North Korea and the Birth Pangs of a New Northeast Asian Order

Gavan McCormack

In February 2007, agreement was reached at the Six Party talks in Beijing on the parameters for resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue. The frame was one of comprehensive settlement of one of the long unresolved legacies of the 20th century and the prospect it opened was for a new, diplomatic, military, political, and economic order.This paper asks why the settlement has taken so long to reach, considers the major obstacles to its implementation, and assesses its prospects. It argues that to understand the “North Korea Problem” close attention has to be paid to the “America Problem” and the “Japan Problem.” It suggests that, while North Korean strategic objectives have been consistent through the decade and a half of crisis, the US and Japan have vacillated, torn between conservative, neo-conservative, and reactionary forces on the one hand and “realists” on the other. The US strategic shift of February heralds the dawn of a 21st century Northeast Asian order; whether that dawn is to prove a true or false one should be clear by year’s end.
_______________________________________________________________________1. The Problem

In the summer and autumn of 2006, as the United Nations Security Council twice denounced North Korea and imposed sanctions on it with seemingly global unanimity, who would have guessed that within one year the prospects for reconciliation could have advanced to the present point? The deal was reached at the Beijing Six-Party Talks in February: North Korea was to shut down and seal its Yongbyon reactor as first step towards permanent “disablement,” while the other parties were to grant it immediate energy aid, with more to come when North Korea presented its detailed inventory of nuclear weapons and facilities to be dismantled. At the same time, the US and Japan were to open talks with North Korea aimed at normalizing relations, while the US was to “begin the process” of removing the designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism and “advance the process” of terminating the application to it of the Trading with the Enemy Act. Five working groups were set up to address the questions of peninsula denuclearization, normalization of DPRK-US relations, normalization of DPRK-Japan relations, economy and energy cooperation, and Northeast Asian peace and security.[1] The Beijing parties promised to “take positive steps to increase mutual trust” and the directly related parties to “negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula.”Shortly after the Agreement, US Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte visited the capitals of this region to explain President Bush’s desire for a permanent peace regime on the peninsula,[2] and US Ambassador Vershbow spoke of the prospect of a treaty to end the Korean War and of relations between his country and North Korea by the spring of 2008.[3] A second South-North Korean summit was held in October 2007 and it is clear that plans proceed in Seoul for a massive “Marshall Plan” scale program of south-north economic cooperation, with an estimated cost over the coming decade of $126 billion.[4] Trains in May crossed between south and north for the first time in 57 years (albeit only on a trial run),[5] and the international (South and North Korea, China, and the US) university, Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, opened in Pyongyang in September 2007. The capitalist enclave of the Gaesong Industrial Complex modestly thrives, with sixty-six South Korean light manufacturing companies operating within it already and another 200 signed up to lease land for further stages in its expansion.[6] Both government and opposition parties in Seoul plan cooperation on the premises of eventual unification, and Seoul’s National Defense Institute is even drawing up plans for a stage-by-stage unification of the armed forces of south and north.[7] Perhaps even more than these grand plans, it is the small, everyday things that bespeak the new era, such as the North Korean under-17 football squad conducting its training camp on Cheju island.[8]As of Autumn 2007, North Korea was committed to providing the inventory of nuclear facilities and dismantling them by year’s end, while the US was looking positively at the removal of the designation “terror supporting state” and the lifting of the “trading with the enemy” sanctions; the former Korean War combatants (the US, China, and South Korea) have agreed that, provided North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons program as promised by December 2007, they will enter upon negotiations to convert the existing armistice into a peace treaty,[9] and Japan has said it is ready for serious and sincere negotiations that will cover both the “unfortunate past” (of colonialism) and the North Korean abductions of the more recent times.[10] What does this mean? The tectonic plates under East Asia are shifting. North Korea has been the enemy of the US for longer than any state in history, including George lll’s England, Stalin’s the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, and Castro’s Cuba, and none of these cases involved a personal sentiment to match the “loathing” of the kind that George W. Bush has expressed for the North Korean leader as “evil”, or the ferocity of the Vice-President’s statement: “You do not negotiate with evil, you defeat it.” For all of this to be resolved, and resolved peacefully, would be truly historic.Peace and cooperation begin to seem possible in East Asia, radiating out from the very peninsula that was in the 20th century one of the most violently contested and militarized spots on earth. Japanese colonialism, the division of Korea and its consequent civil and international war, the long isolation of North Korea and its confrontation with the United States and with South Korea, and the bitter hostility between it and Japan: all these things suddenly seem to be negotiable.[11] The historical significance of 2007 will be huge if even a significant part of this promise is fulfilled. 2. The “North Korea Problem” and the “US Problem”The very term “the North Korea nuclear problem” as framed by American policy makers begs a major question. It assumes that it is North Korea that is irrational, aggressive, nuclear obsessed and dangerous, and the US that is rational, globally responsible, and reacting to North Korean excesses. To thus shrink the frame of the problem is to ignore the matrix of a century’s history – colonialism, division, half a century of Korean War, Cold War as well as nuclear proliferation and intimidation.[12] It is to assume that what it describes as “the North Korean nuclear weapons program” can be dealt with while ignoring the unfinished issues of the Korean War and the Cold War, and even of Japanese imperialism. What this formulation of the “North Korea problem” ignores is something that I have referred to as the “US problem,” the US’s aggressive, militarist hegemonism and contempt for international law.[13] Although North Korea is widely regarded as an “outlaw state” and held in contempt by much of the world, it has not in the past 50 years launched any aggressive war, overthrown any democratically elected government, threatened any neighbor with nuclear weapons, torn up any treaty, or attempted to justify the practices of torture and assassination. Its 2006 missile and nuclear weapons tests were both provocative and unwise, but neither breached any law, and both were carried out under extreme provocation. The North Korean state plainly runs roughshod over the rights of its citizens, but the extremely abnormal circumstances under which it has existed since the founding of the state in 1948, facing the concentrated efforts of the global superpower to isolate, impoverish, and overthrow it, have not been of its choosing. Frozen out of major global institutions and subject to financial and economic sanctions,[14] denounced in fundamentalist terms as “evil” (and beyond redemption), North Korea could scarcely be anything but suspicious and fearful. Suspicion and fear, on the part of a state as well as of an individual, is likely to be expressed in belligerence. In particular, North Korea has faced the threat of nuclear annihilation for more than half a century. If anything is calculated to drive a people mad, and to generate in it an obsession with unity and survival, and with nuclear weapons as the sine qua non of national security, it must be such an experience. Its demand for relief from nuclear intimidation was unquestionably just and yet was ignored by the global community, till, eventually, as we know, it took the matter into its own hands. Being a small country, however, and one without diplomatic allies, the world’s great and middle-sized powers criticized it while turning a blind eye to the injustice of the system from which it suffered. While the world’s fingers were pointed at North Korea, its eyes were, by and large, averted from the suffering and denial of human rights suffered by the US prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, or the citizens of many countries whom the CIA in recent years has ferried secretly around the world, delivering them to torturers in a global gulag beyond the reach of any law, not to mention US flouting of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to dismantle its arsenal. It is sometimes said that the Cold War ended in 1989 (or even that history itself ended) with the victory of the “Free World” especially the United States, but in East Asia it ended rather with the defeat of “Free World”-supported “national security state” regimes at the hands of the democratic resistance, or “people power,” in the Philippines with the overthrow of the Marcos regime in 1986, in Korea with the overthrow of the Chun Doo Hwan regime in 1987, and in Indonesia with the overthrow of Suharto in 1998. These were only partial and incomplete victories, but were nevertheless the precondition for the advance of democracy and human rights. In Korea, it was the people’s victory of 1987, preceding the end of the Cold War, which made possible the new historical era that slowly replaces it, especially the prospect of a post-division system Korea. Bush and North Korea, 2002-2005George W. Bush came to power charging North Korea with a secret, highly enriched uranium (HEU)-based, second track nuclear weapons program in breach of the Agreed Framework of 1994 and denouncing it as part of the Axis of Evil. Pronouncing the regime “evil,” the administration refused to talk to it, consider any form of security guarantee or any phased, step-by-step, reciprocal mode of settlement, or any reference to the principles of the 1994 Framework. It maintained that there was nothing to be discussed but North Korea’s unilateral submission, or CVID (complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantling of its nuclear weapons and materials). Without attempting to resume the full record of the Bush administration’s policy towards North Korea, let me address here primarily two aspects, important as the root of the crisis in relations with North Korea from 2002 to 2005 (highly enriched uranium, or HEU) and 2005-7 (counterfeiting, especially of $100 notes). Like the allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, both were essentially intelligence beat-ups. Inflated to suit a policy of intimidation and regime change, they were just as easily deflated when circumstances changed.Over the following years, many commentators accepted Washington’s story about the HEU deception, but the remarkable fact is that other parties to the Beijing talks remained unconvinced, even after a special US mission with “evidence” was sent around East Asian capitals in 2004. The South Korean Unification Minister told the National Assembly in Seoul in late February 2007 that there was “no information to show that North Korea had a HEU program.” [15] Only years later, when the origins of the crisis had been half-forgotten, was the intelligence about HEU, initially rated “high,” downgraded to “mid”-level,[16] and significant “data gaps,” as they were delicately described, identified. The thin and ambiguous intelligence of November 2002 was that the North had begun “constructing a centrifuge facility” which could be operational by mid-decade. It was blown up to become a fully-fledged program capable of completion by 2003 and producing enough HEU for up to six nukes a year.[17] The State Department’s Christopher Hill in 2007 put it this way: a weapons program would have required “a lot more equipment than we know that they have actually purchased,” and “production techniques that we’re not sure whether they have mastered,” as well as aluminum tubes that might have gone “somewhere else.”[18] The intelligence thus manipulated (or “fixed” in the words of the Downing Street Memo)[19] to suit the political agenda of 2002, they (the Bush administration) “trashed the framework” (in Robert Gallucci’s words).[20] Although most of the world joined the US in blaming North Korea and denouncing it for deception, once the exaggerated US claims were discounted, North Korea responded, admitting at the bilateral meeting in Geneva that it had indeed imported some aluminum materials; the issue seemed no longer difficult to resolve.The HEU issue was only resolved gradually, in a general context of US retreat under mounting, eventually decisive diplomatic pressure. Unable to impose its will in Beijing and unable to rely on the support of any of its partner countries save Japan, in September 2005, having exhausted all possibilities of delay and being fearful of becoming what Jack Pritchard, formerly the State Department’s top North Korea expert, described as “a minority of one … isolated from the mainstream of its four other allies and friends,”[21] and faced an ultimatum from the Chinese chair of the conference to sign or else bear responsibility for their breakdown,[22] the US accepted an agreement, one that was multi-sided but contained essentially the same provisions as those of the Clinton-era Framework – a graduated, step-by-step process leading to North Korean de-nuclearization in exchange for diplomatic and economic normalization. In other words, the US bowed to the will of the Beijing majority. Thus ended phase one of the Bush North Korea policy.Bush and North Korea, 2005-2007However, the “vacillation” and “inconsistency” of US diplomacy,[23] and its inability to “resolve the feuds within its own ranks”[24] were incorrigible. From the day following the September 2005 Beijing agreement, the US government launched financial sanctions designed to bring the Pyongyang regime down. Refusing North Korean overtures for discussion, it launched a campaign to denigrate the North Korean regime as a criminal state. Without resort to military force, it set out to cut North Korea off from the world economically and financially, in yet another effort to bring about regime change.The allegations of counterfeiting, money laundering and drug dealing were central. Under Section 311 of the Patriot Act (2001), the US Treasury is empowered to declare any bank in the world “a primary money-laundering concern,” thereby in effect depriving it of the right to do business, without right of appeal or right to know the reason. A tiny bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA) Asia – 4th smallest (employing only 150 people)[25] of 27 banks in the Chinese special administrative region and gambling Mecca of Macao – was accused of dealing in counterfeit, North Korean-made, hundred dollar notes. From that allegation, banks around the world were put under pressure to refuse any dealings with BDA or North Korea. Failure to comply risked loss of access to the US market. At issue on the surface were suspect deposits of some twenty-odd million dollars, but underlying it was North Korea’s right to engage in any economic transactions of any kind beyond its borders. The US was intent on closing down not just the tiny BDA but North Korea itself.[26] David Asher, the architect of the policy and senior adviser on North Korea matters to the Bush administration, spoke proudly of his success in delivering a “catastrophic blow” or “a direct blow at the fundaments of the North Korean system.” He was describing a policy of strangulation, not regulation.[27]The world was told, and almost universally believed, that North Korea, a country long frozen out of all high technology markets, whose thirty year-old printing presses were apparently unable even to produce its own currency, could nevertheless perform feats of genius in the production of perfect hundred dollar notes. So good are these counterfeit “Supernotes” that the Swiss federal criminal police recently described them as actually superior to the originals. Whoever it was that had such mastery of materials and technology, and the capacity presumably to flood world markets with billions of these Super Dollars, produced only twenty-two million of them over almost two decades.[28] Despite the enormous effort and cost, they produced these high-quality art works in “quantities less than it would cost to acquire the sophisticated machinery needed to make them.”[29] While the US Treasury introduced nineteen different and highly sophisticated refinements in an attempt to outwit the counterfeiters, every one of them was promptly matched. Someone, in other words, was playing a strange game of technological one-upmanship, goading the experts of the US Treasury for no apparent reason other than the inherent satisfaction. Could Kim Jong Il really command a scientific establishment of such astonishing genius, and might he also, perhaps, possess a delicate and hitherto unsuspected sense of humor?But, if not North Korea, then, who? Before blame for the “Super Notes” was sheeted home to the North Koreans, it had been attributed at one time or another to the Iranians, the Syrians, and even the East Germans. However, the German specialist on banknotes, Klaus Bender, makes the pregnant comment that, apart from the US Treasury itself, the printing machines, ink, and other technological refinements were most likely accessible only to the CIA.[30] While North Korea was reviled as a criminal state and singled out for global punishment for putting twenty-odd million dollars of these “Super Hundreds” into circulation, the much larger sum of 38 million counterfeit “ordinary” dollars was seized during the same period in Columbia,[31] and in the single year of 2004-2005 the Israel Discount Bank of New York processed a staggering $35.4 billion for “originators and beneficiaries that exhibited characteristics and patterns commonly associated with money-laundering” (as a Treasury official put it).[32] Yet in neither case were global sanctions imposed, or the Patriot Act invoked. The Wall Street Journal in July 2007 revealed another case, of a Saudi bank suspected by US authorities of financing terrorism but protected by the political consideration of US-Saudi friendship and supposed cooperation in the “War on Terror.”[33] Despite the international furor over North Korea as a criminal, counterfeiting state, when the three agencies of the US Government (Treasury, Federal Reserve, and Secret Service) in 2006 reported jointly on “US currency holdings and counterfeit activity abroad,” neither the DPRK nor Macao was even mentioned.The BDA had been guilty of some infringements in 1994, and possibly 1998, involving the trivial sum of a quarter million dollars in counterfeit currency.[34] When US legal and accounting firms in due course investigated, they did indeed find evidence of lax bookkeeping but of criminal misconduct: none. North Korea’s frozen funds were returned under an agreement on 3 July 2007. The BDA matter, having wrecked the September 2005 agreement, was thus quietly resolved, leaving only the bank’s much aggrieved owner to pursue his case against the US Treasury in the courts. In Article 311 of the Patriot Act, however, the US government had created a powerful financial weapon. While set aside for the time being against North Korea, the administration began to exploit the possibilities thus opened against Iranian, Syrian and Russian companies and banks.[35] Bush and North Korea, 2007By 2007, the Bush administration’s policy shift from “regime change” to negotiated settlement amounted to a 180-degree reversal. The CVID formula of 2003 had morphed by 2007 into something like its opposite: partial, prolonged, unverifiable (any agreement would have to rely, fundamentally, on trust), and reversible (since the experience of producing and testing nuclear weapons could not be expunged). Allegations of North Korean crime that rested on the evidence of defectors and intelligence agencies persisted,[36] but the more carefully and critically the evidence was analyzed the less convincing it became.[37] As for the drug charge, included on the list of accusations by the State Department in 2003, in 2007 North Korea was simply deleted from the list of offending countries (twenty in all), without explanation;[38] whether because the original US intelligence had again been flawed or because North Korea had reformed was impossible to know. The generic denunciation of North Korea as “evil” or as a “soprano state” was simply dropped.Having faced down US denunciation, abuse and threat, having pressed ahead with missile and nuclear tests and ignored the UN Security Council’s two unanimous resolutions of condemnation and its ensuing sanctions, in other words having stuck to its guns, both metaphorically and literally, North Korea in 2007 appears to be on the brink of accomplishing its long term objectives -- security, an end to sanctions, and normalization of relations with both the US and Japan. If so, the much derided and friendless country might be about to pull off one of the greatest diplomatic coups of modern history, converting its 1953 stalemate truce with the US into something tantamount to a victory. But, facing such a historic victory, could it actually bring itself to give up the nuclear card, for which it had paid such a price and which it had already celebrated publicly as a historic event and guarantee of security? Kim Myong Kil, North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN, spoke vividly of such a process as akin to “castrating a bull,”[39] and in truth the analogy could be formulated even more forcefully: the North Korean bull being asked to castrate itself. It is impossible to dismiss the skepticism of John Bolton who writes: “Kim Jong Il’s regime will not voluntarily give up its nuclear weapons program.”[40] Despite that bleak assessment, however, the point of the Beijing agreement was to construct a framework of trust and cooperation in which other “assurances” of security would became unnecessary. Under such conditions, voluntary de-nuclearization just might be possible.It is true that in the short-term Kim Jong Il stands to be “rewarded” by the kind of settlement underway, but the fact is that the greatest beneficiaries are likely to be the long-suffering people of North Korea. War, moreover, periodically given serious consideration by the US, would have brought unimaginable disaster, not only to the people of North Korea but also to the entire region. Where “pressure and sanctions,” as South Korea’s former Unification Minister commented, “tend to reinforce the regime rather than weaken it,”[41] normalization is going to require the leaders of North Korea’s “guerrilla state,”[42] whose legitimacy has long been rooted in their ability to hold powerful and threatening enemies at bay, to respond to the demands of their people for improved living conditions and greater freedoms. 3. The “North Korea Problem” and the “Japan Problem”As for Japan, dependence on the US and hostility to North Korea have been fundamental to national policy for over half a century, and a new and deeper level of subjection to US regional and global purpose was negotiated in 2005-2006.[43] The sudden, February 2007 policy reversal on North Korea under George W. Bush therefore constituted a “Bush shock,” that commentators in Japan likened to the “Nixon shock” over China three and a half decades ago. If the North Korean nuclear issue is now to be resolved, and relations on all sides with North Korea normalized, Japan will be shaken to its foundations. It will have to rethink its post-Cold War diplomatic posture, especially its relationship with China. If peace treaties (US-North Korea, Japan-North Korea) and normalization on all sides were to be negotiated, US Forces would serve no further function in South Korea and Japan (except to contain China, and that case would have to be argued for the populations to accept it) and so might in due course be withdrawn (or sent elsewhere). That would indeed signify a new era. James Kelly (former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State) said in Beijing in late April that Japanese politicians faced a “hard choice” over priorities.[44] Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage suggested that North Korea “might remain in possession of a certain amount of nuclear weapons even as the [Korean] peninsula comes slowly together for some sort of unification,” and that the US might have to “sit-down” with Japan to explain it.[45] If so, nobody in Japan’s government was ready for such a “sitting down.” Where the five other Beijing countries now seek to resolve the nuclear problem and address the legacies of history by implementing the February agreement, in Japan (till September 2007) Abe, who owed his rise to political power in Japan above all to his ability to concentrate national anti-North Korea sentiment over the issue of abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s,[46] took the unique position that abduction concerns were paramount: the abductions, not nuclear weapons, still less resolution of the military and diplomatic divisions of the Korean War and after, constituted “the most important problem our country faces” (sic).[47] Its priority to the abductions and its determination to stick to sanctions and remain aloof from the Six-Party process until satisfied, left Japan on a limb in the context of the Beijing agreement, even as the Abe government’s revisionist and denialist approach to history and its clumsy attempts to evade responsibility for the wartime “Comfort Women” system alienated its closest allies in Washington.[48] Though there were obvious lacunae in the North Korean explanations, Pyongyang had apologized for the abductions and returned to Japan the five it said were the sole survivors and the ashes of those who had died. The international scientific community, through the journal, Nature, had expressed sharp criticisms of the unscientific grounding of the Japanese government’s position. With Bush’s policy shift in Beijing, its North Korea “containment policy,” as the Asahi shimbun described it on 15 February, “falls apart.”[49] Japan was isolated at Beijing because it allowed domestic political considerations to prevail over international ones in framing the North Korean abductions of 1977 to 1982 as a greater problem than nuclear weapons and as a unique North Korean crime against Japan rather than as a universal one of human rights. In any universal human rights frame, Japan itself would become the greatest 20th century perpetrator of abductions, and Koreans, north and south, the greatest victims. No amount of global diplomatic effort under Koizumi and Abe could overcome the problem caused by exclusive focus on Japan’s own victims and the denial of its own abduction responsibility. The Japanese government’s plea of concern for its abducted citizens also did not rest well with its studied neglect of the rights of its citizens abandoned in China, Sakhalin, and elsewhere since the end of the Second World War, its continuing coldness towards those fleeing from political persecution and seeking refuge in Japan, or its cruel policies of the 1950s and 1960s designed to get rid of as many Koreans as possible (with North Korean complicity), recently documented by Tessa Morris-Suzuki.[50] A rift slowly opened between Washington and Tokyo during 2007. Previously unimaginable rumbles of criticism of the Bush administration began to be heard from Tokyo.[51] The Ministers of Defense and of Foreign Affairs, no less, referred to Iraq as a “mistaken” war, without justification, pursued in “childish” manner, and to the US being too “high-handed” in Okinawa. Protesting that it will not be party to any aid to North Korea until the abduction issue is settled, and therefore refusing to shoulder any financial responsibility, the Japanese government was reduced to pleading with the Bush administration to not take steps required under the Beijing agreement such as lifting the terror support label from North Korea. In the sharpest comment of all, the head of the LDP’s Policy Council, Ishihara Nobuteru, denounced US North Korea policy as “appalling” (hidoi) and declared it would be no bad thing for Japan to abandon the Six-Party talks.[52] That way, however, lay absolute and potentially catastrophic isolation. Perhaps the worst Japanese fear is that the US might be in the process of a large-scale shift in its Asia policy, with China gradually coming to replace Japan as its strategic partner. That really would be a Japanese nightmare.4. Conclusion – A New Deal for East AsiaThe reasons for the US reversal can only be surmised, but probably include: North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, the Republican defeat in the mid-term US elections, the deepening catastrophe in Iraq, and perhaps too, in some unquantifiable measure, the success of North Korean overtures of friendship.[53] But, was the US shift strategic and long-term or tactical and likely to be reversed again in the near future? As peace begins to seem possible on the Korean peninsula, the Beijing parties head toward a multi-polar and post-US hegemonic order in Northeast Asia, with the 6-Party conference format likely to be institutionalized in due course as a body for addressing common problems of security, environment, food and energy, the precursor of a future regional community. North Korean nuclear weapons and its distorted, rights denying, family cult centered polity, are indeed serious problems, but they are best seen as symptomatic, parts of larger, primary problems, not capable of resolution in isolation. Looking back at the years of the George W. Bush presidency, especially since September 11, 2001, it is clear that fundamentalism has been a key element - both of Islam (although scarcely a major consideration in Northeast Asia) and of the US, where assumptions of a simple moral order pitting good against evil and god against the devil, and a readiness to destroy the world in order to save it, are deeply rooted in the society, and where under George W. Bush in particular a neo-conservative group, extremists even by conventional US standards, was able to seize power and manipulate the state (and the world) in disastrous and anti-democratic ways. In due course, the failure of the war in the Middle East, the exhaustion of the armed forces, the revolt of the electorate and the rout of the Republican Party in the mid-term elections, combined to shift the balance back in a pragmatic direction, but the underlying, quasi-religious mentality remained strong. [54] The larger issues that constitute the frame within which the North Korean problem has taken shape, and which will somehow have to be addressed as part of its resolution, include:(1) The refusal of their legal and treaty obligations for nuclear disarmament by the global superpowers and the insistence on the part of the US on the prerogative of nuclear threat;(2) The persistence in the US of fundamentalism, unilateralism and militarism, even as its hegemonic position has been seriously weakened by the catastrophe in the Middle East;(3) The persistence in Japan too of a kind of fundamentalism, in the form of neo-nationalism, i.e. the combination of deepening subjection to the US with exaggerated stress on the symbols of nation, denial of war guilt and responsibility, and insistence on national beauty;(4) The reluctance of both the US and Japan (even as the Bush administration scrambles to solve this problem in its remaining span of office) to move beyond the institutions of the Cold War and adjust to the emerging new Northeast Asian order.(5) The obsequious position adopted by America’s allies. The uncritical, unconditional support pledged by Britain’s Blair, Australia’s Howard, and Japan’s Koizumi (later Abe) undoubtedly helped make war on Iraq possible and protracted, and helped prolong and intensify the North Korean crisis.[55]Between the crisis of 2006 and the promise of 2007, the frame of the “North Korea problem,” and of East Asian diplomacy shifted radically, East Asian Confucian realism and humanism displacing Western neo-conservative fundamentalism. Yet the balance of forces remains fragile. Whether North Korea and the US, on the one hand, and North Korea and Japan on the other, can build trust in sufficient measure to outweigh the accumulated half-century (and in the Japanese case a full century) of hostility remains to be seen. If there is a North Korean “lesson” relevant to global crisis points in this record of North Korea in its confrontation with, and looming triumph over, George W. Bush, however, it might be the paradoxical one that it pays to have nuclear weapons and negotiate from a position of strength (unlike Saddam Hussein, or the present leadership of Iran), and that it helps to have no oil (at least no significant and verified deposits), no quarrel with Israel, few Arabs or Muslims, and no involvement (despite the rhetorical excesses of the Bush administration) in any “axis of evil.” Undoubtedly, too, it pays to have neighbors like North Korea’s, who have ruled out any resort to force against it. Despite the apparent progress of 2007, the commitment of the Bush administration to carry forward the radical (Condoleeza) Rice-(Christopher) Hill agenda remains uncertain. Has the president really signed off to normalize relations with one he loathes as much as Kim Jong Il? And even if he has, has he the time left in his lame-duck phase to carry it through? Many within the Bush regime will resist meeting US obligations to lift the terrorist label and end sanctions, let alone “trust” and relate normally to a regime it has hated passionately. As for North Korea, Kim Jong Il will have to deploy all his power and prestige to enforce his commitment to submit the inventory of his nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities, abandon the 50 kilos of plutonium the US estimates it holds,[56] and then dismantle its works. Can he really reverse 50, or even 80, years of guerrilla state mobilization, and persuade his military to accept the goal of becoming the Libya, rather than the Pakistan of East Asia? South Korea faces imminent presidential elections, but seems to offer the prospect of policy continuity irrespective of its outcome. As for Japan, however, North Korea is the concentrated expression of multiple security, diplomatic, and even identity dilemmas. Facing isolation unless it “makes a substantial course correction in its North Korean policy”[57] as the Beijing parties head towards a new, multi-polar and post-US hegemonic order in Northeast Asia, North Korea constitutes for Japan a crucial test. All of these countries stand at a crossroads. The vigorous support of the civil societies of them all, and of the world, will be necessary to ensure the governments concerned do not backtrack and that the promise of February 2007, the best chance the region has ever had to set the troublesome 20th century behind it and advance the 21st century agenda of regional peace, cooperation and prosperity, is borne out in the months ahead.This is a paper delivered to the international conference on “North Korea—Policy, Modernity, Fantasy,” held at the University of Iowa on 19-20 October 2007 and is part of a forthcoming volume of conference papers to be edited by Sonia Ryang. Posted at Japan Focus on October 24, 2007.

Kim Jong Il confronts Bush — and wins

Kim Jong Il confronts Bush — and wins.

A New Page in North-South Korean Relations
Bruce Cumings

The leaders of South and North Korea have met. The meeting had been formally delayed since the summer because of serious flooding in the North – but in fact both sides had to wait six years for this opportunity.The two Korean heads of state met for the first time in June 2000 in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), was supposed to reciprocate by visiting Seoul, but he never did. Now he has succeeded in having a South Korean president visit his capital again.Roh Moo Hyun, president of the Republic of Korea (ROK), agreed because he and his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, ended decades of tit-for-tat protocol in which both sides sought advantage with endless threats and posturing, and began the so-called “sunshine policy”. South Korea, as the 10th-ranking industrial power in the world, has a clear advantage over the North; letting Kim Jong Il think he is in charge is a small price to pay for trying to open up the North. There is political advantage in the summit; Roh, whose popularity is low, can’t win in elections in December and wants to boost the chances of his successor.
Roh Moo Hyun (left) and Kim Jong IlThe DPRK has long fancied itself capable of manipulating the ROK’s politics, and perhaps it has some influence for there is a change in Southern opinion about the North that is part of the policy of reconciliation since 1998. Southerners, used to propaganda depicting the communists as evil sadists, now see them as long-lost cousins ruled by errant (and perhaps nutty) uncles. The summit capped that extraordinary achievement. Roh has also promoted the idea of the Korean peninsula as the hub of a vibrant northeast Asian economy and wants “the era of the Northern economy” as his legacy.But the real basis for the summit lies in the entirely unexpected warming of relations between President George W Bush and Kim Jong Il, manifest in the 13 February agreement on denuclearisation, the origins of which remain murky. Pyongyang celebrated United States Independence Day last year by firing seven missiles, including a long-range Taepodong 2 and several medium-range rockets, and followed that up in October with its first nuclear test. This led to UN sanctions supported for the first time by the DPRK’s old allies, Russia and China (1).
Taepodong 2Bush does not “reward bad behaviour”. He had always rejected direct talks with North Korea and had included the North in his “axis of evil”. Vice-President Dick Cheney said in 2004: “We don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it.” Yet the February agreement was hammered out in secret direct talks between Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan in Beijing and Berlin, and was then presented to the multilateral Six Party Talks (the two Koreas, China, the US, Japan and Russia) on North Korea’s nuclear programme set up two years ago.Back to the futureThe “back to the future” quality of this agreement can be appreciated in the list of achievements: mothballing and dismantling the North’s plutonium reactors, relaxing sanctions and embargoes Washington has had against the North for decades, taking it off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, readmitting UN nuclear inspectors, getting a peace agreement to end the Korean war, and moving toward normalisation of relations.All of these were accomplished or being negotiated when Bush came into office. But the Clinton administration had also worked out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North’s medium and long-range missiles; it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today the North retains all its formidable missile capability. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was amazed in her memoirs that Bush let this deal slide into oblivion, since Pyongyang has no other reliable delivery capability for nuclear weapons. Hardly any influential Americans seem to remember these negotiations, although they were major news at the time.Also inexplicable is how Bush, or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, short-circuited the squabbling inside their administration over how to handle evildoers. On 19 September 2005 the US and the DPRK came to an agreement at the fourth session of the Six Party Talks on principles that paved the way toward denuclearisation (including a US pledge not to attack or invade the North). Yet three days later the Treasury Department, operating under the disputed USA Patriot Act, sanctioned North Korea for its allegedly illegal dealings with the Banco Delta Asia in Macao, cutting it off from the international financial system. It is now clear that the evidence was skimpy and that the sanctions were specifically designed to destroy the September pledges (2).The only illegal activity that the Treasury Department uncovered dated to 1994 and the amounts were tiny, $250m in counterfeit notes that DPRK operatives allegedly deposited in Banco Delta. (Insiders said it was really the North’s entirely legal gold bullion transactions with this obscure bank that were at issue.) Years passed with almost no critical reporting on the matter, and then administration insiders finally admitted that all this was not about law enforcement: dissident officials had gone after North Korea to head off an accommodation between Washington and Pyongyang (3). The Banco Delta problem quietly disappeared when the US agreed to return all the DPRK’s seized deposits with no questions asked and no penalty.A prominent expert, Leon V Sigal, has argued that it takes a while for new administrations, Republican or Democratic, to realise that they have to deal with North Korea, and that with the February agreement, Bush “put the United States firmly back on the road to reconciliation with North Korea”. The key US negotiator, Hill, was similarly optimistic; in August he said that he expects a full declaration of all nuclear weapons and programmes from the North by the end of this year, and full dismantlement of all facilities in 2008. He hinted that Rice might visit Pyongyang soon, and Washington gossip hints at a summit between Bush and Kim Jong Il. If so, it is all to the good. But no administration ever took longer to arrive at such a conclusion.A failed policyUntil the February agreement, Bush had presided over the most asinine Korea policy in history. He sent James Kelly to Pyongyang in October 2002 to accuse the North Koreans of harbouring a second nuclear programme utilising highly-enriched uranium (HEU). Immediately after, Bush broke the precious 1994 Framework Agreement, which had kept the North’s Yongbyon plutonium complex frozen for eight years (4). The North reacted by leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty, taking back the plutonium complex complete with 8,000 fuel rods that had been neutered in concrete casks, manufacturing an unknown number of nuclear weapons – and facing no penalties other than a slap on the wrist.Washington’s inaction in 2002-03 was partly caused by internal conflict over what to do about the DPRK’s provocative steps. Like the current crisis over Iran’s HEU facilities, some officials (especially those in Cheney’s entourage) urged a bombing campaign. Others argued that this would start another Korean war. Bush was focused on making war against Iraq, not the DPRK. So nothing was done except to complain to Seoul that the Bush administration didn’t understand its sunshine policy, thus creating problems with both Koreas.The 1994 agreement said nothing about HEU but most experts thought the North had indeed cheated by dealing with Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. This wasn’t news: the Clinton administration had told the Bush transition team about it in 2000 and suggested that it should be no obstacle to keeping Yongbyun frozen and finishing the missile deal, because HEU is a hard technology to master and would require many years of experimentation before a bomb could be built (5). No one is surprised if North Korea cheats. But the 1994 agreement and the missile deal were based on painstaking verification measures that assured no plutonium bombs and no missile delivery vehicles.The Bush administration sat on the intelligence information that Clinton provided for nearly two years, and then sent Kelly to Pyongyang to confront the North Koreans with it. Yet if American negotiators learned anything in the 1990s, it is that you do not confront the North Koreans. Kelly, who returned to Washington empty-handed. Kelly’s timing was also absurdly provocative: he delivered his message on the heels of Bush’s preemptive strike doctrine, announced in September 2002 and targeted at the “axis of evil.” A few months later came the preventive war against Iraq. Pyongyang reasoned that the US would not have invaded if Saddam had nukes, concluding: "This is not going to happen to us." The Koreans soon found myriad ways of talking about their “nuclear deterrent.” Meanwhile George W. Bush did nothing about the HEU technology imports that he alleged to be a bomb program (why would they need both HEU and plutonium bombs?), or about the staggering ineptitude that fractured the 1994 Framework Agreement—no real penalties, and no plan for ending either program, or about the nukes that the North manufactured after getting their facilities back.We now know that U.S. intelligence on the North’s HEU was no better on than it was on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, but it took five years to find that out. In the immediate aftermath of the February 13th agreement Joseph DeTrani, a longtime intelligence official, informed a Senate committee that intelligence agencies now pegged reports of the North’s HEU weapons program at only “the mid-confidence level,” jargon for information that can be interpreted in various ways, or isn’t fully corroborated. Like Iraq, Pyongyang had also purchased thousands of aluminum tubes: but it turned out that these tubes weren’t strong enough to use in the high-speed rotors necessary for centrifuges. Evidence of these modest purchases had been transformed by Washington analysts into “a significant production capability” in 2002; since that time, however, the U.S. had turned up no evidence of the “large-scale procurements” that would be necessary for an HEU bomb program. Other officials said the degree of the North’s progress toward an HEU program was unknown; they did import some centrifuges from Pakistan—a mere twenty of them, as it turned out, when thousands are needed for production purposes—but no one knew what had happened since: so now the intelligence consensus had turned into “the HEU riddle".A-bomb mysteriesThe bomb that the DPRK detonated last year was made of plutonium, not HEU – it is Bush’s bomb, not Clinton’s. Still, it isn’t easy to say why North Korea chose to test a weapon. It has been 15 years since the North achieved the goal of making the world think that it had atomic weapons. In 1992 the CIA estimated that Pyongyang probably had one or two bombs, and it stuck to that estimate for a decade. The ambiguity about whether they did or didn’t have the bomb strengthened the North’s hand: as with Israel, probable possession of nukes, but no test and no announcement, creates a credible deterrent without putting overwhelming political pressure on other states in the region to follow suit.Why did North Korea end that ambiguity for no obvious gain? It may be that the test was directed more against China, which shut off petroleum exports to the North last September in response to the July missile tests. In that case Pyongyang would have tested to show that it could not be intimidated, and only afterwards agreed to return to the Six Party talks.Nor is it easy to say why Bush decided to make a deal with the North. Clearly the congressional elections last year ended Bush’s hopes of a long-term Republican ascendancy, and turned him into the lamest of lame ducks. His core of support has evaporated at home and abroad: most of the neo-conservatives (Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton) are gone, as are Tony Blair and Abe Shinzo.Yet these explanations are not entirely convincing. In 2003-04 the North Koreans seemed genuinely afraid that the US would attack them. But the US military was soon stretched so thin around the world that the Pentagon could barely spare a handful of combat brigades for the Korean theatre (extant war plans call for half a million US troops there before a victory can be assured). Pyongyang’s strategy was to become a declared nuclear power, suffer through sanctions for the next two years, and then hope to deal with the next US president.Something happened in Washington, as Christopher Hill got a free hand to deal with Pyongyang. The most likely explanation is that the White House decided that Iran was the greater threat: if a deal could be struck with North Korea, that would put pressure on Tehran to negotiate away its nuclear programme. If Bush decided to use force against Iran, North Korea would have to be neutralised or forgotten.These last years, relations between Washington and Seoul have deteriorated drastically. By commission and omission, Bush trampled on the norms of the historic US relationship with Seoul while creating a dangerous situation with Pyongyang. Perhaps the “back to the future” somersault will begin to repair this damage; when the Bush administration returned to Bill Clinton’s strategy of engaging the North, South Korean public opinion against the US began to soften.In South Korea anti-Americanism was never anything like the Middle East’s broad rejection of US power, culture, and values. But since 2001 the US image has deteriorated, especially among the young. Koreans, like many others around the world, were angry about Bush. From being overwhelmingly in favour of the US before Bush, public opinion is now divided: according to the polls 43% do not favour the US, and among Koreans in their 20s only 22% have any kind of favourable opinion (6).Consternation in the SouthThis is the result of Washington’s policies toward the North, and fears for South Korea’s sunshine policy and reconciliation with the North (from which Washington under Bush disassociated itself). The acute danger, which South Korean leaders immediately grasped, was that the Bush doctrine – under which the US may pre-emptively attack regimes it does not like – meant that Seoul would be dragged into a war it didn’t want. Soon after the doctrine became public, a close adviser to Roh told Bush administration officials that if the US attacked the North over South Korean objections, it would destroy the alliance with the South. Leaders in Seoul repeatedly sought assurances from Washington that the North would not be attacked without close consultations or over Seoul’s veto. The Roh administration has not won these assurances. Since the North can destroy Seoul in a matter of hours with 10,000 guns buried in the mountains north of the capital, one can imagine the extreme consternation that the Bush doctrine caused in Seoul.Things are so bad that it now requires a major effort to restore trust and confidence. What the US could do to start afresh would be finally to normalise relations with the North (as it pledged to do in 1994 and again in 2005); guarantee Seoul that it will have a veto over the use of military force against Pyongyang; assure Seoul that the US will not use its forces in Korea in a conflict over Taiwan; and reduce the anachronistic US troop presence in Korea. These steps are not impossible to imagine: the ROK, China and Russia have all urged the US to normalise relations with North Korea, and China gains ever-increasing weight on the peninsula by maintaining good relations with both the North and the South. It is entirely reasonable that the elected leaders of South Korea should have a greater say in whether to go to war on the peninsula than American leaders (except in a far-fetched scenario in which North Korea directly attacked the US), and it is also entirely logical for Seoul to want to remain on the sidelines of any conflict over Taiwan. It is in the American interest to find a better way to deploy its troops in Korea, now in their seventh decade. And perhaps by having an embassy in Pyongyang, Americans would finally gain some leverage over an antagonist that has effectively defied the US for more than sixty years. The past six years have seen an astonishing spectacle in which an American president zig-zagged from gratuitous insults thrown at the North Korean head of state, to charges of new nuclear programs and money-laundering based on flimsy evidence, installing the North as part of an axis of evil and allowing advisors to make open threats of war against it while doing little if anything as the North kicked out UN inspectors, manufactured nuclear weapons, tested both A-bombs and missiles, showing it would not bend to Washington, Beijing or Moscow. Then suddenly both sides climbed down from their polarized positions and embraced Bill Clinton’s decade-old give-and-take diplomacy.North Korea has won and got what it wanted, and what it had suggested in the 1990s: to trade its nuclear programme for aid and normalised ties with the US, a proposition denied and derided in official Washington.The successful diplomacy of the late 1990s was led by Kim Dae Jung, who finally convinced Clinton that Pyongyang would give up its nuclear programme and its missiles in return for a new relationship. The US could have its cake and eat it too, Kim Dae Jung thought, because Pyongyang would not object to the continued stationing of US troops in the South if relations were normalised. He judged that Kim Jong Il was almost as worried about the strength of China and Japan (simultaneously strong for the first time in modern history) as he was about the US, and could be coaxed into new security arrangements within the international system that the US had built in northeast Asia since 1945. Washington could lose an enemy and gain a neutral North Korea – if not a friend or an ally – as a counterbalance against China and a revived Russia, and as a check on Japan’s future course.It is likely that Pyongyang hopes to play the US off against China, much as it did Moscow and Beijing during the cold war. There is no way to know if this new thinking has had an impact on Bush, but it is a logical US strategy for the region in the 21st-century.Bizarre events may well place Bush and “evildoer” Kim Jong Il side by side as peacemakers. If so, all well and good, and better late than never.

NOTES

[1] Russia and China only voted Chapter VII sanctions after making sure that they carried no implication of being backed by military force.
[2] John McGlynn, “Financial Sanctions and North Korea: In Search of the Evidence of Currency Counterfeiting and Money Laundering”, Japan Focus, 10 July 2007, www.japanfocus.org/products/ details/2463
[3] See “How US Turned North Korean Funds into a Bargaining Chip”, The New York Times, 11 April 2007.
[4] Bush and his advisers claimed that the North cheated on this agreement, when in fact the eight-year freeze was never broken. UN inspectors were on the ground every day, and all the facilities were sealed and under constant surveillance.
[5] See Selig Harrison, “Did North Korea Cheat?”, Foreign Affairs, New York, February 2006.
[6] Meredith Woo-Cumings in David I Steinberg, dir, Korean Attitudes Toward the United States, M E Sharpe, 2005; Pew Global Attitudes Project.This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, October, 2007 and at Japan Focus on October 9, 2007.Bruce Cumings teaches in the History Department and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago and is the author of the two volume work The Origins of the Korean War and North Korea: Another Country.

Globalization? Government?

Nuking Iran

Jorge Hirsch is a professor of Physics at the University of California at San Diego. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and an organizer of a recent petition, circulated among leading physicists, opposing the new nuclear weapons policies adopted by the US in the past 5 years. He is a frequent commentator on Iran and nuclear weapons.



Foaad Khosmood: In the April 17 issue of New Yorker Magazine Seymour Hersh has an eye-opening piece that quotes Administration insiders who suggest nuclear war with Iran is a serious option. You had written back in October of 2005 that "The strategic decision by the United States to nuke Iran was probably made long ago." What led you to that conclusion at that time? What do you think of the Hersh piece?

Jorge Hirsch: Of course the Hersh piece is extremely useful in bringing this issue to the forefront of public attention. However already several months ago an analysis of the facts led me to the conviction that a deliberate decision had been made to use nuclear weapons against Iran. First, the US pursuit over several years to get an IAEA resolution against Iran, no matter how weak, which it finally achieved in September 2005. It didn't make any sense as a diplomatic move if the goal was to exert pressure on Iran, in view of the clear dissent by Russia and China. It had two purposes: one was to bring the issue eventually to the UN Security Council, even knowing that Russia and China would veto any action against Iran, so that, just as in the case of Iraq, the US could argue that other countries share its concern but not the resolve to act. But more importantly, the US issued a commitment to the UN in 1995 that it wouldn't use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries signatories of the NPT, which however explicitly excluded countries that are in "non-compliance" with the NPT. So by securing the IAEA resolution of September 2005 of Iran's "non-compliance" the US achieved that it can now use nuclear weapons against Iran "legally", i.e. without violating its 1995 commitment. This explains why it was pushing for it so adamantly.

Furthermore the US has radically changed its nuclear weapons policies since 2001 to erase the sharp line that traditionally existed between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. It now "integrates" both types of weapons in its military strategy, and envisions the use of nuclear weapons against underground facilities, preemptively against countries "intending" to use WMD's against US forces, and "for rapid and favorable war termination on US terms". Several scenarios like that, that apply specifically to the Iran scenario, were made public in 2005 in the Pentagon draft document "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations", to prepare the country for what was being planned.

Furthermore, the administration has been pushing Congress every year to fund new nuclear weapons, "more usable" nuclear weapons, and bunker busting nuclear weapons, to prepare the public mind for the attack. Many are under the mistaken impression that Congress has resisted these efforts, however they forget or don't know that the B61-11, a bunker-buster that can be used against Iranian underground facilities, is in the US arsenal since 2001. Its yield (power) is classified but is likely to include very low yield, to cause "reduced collateral damage" and thus be more "acceptable".

Furthermore, as I pointed out several months ago and is also mentioned by Hersh, the administration is stacked with nuclear weapons experts that are hawks and participated in the formulation of the new nuclear weapons policies: National Security advisor (Hadley), deputy national security advisor (Crouch II), undersecretary of defense for intelligence (Cambone), chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Science Board (Schneider), undersecretary of state for arms control and international security (Joseph) and ambassador to the UN (Bolton). Bolton was appointed in the face of very strong bipartisan opposition. None of these positions require specific nuclear weapons expertise, however these "nuclear warriors" are in high positions for a reason: to advise President Bush to use nuclear weapons. And let's not forget Cheney, who was the architect of new nuclear weapons policies back in 1992 to target non-nuclear-weapon countries, and Rumsfeld who advocates a smaller high tech military where nuclear weapons play an essential role.

It also became clear to me that there is a long-term advantage in the view of advocates of America's "preeminent role in the world" (PNAC) to use nuclear weapons against Iran: to establish the credibility of the US nuclear "deterrent" against non-nuclear countries that pursue courses of action contrary to US interests. The Iran situation lends itself to a scenario where the US use of nuclear weapons will appear to be "inevitable", under the conditions that have been created by the US carefully and methodically over the course of several years for that purpose. Finally, I believe President Bush has embraced the breaking of the 60-year old taboo against the use of nuclear weapons as his personal goal, to be his lasting "legacy" that will overshadow other "accomplishments" of his administration.

FKh: Is a war with Iran now inevitable? Is a nuclear war inevitable?

JH: If there is an aerial bombing of Iran, I believe it is inevitable it will go nuclear. The intention is there, the advisors are there, the nuclear policies and the weapons are there. The excuses to make it "acceptable" to the American public are there. The President has sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, Congress has no say. The chain of command doesn't go through the Joint Chiefs of Staff that may oppose it as Hersh mentions: it goes directly from Bush and Rumsfeld to commanders of the Unified Combatant Commands such as Gen. Abizaid and Gen. Cartwright. Unless those individuals disobey orders, there is no way to stop it.

I believe there is a high probability of war with Iran because key people in the administration desperately want it, but I don't believe it is inevitable. I hope there will be a sufficiently large public outburst of opposition, eg thanks to Hersh's and other's revelations, to make it impossible. The dire situation in Iraq of course is making it more difficult, and I hope there will be strong voices in the administration and influential republicans that will recognize the likely disastrous consequences and oppose it. Or perhaps influential old-timers like Bush Sr. and Scowcroft will be able to dissuade President Bush.

However I believe there is very little time: an attack may well happen within the next 2 weeks, while Congress is in recess. There is no advantage to those that want it to happen in waiting.

FKh: What is the rationale for America using nukes on Iran, given that even the CIA believes Iran is at least "10 years" from any nuclear weapon production?

JH: The use of nuclear weapons against Iran will be justified by "military necessity". In theory, Iran could equip missile warheads with chemical or biological weapons and aim them at Israeli cities or US bases in the area. The declared US policy of "preemption" would "justify" using highly accurate earth penetrating nuclear weapons to destroy missile silos or suspected underground facilities housing WMD's. The argument will be made that a few hundred or thousand Iranian "collateral damage" casualties of low yield earth penetrating nuclear weapons is preferable to potential tens of thousands of US or Israeli casualties from Iranian missiles equipped with WMD warheads. The US accuses Iran of having clandestine chemical and biological weapons facilities, even though it doesn't present proof of such assertions, and despite the fact that Iran is signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention treaties. Furthermore the US has worked very hard over the past 15 years to create the perception that nuclear, biological and chemical weapons are all similar "WMD"'s, to prepare the ground for the US use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon countries. However the scientific fact is, nuclear weapons are million-fold more destructive than all other weapons and in contrast to chemical and biological weapons there is no protection against nuclear weapons.

FKh: What would be the likely impact on the EU3/IAEA/UN negotiation process for Iran? Some of theorized that the Bush Administration is hoping Iran would withdraw from the NPT, like North Korea did, creating an excuse for intervention. What is your view on this?

JH: Just like in the run-up to the Iraq war, I believe there was the hope that Iran would withdraw from the NPT to create conditions to "justify" an aerial attack. Iran would have been justified in withdrawing, since its right as an NPT signatory are clearly being violated. Wisely it has chosen not to do so. North Korea is in the fortunate situation of having a deterrent to US attack, a few nuclear weapons with which it could retaliate if attacked. Iran does not have that recourse.

FKh: Could the threat of using American nuclear weapons be overplayed in order to serve as a "limit" to any Iranian response to a conventional attack/strike? I distinctly recall in the first months of 2003, the Administration leaked that US is prepared to use nuclear weapons in "retaliation" if Saddam decided to use chemical weapons against advancing US troops.

JH: I don't believe the threat of American nuclear weapons use is being overplayed. Iran will respond to a conventional attack with conventional weapons (eg missiles) and will not be deterred by a US nuclear threat from doing so. The US will use nuclear weapons against Iran because certain sectors of the American establishment, that are in power now, believe it is in the long term strategic interest of the US to do so.

FKh: Is Iran's recent show of force in the Persian Gulf through military exercises involving high-speed torpedoes significant to the US establishment?

JH: I don't believe it is. The US can use overwhelming force against Iran, including nuclear weapons, and Iranian military power is relatively insignificant. The US can destroy a large number of Iranian facilities with relatively little risk to US forces. As Gen. Abizaid recently remarked, "If you ever even contemplate our nuclear capability, it should give everybody the clear understanding that there is no power that can match the United States militarily." However no US military power will be able to contain the chaos and asymmetrical warfare that will engulf the region after the US attacks Iran.

FKh: Is there any likelihood of UN Security Council approving any kind of force against Iran? What about Sanctions?

JH: I don't think there is any likelihood the UN Security Council will approve any kind of force nor sanctions against Iran. Iran is well within its rights within the NPT to enrich uranium on an industrial scale. The US does not want Iran to do it even on a research scale, it doesn't want Iran to have even the "knowledge" or "capability" to do so. President Bush openly acknowledged Iran's right (in the March 16 NSS, and also earlier) when he said that this is a "loophole" of the NPT. Well, one party to a treaty cannot simply declare part of a mutually agreed treaty a "loophole", and expect other parties to automatically submit to unilateral modifications of the treaty.

Russia and China recognize that it is Iran's right to enrich uranium, so they will not agree to force or sanctions against Iran, and since both have veto power at the UN Security Council, neither of those courses of action will be approved by the Security Council.

FKh: Can Russia and China be persuaded to back the Bush regime the way IAEA member India was just weeks ago when it voted to report Iran to the UN? It is often mentioned that these countries have economic interests in Iran, but doesn't that mean they could be "bribed" with bigger incentives from the US?

JH: Neither Russia nor China can be persuaded to back the US in this instance. There are no "bigger incentives" that the US could offer to Russia and China, they are backing a legitimate right of Iran, and it is not to their strategic advantage to allow for further expansion of US power in that region. India could indeed be bought off by US incentives like the nuclear deal, because its shortsighted leaders don't recognize that they are committing national suicide by entering into this nuclear deal with the US.

FKh: Does the US Congress pose any barrier to this administration? Some say in an election year, where Republicans could lose control of Congress, risky actions like war -or even riskier "nuclear" war- will not be approved. What do you think?

JH: Congress is unfortunately not posing barriers to the administration in the Iran situation, on the contrary some democrats sound even more hawkish than the administration. This is likely to be in large part due to the very effective work of AIPAC, and the persistent US propaganda over the years that Iran is the "prime sponsor" of terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction and even having ties with Al Qaeda. Those statements have as little proof as the propaganda against Iraq had, yet Congress has accepted them as facts.

I don't believe the prospect of losing control of Congress plays a role in the thinking of the people in the administration that are intent in nuking Iran. They regard this action as being in the long term strategic interest of the United States, they have worked towards this goal for many years, so that short term setbacks like losing control of Congress are not likely to be a deterrent. The invasion of Iraq doesn't make sense in isolation, since it would leave Iran in a much stronger position in the region. The intent was always to attack Iran after invading Iraq, to suppress Iran's rise as a strong regional power that does not conform to US interests.

FKh: Some in Iran's substantial exile community think it best to pressure Iran's government to back off the confrontation. It seems Iranian leadership is backed into a political corner but If Iran suddenly decided to "give in" and stop nuclear production, will that pacify the Bush Administration?

JH: It will not, the nuclear issue is just an excuse. The US has built its case against Iran over many years, see for example the 1998 Rumsfeld report: " Iran is placing extraordinary emphasis on its ballistic missile and WMD development programs.", "Iran has acquired and is seeking major, advanced missile components that can be combined to produce ballistic missiles with sufficient range to strike the United States."; " Iran is developing weapons of mass destruction. It has a nuclear energy and weapons program, which aims to design, develop, and as soon as possible produce nuclear weapons." Those are just assertions, with no backing from reality. In 1993 the CIA estimated that Iran was 8-10 years away from acquiring nuclear weapons, the NIE estimate 12 years later is that it is still 10 years away.

If Iran declared it will stop nuclear production, the US would make other demands: that it opens up all its military facilities to inspections, destroys all its missiles, whatever it takes to get Iran to say "no", and then use that as a reason to attack.

The best assurance that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons is to allow it to have a full civilian nuclear program under IAEA supervision, as allowed by the NPT, including uranium enrichment to 3%, well below weapons-grade uranium at 90%, as many other non-nuclear-weapon countries do. Bombing Iran will drive its nuclear program underground and ensure it will do the utmost to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

FKh: Will the American people really stand for another "Iraq" only 3 years after the previous one?

JH: Unfortunately the American people will not be asked, and neither will Congress. In signing into law the congressional authorization to use force against Iraq in October 2002, the President explicitly stated that even though he appreciated receiving that support he didn't need it, since he has the authority to initiate military action under the War Powers Resolution, and he can also invoke the 2001 Senate Joint Resolution 23 alleging that Iran supports terrorism against the US. First the bombing will start, then the President will address Congress and the public to "explain" the action and ask for support.

FKh: Just last week you wrote in AntiWar.com: "People in the know have to come forward with information that brings the impending attack to the forefront of attention of Congress and the American public and thwarts it." Is the Hersh article what you had in mind?

JH: Yes, the Hersh article is an example of what I had in mind, but it is not enough. People in the know have to come out and reveal detailed plans, for example whether tactical nuclear weapons are already deployed in the Persian Gulf region. This is very likely to be so, and American people have a right to know. Of course revealing classified information is punishable under US law. However it should be remember that the Nuremberg principles (crafted by the US and its allies) established that international law supersedes internal law. The use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and any preparations to that effect, would be illegal and immoral under international law (eg 1996 International Court of Justice opinion, that the US is bound to). General Pace repeatedly warned Iraqis during the 2003 invasion that any use by them of WMD would be "illegal and immoral", and he very recently advised the US military that "It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral".

I am convinced the American people will stand behind and support anybody that has the courage to "break the law" and reveal that the US is about to break the 60-year-old taboo on the use of nuclear weapons, since such an action by the US will cause long term grave damage to America. And I am convinced that if the administration goes through with this plan, those responsible will eventually be brought to justice.

FKh: You have mentioned a threat of Iranian chemical and biological weapons as a justification for invasion. You've even theorized that such an argument may be framed in the context of the Avian Flu pandemic threat to Europe and America. Is the administration really that desperate for a context? And does this not betray that there is no real danger from Iran?

JH: By now there is an international consensus that there is no "imminent threat" from Iranian nuclear weapons. Even those that argue that Iran is intent in developing nuclear weapons acknowledge that Iran would need several years to do so. The Israeli "point of no return argument" has been at times adopted by administration officials (eg Robert Joseph) but is not very convincing. To justify a US attack, that is likely to escalate into large scale military action, an "imminent threat" is needed. The US accuses Iran of having chemical and biological weapons and programs as well as of sponsoring terrorism, and it is natural to expect that some combination of those allegations will be used. E.g. that Iran is about to launch missiles with chemical or biological warheads against US troops in Iraq, or is about to give terrorist groups chemical or biological weapons to be used against America. It is important to note that Executive Order 13292 of 2003 made information on "weapons of mass destruction" and on "defense against international terrorism" classified. The reason for that is so that such allegations would not be subject to public scrutiny prior to the attack.

There are however several reasons that point to the Avian flu pandemic threat as a convenient excuse: 1) It has a natural time element that cannot be postponed, the yearly bird migration season; 2) The bird flu "danger" has been played up by administration officials far beyond what is scientifically justified; 3) Administration officials emphasize the danger of bird flu transmission over long distances by wild birds, even though this is scientifically in doubt; 4) Iran has an advanced biotechnology and biomedical effort, and the US accuses Iran of having a bioweapons program embedded in it. It is natural that Iran would be studying the H5N1 avian flu virus, even the US is deliberately trying to develop dangerous mutations of the virus to learn how to combat them. 5) There are scientists in the US administration and in the US military that have warned about the danger of influenza as a bioweapon.

Of course what I discuss above answers the last part of your question: there is no real danger from Iran, it is all fabricated.

FKh: What will be the likely Iranian response to a conventional air strike? What about a nuclear strike?

JH: Iran is likely to respond to any US attack using its considerable missile arsenal against US forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. Israel may attempt to stay out of the conflict, it is not clear whether Iran would target Israel in a retaliatory strike but it is certainly possible. If the US attack includes nuclear weapons use against Iranian facilities, as I believe is very likely, rather than deterring Iran it will cause a much more violent response. Iranian military forces and militias are likely to storm into southern Iraq and the US may be forced to use nuclear weapons against them, causing large scale casualties and inflaming the Muslim world. There could be popular uprisings in other countries in the region like Pakistan, and of course a Shiite uprising in Iraq against American occupiers.

Finally I would like to discuss the grave consequences to America and the world if the US uses nuclear weapons against Iran. First, the likelihood of terrorist attacks against Americans both on American soil and abroad will be enormously enhanced after these events. And terrorist's attempts to get hold of "loose nukes" and use them against Americans will be enormously incentivized after the US used nuclear weapons against Iran.

Second, it will destroy America's position as the leader of the free world. The rest of the world rightly recognizes that nuclear weapons are qualitatively different from all other weapons, and that there is no sharp distinction between small and large nuclear weapons, or between nuclear weapons targeting facilities versus those targeting armies or civilians. It will not condone the breaking of the nuclear taboo in an unprovoked war of aggression against a non-nuclear country, and the US will become a pariah state.

Third, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will cease to exist, and many of its 182 non-nuclear-weapon-country signatories will strive to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent to an attack by a nuclear nation. With no longer a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, any regional conflict may go nuclear and expand into global nuclear war. Nuclear weapons are million-fold more powerful than any other weapon, and the existing nuclear arsenals can obliterate humanity many times over. In the past, global conflicts terminated when one side prevailed. In the next global conflict we will all be gone before anybody has prevailed.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=10071

THE IRAN PLANS

Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.

There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

One military planner told me that White House criticisms of Iran and the high tempo of planning and clandestine activities amount to a campaign of “coercion” aimed at Iran. “You have to be ready to go, and we’ll see how they respond,” the officer said. “You have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down.” He added, “People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.” (In response to detailed requests for comment, the White House said that it would not comment on military planning but added, “As the President has indicated, we are pursuing a diplomatic solution”; the Defense Department also said that Iran was being dealt with through “diplomatic channels” but wouldn’t elaborate on that; the C.I.A. said that there were “inaccuracies” in this account but would not specify them.)

“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said. The danger, he said, was that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability.” A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: “Hezbollah comes into play,” the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world’s most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. “And here comes Al Qaeda.”
In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re doing the Senate, somewhat selectively.”

The House member said that no one in the meetings “is really objecting” to the talk of war. “The people they’re briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?” (Iran is building facilities underground.) “There’s no pressure from Congress” not to take military action, the House member added. “The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it.” Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.”

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. Natanz, which is no longer under I.A.E.A. safeguards, reportedly has underground floor space to hold fifty thousand centrifuges, and laboratories and workspaces buried approximately seventy-five feet beneath the surface. That number of centrifuges could provide enough enriched uranium for about twenty nuclear warheads a year. (Iran has acknowledged that it initially kept the existence of its enrichment program hidden from I.A.E.A. inspectors, but claims that none of its current activity is barred by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.) The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

There is a Cold War precedent for targeting deep underground bunkers with nuclear weapons. In the early nineteen-eighties, the American intelligence community watched as the Soviet government began digging a huge underground complex outside Moscow. Analysts concluded that the underground facility was designed for “continuity of government”—for the political and military leadership to survive a nuclear war. (There are similar facilities, in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for the American leadership.) The Soviet facility still exists, and much of what the U.S. knows about it remains classified. “The ‘tell’ ”—the giveaway—“was the ventilator shafts, some of which were disguised,” the former senior intelligence official told me. At the time, he said, it was determined that “only nukes” could destroy the bunker. He added that some American intelligence analysts believe that the Russians helped the Iranians design their underground facility. “We see a similarity of design,” specifically in the ventilator shafts, he said.
A former high-level Defense Department official told me that, in his view, even limited bombing would allow the U.S. to “go in there and do enough damage to slow down the nuclear infrastructure—it’s feasible.” The former defense official said, “The Iranians don’t have friends, and we can tell them that, if necessary, we’ll keep knocking back their infrastructure. The United States should act like we’re ready to go.” He added, “We don’t have to knock down all of their air defenses. Our stealth bombers and standoff missiles really work, and we can blow fixed things up. We can do things on the ground, too, but it’s difficult and very dangerous—put bad stuff in ventilator shafts and put them to sleep.”

But those who are familiar with the Soviet bunker, according to the former senior intelligence official, “say ‘No way.’ You’ve got to know what’s underneath—to know which ventilator feeds people, or diesel generators, or which are false. And there’s a lot that we don’t know.” The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—“they’re shouted down.”

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.’ ”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

The chairman of the Defense Science Board is William Schneider, Jr., an Under-Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In January, 2001, as President Bush prepared to take office, Schneider served on an ad-hoc panel on nuclear forces sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. The panel’s report recommended treating tactical nuclear weapons as an essential part of the U.S. arsenal and noted their suitability “for those occasions when the certain and prompt destruction of high priority targets is essential and beyond the promise of conventional weapons.” Several signers of the report are now prominent members of the Bush Administration, including Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. “The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

With or without the nuclear option, the list of targets may inevitably expand. One recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning, told me that he would have vigorously argued against an air attack on Iran, because “Iran is a much tougher target” than Iraq. But, he added, “If you’re going to do any bombing to stop the nukes, you might as well improve your lie across the board. Maybe hit some training camps, and clear up a lot of other problems.”

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.

If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops “are studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,” the consultant said. One goal is to get “eyes on the ground”—quoting a line from “Othello,” he said, “Give me the ocular proof.” The broader aim, the consultant said, is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.

The new mission for the combat troops is a product of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s long-standing interest in expanding the role of the military in covert operations, which was made official policy in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February. Such activities, if conducted by C.I.A. operatives, would need a Presidential Finding and would have to be reported to key members of Congress.

“ ‘Force protection’ is the new buzzword,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon’s position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. “The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran,” he said. “We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want.”

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as “a white coup,” with ominous implications for the West. “Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out,” he said. “We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution.” He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was “To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like.”

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. “Ahmadinejad is not in control,” one European diplomat told me. “Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval.”

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that “allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous.” He added, “The whole internal debate is on which way to go”—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. “God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.”

While almost no one disputes Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there is intense debate over how soon it could get the bomb, and what to do about that. Robert Gallucci, a former government expert on nonproliferation who is now the dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, told me, “Based on what I know, Iran could be eight to ten years away” from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon. Gallucci added, “If they had a covert nuclear program and we could prove it, and we could not stop it by negotiation, diplomacy, or the threat of sanctions, I’d be in favor of taking it out. But if you do it”—bomb Iran—“without being able to show there’s a secret program, you’re in trouble.”

Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told the Knesset last December that “Iran is one to two years away, at the latest, from having enriched uranium. From that point, the completion of their nuclear weapon is simply a technical matter.” In a conversation with me, a senior Israeli intelligence official talked about what he said was Iran’s duplicity: “There are two parallel nuclear programs” inside Iran—the program declared to the I.A.E.A. and a separate operation, run by the military and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials have repeatedly made this argument, but Israel has not produced public evidence to support it. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, “I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it.”

In recent months, the Pakistani government has given the U.S. new access to A. Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb. Khan, who is now living under house arrest in Islamabad, is accused of setting up a black market in nuclear materials; he made at least one clandestine visit to Tehran in the late nineteen-eighties. In the most recent interrogations, Khan has provided information on Iran’s weapons design and its time line for building a bomb. “The picture is of ‘unquestionable danger,’ ” the former senior intelligence official said. (The Pentagon adviser also confirmed that Khan has been “singing like a canary.”) The concern, the former senior official said, is that “Khan has credibility problems. He is suggestible, and he’s telling the neoconservatives what they want to hear”—or what might be useful to Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, who is under pressure to assist Washington in the war on terror.

“I think Khan’s leading us on,” the former intelligence official said. “I don’t know anybody who says, ‘Here’s the smoking gun.’ But lights are beginning to blink. He’s feeding us information on the time line, and targeting information is coming in from our own sources— sensors and the covert teams. The C.I.A., which was so burned by Iraqi W.M.D., is going to the Pentagon and the Vice-President’s office saying, ‘It’s all new stuff.’ People in the Administration are saying, ‘We’ve got enough.’ ”

The Administration’s case against Iran is compromised by its history of promoting false intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In a recent essay on the Foreign Policy Web site, entitled “Fool Me Twice,” Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, “The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war.” He noted several parallels:
The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism.

Cirincione called some of the Administration’s claims about Iran “questionable” or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, “What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this?” The answer, he said, “is in the intelligence community and the I.A.E.A.” (In August, the Washington Post reported that the most recent comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate predicted that Iran was a decade away from being a nuclear power.)

Last year, the Bush Administration briefed I.A.E.A. officials on what it said was new and alarming information about Iran’s weapons program which had been retrieved from an Iranian’s laptop. The new data included more than a thousand pages of technical drawings of weapons systems. The Washington Post reported that there were also designs for a small facility that could be used in the uranium-enrichment process. Leaks about the laptop became the focal point of stories in the Times and elsewhere. The stories were generally careful to note that the materials could have been fabricated, but also quoted senior American officials as saying that they appeared to be legitimate. The headline in the Times’ account read, “RELYING ON COMPUTER, U.S. SEEKS TO PROVE IRAN’S NUCLEAR AIMS.”

I was told in interviews with American and European intelligence officials, however, that the laptop was more suspect and less revelatory than it had been depicted. The Iranian who owned the laptop had initially been recruited by German and American intelligence operatives, working together. The Americans eventually lost interest in him. The Germans kept on, but the Iranian was seized by the Iranian counter-intelligence force. It is not known where he is today. Some family members managed to leave Iran with his laptop and handed it over at a U.S. embassy, apparently in Europe. It was a classic “walk-in.”

A European intelligence official said, “There was some hesitation on our side” about what the materials really proved, “and we are still not convinced.” The drawings were not meticulous, as newspaper accounts suggested, “but had the character of sketches,” the European official said. “It was not a slam-dunk smoking gun.”

The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency’s officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but “nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.’s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. “But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride,” the diplomat said. “The whole issue is America’s risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don’t trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy.”

In Vienna, I was told of an exceedingly testy meeting earlier this year between Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A.’s director-general, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and Robert Joseph, the Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control. Joseph’s message was blunt, one diplomat recalled: “We cannot have a single centrifuge spinning in Iran. Iran is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and our allies, and we will not tolerate it. We want you to give us an understanding that you will not say anything publicly that will undermine us. ”

Joseph’s heavy-handedness was unnecessary, the diplomat said, since the I.A.E.A. already had been inclined to take a hard stand against Iran. “All of the inspectors are angry at being misled by the Iranians, and some think the Iranian leadership are nutcases—one hundred per cent totally certified nuts,” the diplomat said. He added that ElBaradei’s overriding concern is that the Iranian leaders “want confrontation, just like the neocons on the other side”—in Washington. “At the end of the day, it will work only if the United States agrees to talk to the Iranians.”
The central question—whether Iran will be able to proceed with its plans to enrich uranium—is now before the United Nations, with the Russians and the Chinese reluctant to impose sanctions on Tehran. A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, “there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It’s a dead end.”

Another diplomat in Vienna asked me, “Why would the West take the risk of going to war against that kind of target without giving it to the I.A.E.A. to verify? We’re low-cost, and we can create a program that will force Iran to put its cards on the table.” A Western Ambassador in Vienna expressed similar distress at the White House’s dismissal of the I.A.E.A. He said, “If you don’t believe that the I.A.E.A. can establish an inspection system—if you don’t trust them—you can only bomb.”

There is little sympathy for the I.A.E.A. in the Bush Administration or among its European allies. “We’re quite frustrated with the director-general,” the European diplomat told me. “His basic approach has been to describe this as a dispute between two sides with equal weight. It’s not. We’re the good guys! ElBaradei has been pushing the idea of letting Iran have a small nuclear-enrichment program, which is ludicrous. It’s not his job to push ideas that pose a serious proliferation risk.”

The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. “Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change,” a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, “The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don’t have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don’t want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable.”

“The Brits think this is a very bad idea,” Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, told me, “but they’re really worried we’re going to do it.” The European diplomatic adviser acknowledged that the British Foreign Office was aware of war planning in Washington but that, “short of a smoking gun, it’s going to be very difficult to line up the Europeans on Iran.” He said that the British “are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise.”

The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but “to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully run centrifuges” to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran’s essential pragmatism. “The regime acts in its best interests,” he said. Iran’s leaders “take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff,” believing that “the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold.” But, he said, “From what we’ve seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off.”

The diplomat went on, “You never reward bad behavior, and this is not the time to offer concessions. We need to find ways to impose sufficient costs to bring the regime to its senses. It’s going to be a close call, but I think if there is unity in opposition and the price imposed”—in sanctions—“is sufficient, they may back down. It’s too early to give up on the U.N. route.” He added, “If the diplomatic process doesn’t work, there is no military ‘solution.’ There may be a military option, but the impact could be catastrophic.”

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, was George Bush’s most dependable ally in the year leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But he and his party have been racked by a series of financial scandals, and his popularity is at a low point. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said last year that military action against Iran was “inconceivable.” Blair has been more circumspect, saying publicly that one should never take options off the table.

Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. “The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically,” the European intelligence official told me. “He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse.” An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. “Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,” he said. “If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.”

Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. “It’s always the same guys,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “There is a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.”
A key ally with an important voice in the debate is Israel, whose leadership has warned for years that it viewed any attempt by Iran to begin enriching uranium as a point of no return. I was told by several officials that the White House’s interest in preventing an Israeli attack on a Muslim country, which would provoke a backlash across the region, was a factor in its decision to begin the current operational planning. In a speech in Cleveland on March 20th, President Bush depicted Ahmadinejad’s hostility toward Israel as a “serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace.” He added, “I made it clear, I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: “What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?”

Iran, which now produces nearly four million barrels of oil a day, would not have to cut off production to disrupt the world’s oil markets. It could blockade or mine the Strait of Hormuz, the thirty-four-mile-wide passage through which Middle Eastern oil reaches the Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, the recently retired defense official dismissed the strategic consequences of such actions. He told me that the U.S. Navy could keep shipping open by conducting salvage missions and putting mine- sweepers to work. “It’s impossible to block passage,” he said.

The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon also said he believed that the oil problem could be managed, pointing out that the U.S. has enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days. However, those in the oil business I spoke to were less optimistic; one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict.

Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. “They would be at risk,” he said, “and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world.”

Iran could also initiate a wave of terror attacks in Iraq and elsewhere, with the help of Hezbollah. On April 2nd, the Washington Post reported that the planning to counter such attacks “is consuming a lot of time” at U.S. intelligence agencies. “The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years,” the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. “This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us.” (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, “Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.”)

The adviser went on, “If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle.” The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, “the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck.”

“If you attack,” the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, “Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians.”

The diplomat went on, “There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking.” He added, “The window of opportunity is now.”

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