Gavan McCormack and Kim Ha-yong on the Beijing deal
This is really an update to my last post, but I just wanted to point readers toward two excellent recent pieces on the new ‘Beijing deal’ between the US and DPRK. One is by the very reliable Gavan McCormack, whom I’ve featured here before, the other is another regular here: Kim Ha-yong of All Together (only in Korean unfortunately). Interestingly, both of them opt for a similar analysis to the one I made a couple of days ago: that this deal has much to do with Washington’s designs on Iran:
McCormack:
How is such an apparent Washington change of heart to be understood? The fundamental factors would seem to have been the US Republican debacle in the Congressional elections of November 2006 and the continuing catastrophe of Iraq, together with the increasingly sharp focus of the Bush administration’s attention on Iran, and the growing likelihood that the Middle East war would be greatly expanded.
Kim Ha-yong [my translation]:
According to a report in the Washington Post, Dick Cheney’s National Security Advisor, John Hannah recently told a meeting that the Bush administration sees 2007 as the ‘Year of Iran’. This means that an attack is a very real possibility. In this situation, the US does not have the reserves to divert some of its forces to the North Korea problem. This is the reason that it has chosen compromise. But the change in the Bush administration’s North Korea policy should not be exaggerated. The US has not moved from a position of ‘war’ to one of ‘dialogue’ with regard to the North…
I can’t say that I’ve been reading any of the more NL/Juche oriented news sources in South Korea, but I would assume that their position is that it has little to do with Iran and everything to do with plucky North Korea’s standing up to the US.
Well, it obviously has SOMETHING to do with plucky North Korea exploding a nuclear device. Why state this as if you are dismissing it as irrelevant?
Comment by Tony Lawless — February 21, 2007 @ 7:32 am
I’m not dismissing the actions of the DPRK regime as irrelevant, they’ve clearly played a pretty good game. (Was it Cumings who said that they’ve “played a terrible hand fantastically well” while the US has “played a great hand as badly as it could”?)
But the point is strategically important, because the tendency of the Jucheists in South Korea is to focus only on US imperialism on the Korean peninsula and not to recognise that the focus of US imperialism and its weakest point is not Northeast Asia but the Middle East. This then leads them to support uncritically *both* the actions of the DPRK government and the Sunshine Policy of the South Korean government, while tending to let them off the hook on matters such as their (very large) dispatch of troops to Iraq.
To a considerable extent US policy in Korea is being decided by what happens in Middle East and the anti-war movement and breaking South Korean support for US imperialism is therefore of central importance.
Comment by kotaji — February 21, 2007 @ 11:33 am
Speaking of, the two NL teachers are still in Seoul Prison. Education International has images of the infamous posters on its site, together with posters provided by the Chosun Ilbo and the Ministry of Education.
Comment by jay — February 23, 2007 @ 10:24 am
Thanks for the link Jay. It’s really good that EI is taking this up. I almost wonder whether it would be possible to get Amnesty involved in this.
Comment by kotaji — February 23, 2007 @ 12:05 pm