Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Why Is Korea Not Reunified Already?



This is my article in the current EIR explaining why the current crisis in Korea was intentionally created by the Bush and Obama administrations, on behalf of the British Empire's division of the world into warring blocks, East vs.West, which President Trump is threatening to abolish by creating friendships and cooperation with China and Russia -- to the horror of London and their assets on Wall Street, in the press, and in government. If Trump proceeds with joining Xi Jinping's New Silk Road, the Korea problem will be easily solved, as it nearly was twice before through cooperative development, only to be sabotaged by Bush and Obama. 
     To watch my presentation on this subject on the LaRouche PAC weekly webcast, see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzk1s8336aU
                                     Mike Billington
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KOREA CRISIS --
Why Is Korea Not Reunified Already?
by Michael Billington

April 22—There is no legitimate reason why Korea has
not already been reunified, or why there must now be a
festering crisis over North Korea, threatening to spark a
war that would devastate most of Asia and could possibly
provoke a global nuclear war. The overtly British
assets in the White House over the past 16 years—
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama—
intentionally created the crisis, not because of any actions
by North Korea, but in order to provoke
confrontation or even war between the United States
and China, to sustain the British division of the world
into East against West. Likewise, we see the desperate
effort by the British today to stop President Trump’s
intended cooperation with Russia—using British-manufactured
crises in Ukraine and Syria aimed at maintaining
U.S.-Russia antagonism and possible war.

As this article will demonstrate, the foundation for a
peaceful resolution to the Korea conflict—including
ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—was
firmly established in 1994, and was functioning reasonably
well until the Bush-Cheney White House shut it
down unilaterally, based on lies of the sort later made
famous by Tony Blair’s fabrication of Saddam Hussein’s
supposed weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent
steps taken by Russia, China, Japan, and both North
and South Korea, nearly saved the peace process, and
set the pace for a peaceful reunification of the Koreas.
Again, however, Bush, Cheney, and then Obama intervened
to crush that effort, in favor of confrontation and
military build up for war.

The Agreed Framework
North Korea had been a member of the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) since 1985,
but the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA) believed
in the early 1990s that Pyongyang was hiding
some quantity of plutonium (produced at its graphitemoderated
nuclear reactor) from IAEA inspectors. A
back-and-forth took place with the IAEA and the Clinton
Administration, leading to a serious threat from
Washington, then represented by Clinton’s Defense
Secretary William Perry, that a military strike was being
planned to take out the Yongbyon nuclear plant which
produced the plutonium.

Former President Jimmy Carter then made a personal
trip to North Korea and met with Kim Il-sung (the
supreme leader of North Korea from the time of its creation
after World War II), resulting in an agreement to
reach a deal with Washington.

In the resulting “Agreed Framework” of October
1994, North Korea agreed to shut down the 5 megawatt
(MW) plutonium-generating nuclear plant and stop
construction on two others of 50 MW and 200 MW, and
the United States and South Korea would provide a
1,000 MW light-water nuclear reactor that would not
produce weapons-grade plutonium. Oil would be provided
to the North until the new nuclear reactor came
on line. Most important, talks toward normalization of
relations would take place immediately, and the United
States committed to neither use nor threaten to use nuclear
weapons against North Korea while the talks were
underway (the Korean War of the 1950s never officially
ended—an armistice was signed, but never a peace
treaty). Both sides agreed that the Korean Peninsula,
North and South, would remain free of nuclear weapons.
The IAEA would make routine inspections of the
North to confirm compliance.

In 1998, Kim Dae-jung was elected President of
South Korea. He had been a leading opponent of the conservative
governments in Seoul, was imprisoned several
times, and had even been condemned to death at one
point. But circumstances changed, and he was elected.
He moved immediately to implement a “Sunshine
Policy,” opening up relations with North Korea. In 2000,
he made an historic visit to North Korea and met with
supreme leader Kim Jong-il, who had succeeded Kim Ilsung
after his father’s death in 1994, soon after meeting
with Jimmy Carter. Dramatic motion toward peace and
cooperation on the Korean peninsula was nearly assured.
Former Defense Secretary Perry has just written, in
an April 15 article in Politico magazine, that during
Clinton’s second term, he and others were negotiating
a further deal with Pyongyang aimed at a long-term
solution for peace on the peninsula. “With allies in
South Korea and Japan,” Perry wrote, “we discussed a
bargain that offered a highly desirable outcome: normalization
of relations with North Korea in exchange
for its giving up its quest for nuclear weapons. We
were tantalizingly close to an agreement, including a
presidential visit to Pyongyang, when the clock ran out
on Clinton’s term.”

What happened next was one of the most bloodthirsty
and insane acts in history. George Bush’s Secretary
of Defense Colin Powell, who clearly had more
sense than his boss, openly declared on March 6, 2001
that the new Administration intended to “engage with
North Korea to pick up where President Clinton left off.
Some promising elements were left on the table and we
will be examining those elements.” But the very next
day, President Bush—under the influence of his controller,
Vice-President Dick Cheney, and with support
from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s
deputy —snubbed the visiting South Korean
President Kim Dae-jung, announced that there would
be no engagement with “dictator” Kim Jung-il (sound
familiar?), and essentially scrapped the entire Agreed
Framework.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were, of course,
the team of neoconservatives that gave us the war on
Iraq on false pretenses, based on Tony Blair’s lies, unleashing
the destruction of Southwest Asia.

The result of this insanity can be seen today—North
Korea now has an estimated 10-20 nuclear weapons.
This should not be seen as a terrible blunder by the neocons:
It must be seen as their intention. As long as North
Korea could be presented as a threat, the United States’
expansion of military power in a ring around China
could be maintained and expanded. The British imperial
division of the world, East against West, could be
sustained.

Progress Without British/U.S. Support
President Kim Dae-jung was undaunted in his pursuit
of the Sunshine Policy towards North Korea. At
the time, Lyndon LaRouche and representatives of his
movement were meeting regularly with people in and
around Kim Dae-jung’s administration, promoting the
idea initiated by LaRouche in 1992 called the “New
Silk Road.” The concept, following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, was that a series of economic development
corridors connecting Europe and Asia through
high-speed rail lines—passing through Russia and the
Central Asian republics—would create the conditions
for “peace through development,” uniting former adversaries
in mutually beneficial infrastructure and investment
projects. From the beginning of this initiative,
LaRouche identified the New Silk Road as
proceeding from “Pusan to Rotterdam,” noting the importance
of resolving the conflict on the Korean peninsula
through mutual development between North
and South Korea, together with Russia, China and
Japan.

In 2002 this effort nearly achieved success, when
the two Koreas opened the gates dividing North and
South, began clearing the land mines on both sides of
the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and began rebuilding
the severed rail connections between North and
South.

The September 27, 2002 issue of EIR carried an article
by EIR’s Kathy Wolfe, who had been organizing
for LaRouche’s ideas in South Korea, which read:
    "At 11 a.m. on Sept. 18, North and South Korea
cut open the DMZ barbed-wire fences which
have divided them for 50 years, in ground-breaking
ceremonies to rebuild the “Iron Silk Road”—
the trans-Korean rail and road links severed
since the Korean War.
    "In the west, where the Seoul-Pyongyang
Kyongui line is being rebuilt toward China,
South Korean soldiers unlocked the ten-foothigh
fence that runs the 250-kilometer length of
the DMZ, at Dorasan Station in Paju, as thousands
applauded. Simultaneously, 14.2 kilometers
to the north, North Korea opened its fence at
Kaesong Station. On the peninsula’s east coast,
where the Donghae-Wonsan line is being rebuilt
toward Russia’s Vladivostok, North Korean
Prime Minister Hong Song-nam, Railway Minister
Kim Yong-sam, and 3,000 guests cut the
north fence of the DMZ at Onjong-ri at the foot
of Mt. Kumgang (Diamond Mountain). Some 27
km to the south, South Korea opened its east
coast fence in Kosung at the Unification Observatory,
as crowds gazed north toward the revered
Diamond Mountain.
    "At all four points, ceremonies with fireworks
and music exploded. . . . They joined a chorus
singing the emotional “Our Wish Is Unification,”
as a train decked with a unification flag
and flowers rolled slowly toward the fence
where the rails end. . . .
    "In more ceremonies on Sept. 19, construction
began: South and North Korean soldiers simultaneously
entered the DMZ at all four points for
mine-clearing operations. Near Dorasan, 50 soldiers
with live ammunition and 50 engineering
troops followed a German-made mine-sweeper
along the rail lines in a massed procession of
trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, and an ambulance."

The two Kims, from the North and the South, also
set up an industrial complex in the northern city of Kaesong,
near the border; South Korean companies set up
factories with North Korean employees, benefitting
both sides and setting a course for closer cooperation.
They also arranged for family visits; members of families
long separated by the division of the country after
World War II were able to visit each other.
Other stirrings toward peace had taken place just
days before these events, when Japanese Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi travelled to Pyongyang on September
17, 2002, to meet with Kim Jong-il. The two
issued full apologies to each other—Japan for its invasion
and occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, and
North Korea for the abduction of eleven Japanese citizens.
They also agreed to formal diplomatic normalization
talks, to begin in October.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had held
several summits with both Kim Jong-il and Koizumi
leading up to the meeting, offered his full support for
the New Silk Road process.

At the same time, China initiated six-party talks
among the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan, and the
United States. It was hoped that the rail connections linking
South Korea to China and Russia through North
Korea would be up and runnng by the end of 2003,
and that the road to reunification would lie just ahead. It
was not to be.

Subverting the Six-Party Talks
The Bush Administration launched its war against Afghanistan
in 2002 and another against Iraq in 2003.
Over the next fourteen years, Bush and Obama would keep
the United States in a state of permanent warfare, targetting
the three secular nations in Southwest Asia—Iraq,
Libya, and Syria—none of which was Islamist,
while all were firmly anti-terror.
These two Anglophile presidents also sustained the longest
war in United States history, continuing still today,
in Afghanistan.

In his 2002 State of the Union Address, as Japanese
and South Korean leaders were meeting with North
Korean leaders and preparing joint development projects,
George W. Bush pronounced that North Korea was
part of an “Axis of Evil,” together with Iraq and Iran.
As former Secretary of Defense Perry said in the article
quoted above, the North Korean leadership may be
reckless, but it is “not crazy or suicidal.” It would never
use its nuclear weapons offensively, he noted, since it
knows “the American response would bring death to the
leadership and devastation to its country.” To that must
be added that Pyongyang is fully aware of what happened
to both Iraq and Libya, which gave up their nuclear
weapons programs voluntarily, only to then be
bombed mercilessly, their leaders killed, and their countries
left in the hands of warring terrorist factions. North
Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons program
unless it has normalized relations with the United States
and has obtained a non-aggression pledge. This is in fact
what Perry recommends to President Trump.

As in Southwest Asia, so also in East Asia: Bush and
Obama played along with the six-party talks, but found
every excuse to claim—almost always falsely—that
North Korea was cheating. On this false basis, Obama
imposed more and more sanctions while deploying
more and more military forces into the region. Obama
then officially adopted a policy called “strategic patience,”
which really meant refusing all contact, increasing
sanctions every time Pyongyang tested a missile or
nuclear weapon, and “patiently” waiting for either a collapse
of the regime or an excuse to start a war. As with
Bush’s policy, it was an assured failure, by intention,
aimed at justifying the build-up around China.

Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” was the most blatant case
of this fraud. The claim that the Pivot, and his later deployment
of THAAD missile systems to South Korea,
were meant to deter North Korea, fooled neither Beijing
nor Moscow. Under the Pivot policy, Obama deployed
massive U.S. military power in a ring around
China and the Russian Far East, while the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) trade policy was openly aimed at isolating
China and slowing down its increasing dominance
of economic relations in the region. This attempt
at economic isolation was a colossal failure, since
China was at the same time implementing Xi Jinping’s
New Silk Road policy (the Belt and Road Initiative),
bringing real development, not military coercion, to the
nations of the region.

Sad Case of Park Geun-Hye
The other major tragedy brought on by Obama’s role in
Asia was the destruction of President Park Geun-hye’s government
in South Korea. Park is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the leader
who transformed South Korea during his presidency, from 1961-
1979, from one of the poorest nations on Earth after the Korean
war to what is today one of the leading industrial powers. His
daughter Geun-hye was not a strong leader, but she had a vision,
which she called “the Eurasian Vision,” that Korea, together with
Russia and China, would play a key role in the development of the
entire Eurasian continent. In September 2015, she attended the celebration
of victory in World War II in Beijing, standing proudly on the
podium with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Clearly this Eurasian Vision required a peaceful resolution
of the conflict with North Korea, so that the rail
and other connections between South Korea and Russia
and China could be restored. It was also understood that
South Korean technology and skilled North Korean
labor could, together, contribute to the much needed development
of the Russian Far East, to the benefit of all.

In fact, although her government maintained a “no
official contact” policy towards the North, she had allowed
an extraordinary consortium to be established
between Russia, North Korea, and three leading companies
in the South—Hyundai Merchant Marine, a logistics
and container freight company; Posco, the largest
South Korean steel company; and Korail, the Korean
state rail corporation. The consortium sent Russian coal
by rail to a new port structure built in the North Korean
city of Rason, where it was shipped by Hyundai Merchant
Marine to South Korea, then by Korail trains to
Posco steel mills. This was in fact the model for a
system of state-industry cooperation which could have
led to a “peace through development” solution.

Then, in January 2016, after the fourth North Korean
nuclear weapons test (a test that everyone knew would
happen eventually for the reasons given above), President
Park Geun-hye capitulated totally to the Obama
policy. Not only did she order the closure of the consortium
of North Korea, Russia, and the South Korean corporations,
but she even closed the Kaesong Industrial
Complex, which by this time was employing more than
50,000 North Koreans in 123 South Korean companies.
This left virtually no ties between North and South—
political, economic, or social. While the legal removal
of President Park from power through impeachment
was not specifically over this policy, but over corruption
issues internal to South Korea, the impeachment
was nonetheless aided by her obvious failure, and
weakness, in letting Obama’s policies poison Seoul’s
relations with China, Russia, and North Korea, creating
the threat of a war provoked by the United States—a
war that would be devastating to South Korea.

The election to replace Park will be held May 9, creating
the potential for a new approach.

Trump Rejects the Imperial Divide
The Trump campaign made very clear that he intended
to be friends with Russia, much to the horror of
London and the warmongers in both the Democratic
and Republican parties. Although he was critical of
China’s economic policies during the campaign, he has
now established a close relationship with Xi Jinping,
including their personal meeting in Florida in April.
Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airbase on April 6
went against his pledge to end Bush’s and Obama’s
wars of aggression against nations which were no threat
to our own and was a clear violation of international
law. But it was done on the basis of lies provided by
British intelligence, claiming to have proof that the
Assad government was responsible for a chemical
weapon attack—a total absurdity.

Similarly, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson
has been screaming for war against Syria and goading
Trump to prepare for a preemptive attack on North
Korea. Even if North Korea’s nuclear weapons were
destroyed in a first strike, its conventional weapons
could, and likely would, totally destroy the beautiful
city of Seoul, only 35 miles from the well-fortified
border, and other sites in South Korea.

Although it would be an act of lunacy to launch such
an attack on North Korea, and it is highly unlikely that
Trump could be induced to do so, there will be no solution
to the conflict until the British are acknowledged as
the source of the crisis, aiming to prevent President
Trump from carrying out his expressed intention to
bring the United States into a new relationship with
both China and Russia.

The Russian Deputy Permanent Representative to
the UN, Vladimir Safronkov, responded on April 12 to
a typically virulent rant against both Syria and Russia
by the British Permanent Representative Matthew Rycroft,
CBE (Commander of the Order of the British
Empire), in a manner which profoundly located the fundamental
intention of the British Empire:
    “The essence is,” Safronkov said, “and everyone in
the UN knows this very well, is that you are afraid, you
have been losing sleep, over the fact that we might be
working together with the United States, cooperating
with the United States—that is your fear. You are doing
everything to make sure that this kind of cooperation be
undermined.”

Safronkov’s statement is accurate. He is perhaps the
first world leader to identify what Lyndon LaRouche
has identified for more than 50 years: The British will
stop at nothing to prevent the United States from breaking
the imperial divide between West and East and creating
with Russia and China the basis for a new paradigm
based on the common aims of mankind.

Now is the time to make that break, to establish a
new era of mankind based on development, and end the
British Empire once and for all.

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