U.S.
Neo-Cons Call For Japanese Nukes, Regime Change
By Jim Lobe
12 October, 2006
Inter Press
Service
WASHINGTON, Oct 11 (IPS) - Encouraging Japan to build
nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret
sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of
policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neo-conservatives in the
wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.
Writing in publications from
National Review Online (NRO) to the New York Times, neo-conservatives
claim, contrary to the lessons drawn by "realist" and other
critics of the George W. Bush administration, that Monday's test vindicates
their long-held view that negotiations with "rogue" states
like North Korea are useless and that "regime change" -- by
military means, if necessary -- is the only answer.
"With our intelligence
on North Korea so uneven, the doctrine of pre-emption must return to
the fore," wrote Dan Blumenthal, an Asia specialist at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) who worked for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
during Bush's first term, in the NRO Tuesday. "Any talk of renewed
six-party talks [involving China, Japan, Russia, the U.S. and the two
Koreas] must be resisted."
The North Korean test "has
stripped any plausibility to arguments that engaging dictators works,"
according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist at AEI, who added
that the Bush administration now faces a "watershed" in its
relations with other states that have defied Washington in recent years.
"This crisis is not
just about North Korea, but about Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba as
well," according to Rubin. "Bush now has two choices: to respond
forcefully and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm that defiance
pays and that international will is illusionary.
"...(He) must now choose
whether his legacy will be one of inaction or leadership, Chamberlain
or Churchill," he added in a reference to the pre-World War II
debate between the "appeasement" of British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of his successor, Winston Churchill.
The neo-conservatives, whose
influence on the Bush administration has generally been on the wane
since late 2003 when it became clear that the Iraq war that they had
done so much to champion was going badly, nonetheless retain some clout,
particularly through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon
chief Rumsfeld.
They are opposed by the "realists"
who are concentrated in the State Department and also include former
secretary of state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard Armacost;
and a number of top national security officials in the administration
of former President George H.W. Bush, such as former national security
adviser Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state James Baker, who just
last weekend publicly called for Washington to directly engage its "enemies",
including North Korea, Syria and Iran.
That stance is anathema to
the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies, such as Cheney, who,
at one national security council meeting on North Korea several years
ago, was reported to have said, "We don't negotiate with evil;
we defeat it."
The neo-conservatives' main
area of concern has historically been the Middle East -- indeed, their
central focus in recent months has been publicising the threats to the
U.S. and Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and opposing any
realist appeals to engage Tehran and Damascus in direct talks. But they
have also been warning for some time against "the appeasement"
of North Korea and its chief source of material aid and support, China.
In their view, Beijing has
always had the power to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms
programmes, and the fact that it has not done so demonstrates that China
sees itself as a "strategic rival" of Washington, a phrase
much favoured by administration hawks during Bush's first year in office.
Indeed, in the most prominent
neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test to date, former Bush
speechwriter David Frum called in a column published by the New York
Times for the administration to take a series of measures designed to
"punish China" for its failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.
Among them, Frum, who is
also based at AEI and is sometimes credited with inventing the phrase
"axis of evil", in which North Korea, Iran, and Iraq were
lumped together, for Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, urged the
administration to cut off all humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure
South Korea to do the same, and thus force China to "shoulder the
cost of helping to avert" North Korea's economic collapse.
Frum, who is also based at
AEI, urged that Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore
to be invited to join NATO and that Taiwan, which China regards as a
renegade province, to send observers to NATO meetings.
Frum, who in 2003 co-authored
"An End to Evil" with former Defence Policy Board chairman,
also suggested that Washington "encourage Japan to renounce the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and create its own nuclear deterrent."
"A nuclear Japan is
the thing China and North Korea dread most (after, perhaps, a nuclear
South Korea or Taiwan)," he asserted.
"Not only would the
nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China and North Korea,"
he wrote, "but it would also go far to meet our goal of dissuading
Iran (from trying to obtain a nuclear weapons)... The analogue for Iran,
of course, would be the threat of American aid to improve Israel's capacity
to hit targets with nuclear weapons," according to Frum.
Other neo-conservatives echoed
Blumenthal's position that the Six-Party Talks should be abandoned and
called for the administration to resist any further appeals for bilateral
talks between Washington and Pyongyang -- repeatedly made by China,
South Korea, and Russia, as well as by realists here, over the past
several years.
"There will be renewed
calls for bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang. That would
be a mistake." according to the lead editorial in the neo-conservative
Wall Street Journal, which also urged the U.S. to "make clear that
a military response is not off the table."
Other commentators called
for strong efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins, senior fellow
at the American Foreign Policy Council, called for covert action, including
"sabotage, espionage, information operations, subversion, deception
-- the works. A highly paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim (Jong Il's)
will be highly susceptible to these methods," he predicted.
At the same time, former
House Speaker and DPB member Newt Gingrich, who is also based at AEI,
said he favoured continuing shipments of U.S. food aid but through a
covert delivery system "consciously designed to undermine the dictatorship".
"Food might be parachuted
into the country, delivered from submarines and small boats by clandestine
services, shipped in from China and Russia through anti-regime middlemen
and delivered in every way possible to divert energy and authority away
from the government and toward an alternative organising system of individuals
dedicated to a better more prosperous life," he wrote.
Like his fellow-neo-conservatives,
Frank Gaffney, the president of the Centre for Security Policy, called
for accelerated development and deployment of Washington's embryonic
but extraordinarily costly missile defence system, including a ship-launched
system that can shoot down ballistic missiles of various ranges "whether
launched from places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off our
coasts."
He also urged Washington
to resume periodic underground nuclear tests of its own, ending a moratorium
on such testing announced by former President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter
Press Service
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