American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader with a Foreword by Diane Duston; Edited and with an Afterword by Nat Parry by Robert Parry

Author:Robert Parry [Parry, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Deeper Into the Big Muddy (Oct. 27, 2002)

Originally published at Consortium News

On the campaign trail this fall, George W. Bush has been selling his hardline foreign policy as a strategy for protecting Americans. But the opposite now appears to be true: Bush’s tough-guy rhetoric in the face of complex world problems is adding to the dangers confronting Americans.

The latest episode of Bush’s unintended consequences is North Korea’s admission that it is pressing ahead to build nuclear weapons.

Bush’s supporters have tried to shift the blame for this unsettling development to President Clinton, by claiming that a 1994 agreement to stop North Korea’s nuclear program was too weak. But the evidence now is that North Korea cast aside that agreement this year and sped up its quest for nuclear weapons in direct reaction to Bush’s threats and rhetoric.

The collision course with North Korea was set early in the Bush administration. In 2001, shortly after taking office, Bush cut off talks with North Korea and snubbed South Korea’s President Kim Dae-Jung over his détente strategy. Kim Dae-Jung, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, found himself humiliated during a state visit to Washington.

After the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Bush began counting North Korea as part of his “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and Iran. Apparently, Bush’s reasoning for putting North Korea into the “axis” was to avoid fingering only Islamic countries. So his speechwriters added North Korea as a kind of politically correct multiculturalism in reverse.

More substantively, in late 2001, Bush sent to Congress a “nuclear posture review,” which laid out future U.S. strategy for deploying nuclear weapons. Leaked early this year, the so-called NPR put North Korea on a list of potential targets for U.S. nuclear weapons. In doing that, Bush reversed President Clinton’s commitment against targeting non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons. Clinton’s idea was that a U.S. promise not to fire nuclear weapons at non-nuclear states would reduce their incentives for joining the nuclear club.

But to Bush’s advisers, Clinton’s strategy was simply more “appeasement.” So Bush showed his toughness by aiming nuclear missiles at North Korea and other enemy states. As part of the nuclear review, the Bush administration also discussed lowering the threshold for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons by making low-yield tactical nukes available for some battlefield situations.

All of this may have played well with Bush’s conservative base and many of his neoconservative geopolitical enthusiasts. But North Korea’s famously paranoid communist government went, as they say, ballistic.

‘Strong Countermeasures’

Last March, Pyongyang signaled what would come next. The North Korean government warned of “strong countermeasures” against Bush’s nuclear policy shifts. North Korea accused the Bush administration of “an inhuman plan to spark a global nuclear arms race” and vowed that it would “not remain a passive onlooker” after being included in the Pentagon’s list of prospective nuclear targets.

A commentary, issued by the official Korean Central News Agency, cited the threat from the Bush administration in the context of the U.S. nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

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