Asia News Digest
Bush 'Manipulated North Korea Intel,' Just Like in Iraq
U.S. President George W. Bush "manipulated North Korea intelligence as a weapon of mass distraction," wrote Selig Harrison in the just-published January-February 2005 issue of the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs. Harrison reports (more than a year after EIR's Aug. 8, 2003 exposé), from angry U.S. military sources, that Washington manufactured the North Korea crisis and "claimed Pyongyang was on its way to producing weapons-grade uranium, to scare allies Japan and South Korea."
"Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons," he notes.
The intelligence was "manipulated for political purposes," Harrison writes, as a "weapon of mass distraction." The North Korea hand's charge has been front-page news worldwide.
Harrison's article reports charges made in the summer 2003, by Jonathan Pollack at the U.S. Naval War College and reported in EIR, to the effect that the crisis was manufactured to stop an East Asian regional alliance and, Harrison adds, "to keep open the option of 'regime change' as in Iraq."
Harrison, Asia chief at the Center for International Policy, also chairs the Task Force on Korean Policy, a grouping of former senior U.S. military officials, diplomats, and Korean specialists. The Task Force, which includes a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former ambassadors, also on Dec. 10 issued a report calling on the U.S. immediately to back down on its insistence that North Korea come clean on its alleged uranium program. Instead, it should first negotiate the dismantling of Pyongyang's plutonium facilities, it said.
Harrison quotes Pollack's charge that the rapid North-South Korean and Japanese rapprochement alarmed the Bush Administration, which "saw a real possibility that its options on the [Korean] peninsula would increasingly be driven by the policy agendas of others," so that the U.S. showdown in Pyongyang in October 2002 was arranged less than three weeks after Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi's historic September 2002 summit with Kim Jong Il.
"Koizumi did not ask for U.S. permission to go to North Korea, and he refused to call off the trip even after [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage revealed Washington's suspicions about a secret North Korean uranium program," Harrison wrote.
"No concrete evidence of a uranium program has been presented," says Harrison, reporting that the U.S. claim of a uranium capability was based on several failed attempts by Pyongyang to buy enrichment technology, including electrical-frequency converters and tubing for centrifuges.
But "According to Pollack, the CIA report indicated that North Korea had no operational enrichment facility to declare.... Most officials recognized that the path to a meaningful enrichment capability remained a distant and very uncertain possibility." However, "despite its limited knowledge about the uranium program, the U.S. government "opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes." The uranium issue "furnished powerful ammunition to render the Agreed Framework a dead letter"something enormously appealing to hawks in the administration," Harrison writes, quoting Pollack.
Harrison also writes that his claims are based on South Korean and Japanese intelligence sources who collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency on the issue.
State Department Denies Harrison Charges on North Korea
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli dismissed Selig Harrison's claims Dec. 11, that North Korea's uranium program is a manufactured crisis issue. "We think there is a wealth of clear and compelling evidence about North Korea's uranium enrichment program," he said. "We have known since the late 1990s that North Korea was interested in enrichment technology." He said the United States obtained evidence more than two and a half years ago that North Korea was pursuing a covert program to enrich uranium, and assessed it was aimed at making nuclear weaponsthat is, he simply repeated the assertions which have been made by the U.S. side, and never substantiated.
Japanese PM's Support Plunges Over Iraq Troops
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's support plunged to 37% as the public opposed his Dec. 9 decision to extend Japan's troop deployment in Iraq 9. "It appears that the Premier's polls reflect his decision to extend the troop deployment without receiving the understanding of the people," Mainichi News said.
Taiwan's People Seek 'One China'
"Ties with Beijing won the parliamentary elections Dec. 11 on Taiwan," political analyst Wu Chih-chung of Dongwu University told the Dec. 11 New York Times. "It will be much more difficult" for President Chen Shui-bian's program to split China, he said. Chen's increasingly forceful calls in the past two weeks for Taiwanese independence from mainland China have angered the population, who voted against the idea, and now, "tensions between Taiwan and China will be reduced," he said. As reported Dec. 10, Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its coalition partners dropped to 101 seats, while the "one China" Kuomintang Nationalists and their allied parties won 114 seats, increasing their small parliamentary majority.
The Nationalists have vowed to block Chen's independence constitution for the island and other actions that Beijing has labelled as leading to war, especially when trade with the mainland has kept the economy going, and the one-China policy is very popular in the business sector. The Kuomintang-dominated Assembly may now refuse to purchase $18 billion in weapons from the U.S., as Chen had requested. They questioned the size of the program and suggest that such large anti-missile systems won't be needed because relations with Beijing should simply be improved.
President Chen took personal responsibility for the defeat, and Lien Chan, the Nationalists' party chairman, said the vote would make it difficult to proceed with the purchase of the American weapons.
Japan's New Military Focus Turns to China, North Korea
Japan adopted plans Dec. 10 to shift its military focus away from the Cold War Soviet target, toward guarding against missiles from North Korean and Chinese incursions into Japanese naval zones. The new policy cuts tanks and other ground operations by one-third, but increases investment in missiles and forms a squadron of midair refueling planes to allow an attack on North Korean missile sites, if needed.
The guidelines, updated for the first time in nine years, said Japan needed to change to "multi-function, flexible defense capabilities" to deal with new threats such as terrorist and missile attacks. A joint missile-defense system with the United States is envisaged under the new guidelines, which will "advance the military unification of Japan and the United Sates," the Mainichi Shimbun said. If Japan actually does give up the capability for an independent missile system, it will become more heavily controlled by the neo-cons, so this provision has been a topic of hot debate.
The plan also will raise hackles in Asia with its call for selectively ending a longstanding ban on arms exports. To develop a missile-defense system with Washington, Japan would have to export components to the United States.
"The so-called 'China threat,' is completely baseless and irresponsible," said Zhang Qiyue, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, in a statement Dec. 10. "China expresses strong dissatisfaction with this, and hopes Japan will do more to improve mutual trust and the healthy and stable development of bilateral ties."
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