TOKYO, October 4, 2006(CBS) I’m Barry Petersen with this Letter from Asia.
China was the one country that was once thought to have real
influence on North Korea. But over the last few years, that perception
has slowly eroded. Especially after Chinese diplomacy couldn’t stop a
North Korea missile test July forth.
With America distracted in Iraq, it’s been a busy few years for
North Korea’s leader. After Kim Jong Il cheated on a treaty and the
Bush administration cut off aide, he reached for his high card…his
nuclear weapons program.
Inspectors were tossed out…the site once in plain site is now
dispersed and hidden. And President Bush made it personal, including
North Korea in his Axis of Evil.
Professor Kenneth Quinones is an American teaching in Japan. He was
the first US diplomat to visit North Korea. He wonders how the US will
deal with a nuclear North.
“I think right now we are quickly seeing in North Asia a movement
towards the worst case scenario, a slippery slope,” Quinones says. “The
decision is now being considered in Washington DC…do you stop that
through military force or do you give diplomacy another effort. If the
decision is military force I think we will see the entire situation
blow up, literally in our faces.”
North Korea holds South Korea hostage…if attacked, the North could
rain hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and missiles pretty much
destroying Seoul…killing millions. And despite publicly supporting
talks on North Korea, Quinones says the Bush Administration was
privately more interested in an Iraq-style regime change for North
Korea.
“My personal experience was to see earnest diplomats on both sides,
the US and the North Korean side, attempt to first of all reopen
channels of communication and then to develop potential solutions so
they could go back to the negotiating table,” explains Quinones.
“However, now every time they made progress, I also saw individuals in
the Bush administration take steps that simply pulled the rug out form
under that progress.”
Quinones says some use the failure they engineered to push a
hard-line approach. “What we have now are the so called hardliners, the
individuals who claim, ah diplomacy has failed therefore not it is time
to first tighten the economic screws and if that fails we go to the
next step, the military option. This is the first time in many, many
years I am this pessimistic.”
Differing sides may have different views of how we got here. What
no one seems to have, diplomats or the American President, is anything
resembling a plan…and every day, North Korea is building it nuclear
bombs and developing a long-range missile with one target in mind…the
United States.