucous conversation-that's a Korean-style birthday!

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!

DPRK Forum creditably serves up the video facts and timeline on the Dayr az-Zwar reactor incident. The Economist is skeptical:

Many facts remain contested. White House officials told Congress that the reactor had «striking similarities» to North Korea's facility at Yongbyon. Footage presented to Congress is said to show Korean faces at the Syrian site. But David Albright and Paul Brannan, in an analysis for the Institute for Science and International Security, an American think-tank, note that evidence is missing for a Syrian weaponisation programme or for plutonium-separation facilities. The North Koreans may well have helped to build the site, but they say more evidence is needed to be sure that Syria had a bomb programme.

The target of Thursday's hearing was not Syria in the main. The Bush administration is divided over North Korea. Years of efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme have been driven both by the American government and by six-party talks that involve China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, North Korea and America. Last year North Korea agreed to dismantle the Yongbyon facility, as part of a deal agreed in 2005 that requires it to declare and dismantle all of its nuclear programmes. However progress was stalled several times, including after a row over the release of funds claimed by North Korea.

A smooth-talking American diplomat, Christopher Hill, was deployed to persuade North Korea to take the steps needed to move ahead with the deal. North Korea has publicly acknowledged its plutonium-making but is reluctant to own up publicly to efforts to import equipment for producing uranium and about nuclear help to Syria. Mr Hill has been working on a deal that would let North Korea acknowledge America's concerns about both these activities, while pushing ahead with dismantling its plutonium-making reactor at Yongbyon. But hawks in the administration, and outside critics, dislike the idea of any concessions to North Korea and want to ensure that the country is compelled to account for and dismantle the parallel uranium programme, such as it was.

Congress began threatening to cut off funding for Mr Hill's efforts unless the administration produced all the information it had about North Korea's proliferation activity. This resulted in the hearings on Thursday. Some conspiracy theorists think that the briefing was designed to embarrass the North Koreans and to provoke them to flounce out of the deal, pleasing the hawkish types who never liked it.

But it comes at a curious time on several fronts. Another American diplomat was in North Korea as the briefing took place, and the country's news agency reported that talks were held «in a sincere and constructive manner». Jamie Metzl, a Korea expert at the Asia Society in New York (and a former National Security Council staffer under Bill Clinton), notes that the agreement with North Korea essentially forgives past sins and focuses on disarming North Korea in the future. Thus the North Koreans have an incentive to confess and get this behind them, in order to get promised aid and other concessions.

Nukes of Hazard also points readers to an April 24 ISIS statement on the US video:

The release of this information is likely to prompt a fresh wave of questions about North Korea's commitment to verifiably dismantle its nuclear arsenal and halt its proliferation activities. This new information confirms the need to be concerned about Syrian and North Korean actions, including their nuclear cooperation which dates back many years. However, it should not be seen as a casus belli against Syria or a reason to scuttle the progress being made at the Six Party Talks in disabling and dismantling North Korea's nuclear arsenal.

First, the United States does not have any indication of how Syria would fuel this reactor, and no information that North Korea had already, or intended to provide the reactor's fuel. This type of reactor requires a large supply of uranium fuel. The lack of any identified source of this fuel raises questions about when the reactor could have operated, despite evidence that it was nearing completion at the time of the attack.

Second, the United States and Israel have not identified any Syrian plutonium separation or nuclear weaponization facilities. The absence of such facilities gives little confidence that the reactor was part of an active nuclear weapons program. The apparent absence of fuel, whether imported or indigenously produced, also lowers confidence that Syria has an active nuclear weapons program.

If OFK's account of the Congressional hearings and this exchange on the Lehrer Newshour are any indication of the useless invective with which conservatives have infused this debate, it's hard to evaluate any of this. One aspect of the A.Q. Khan investigations troubles me in this regard. CIA knew of Khan's activities as far back as the 70s before Khan even assembled a centrifuge in Pakistan. Yet, intelligence officials refused to share their evidence with international agencies, like the IAEA, whose job it is to investigate and regulate, out of simple ideological pique.

WangKon936 asks, "So, is the Bush administration genuinely concerned about proliferation and North Korea, or is this a clumsy neocon plot?" The goal then, as now, is partisan, and not on improving the international regime, or even presenting a unified national position in a diplomatic negotiation.