NORTH KOREA WON’T SPONSOR TERRORISM
by Fred Edwards
Oct. 24, 2008

The axis of evil lost a charter member Oct. 11 when the United States scratched North Korea off the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring states. But the State Department’s verification expert had nothing to do with it. In fact less than two days before the agreement was announced, Paula DeSutter, the department’s assistant secretary for the Bureau of Verification, Compliance and Implementation, said she had “no clue” about it. Looks like the administration bypassed its own expert. So what happened?

Officials from North Korea promised to let international inspectors return to North Korea’s declared nuclear sites — which the International Atomic Energy Agency has inspected over and over again. They even pledged to allow the IAEA to look anywhere else by “mutual consent.” In other words, if the North Koreans are producing nuclear materials elsewhere, they simply don’t have to consent to an inspection.

The Bush administration apparently trusts this regime, but should we? Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, for one, says absolutely not. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, wrote: “North Korea has never kept an agreement that it has signed. Never in history. As a guy who has spent hundreds of hours across the negotiating table from them, who has traveled to Pyongyang, and who has been on Fox News as a commentator on NK, I believe we look at North Korea wrong.” Referring to a piece he wrote for the September-October 2005 issue of Military Review, titled “10 Misperceptions about North Korea,” he said the article applies as much today as it did the day it was published. The following is a compendium from the article.

First, North Korea is not run by a government. It’s run by a dictator (Kim Il Sung, who likes to be called “Dear Leader”), his family and his close personal friends. Do not expect North Korea to change, because the survival of regimes like this depends upon the dictator’s unwavering control of the population, coupled with rewards for the elite.

Next, the notion that North Korea’s economy has failed, and that it cannot conduct a war against the south is in error. The economy is being held hostage by Kim, who uses the people to produce luxuries for the ruling elite. He counts on international aid to keep his Army and elites well-fed and to help the people survive. In 2004, for example, the economy produced about $1 billion in hard cash. Much of it went to the army, while the elite spent $100 million of it on luxury automobiles, imported liquors, and expensive china. Dunn adds that the regime also gets hard cash from “sale of illicit drugs, counterfeiting, ROK bribery, resale of international aid, remittances from abroad, and the sale of military equipment.”

Meanwhile, the military buildup consists of “production lines running to produce tanks, artillery, aircraft, subs, surface ships, and missiles,” writes Dunn. Additionally, he states that North Korea has concentrated on “low-tech” ways to defeat the ROK-U.S. forces, including “100,000 special operations forces troops, mini-subs, ballistic missiles, and chemical and biological weapons.” But why does North Korea keep dithering about nuclear weapons? Because it has never renounced its objective of uniting the Korean peninsula under its rule, and it considers nuclear weapons to be a non-negotiable part of its war making arsenal. Finally, Dunn asserts that time is not on our side because “North Korea can spread weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to a receptive world.” He adds that, “in 1990 we predicted North Korea would collapse by 1995,” and we were wrong.

Do not count on random events happening in North Korea because the regime maintains tight control. It holds military rehearsals before major provocations. It negotiates as part of an information operations strategy designed to turn ROK public opinion toward North Korea and away from its alliance with the United States. And its negotiators arrive at meetings loaded with papers containing detailed talking points. By all indications, states Dunn, every important action must be approved from the top.

Dunn also debunks the myth that North Korea is a closed society, and that we do not know what its leaders are thinking. North Korea continuously spreads its Communist message to the people. Furthermore, it often announces its plans in “coded” language. In addition, the leaders clearly demonstrate what they think about U.S. and ROK leaders by the nouns used in their news announcements, such as “bastards, cannibals, criminals, stooges, militants, and puppets,” and the adjectives such as “imperialist, babbling, fascist, murderous, war mongering, colonial, and perfidious.”

Just before U.S. officials announced that North Korea was going off the terror list, the regime’s media published the first photographs of the “Dear Leader” released since rumors circulated that he had been taken ill. He was smiling.

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The content of Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review may be copied or retransmitted for information purposes, but may not be used for any commercial purpose without my written permission. Please credit the source as “Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review” at www.milmat.net by Fred Edwards.
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Fred Edwards is a military columnist and journalist. He has contributed articles to more than two dozen periodicals and has written six books. His most recent are The Buffie Brigade and The Bridges of Vietnam: From the Journals of a U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer.

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