03/27/15 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey guys, how's it going?
Welcome back.
Alright, our guest today is our old friend John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, Institute for Policy Studies.
And then here he is at the Loeb Log.
I lost the damn tab here.
The article is about Iran and North Korea.
And the talks.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Good, thanks for having me on the show.
Very happy to have you back here.
Here it is, I found it.
Iran, North Korea, and the Congress that says no.
And yeah, I hate Congress too, they suck.
I guess it would be better to have them and no president to carry out their will.
If that was my choice, I'd settle.
But anyway, in this case you're talking about various presidents.
First of all, Bill Clinton back in the 90s and now Obama.
Trying to come to some sort of nuclear compromise in the cases of North Korea and Iran.
And how the Congress just will do everything that they can to screw these things up.
So you know me, I love talking about this agreed framework and how it came together and how it all fell apart.
Because I think it's such an instructive story.
So could you please tell us about the agreed framework deal that Bill Clinton made with the North Koreans back in 1994.
The context and what the deal was.
Sure.
Well folks might remember, if they're old enough I guess, that we almost went to war with North Korea in 1994.
North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the spring of that year.
And the conflict escalated as the United States tried to find a variety of different methods of persuading North Korea to return to the NPP.
The United States along with other members of the international community.
And it got to a point where it really looked as if the Clinton administration was very seriously considering a military attack on North Korea.
In order to take out its nuclear capability or its burgeoning nuclear capability.
And then right before any conflict broke out, former President Jimmy Carter, more or less on his own initiative.
The Clinton administration was not enthusiastic about his trip.
Decided to go to North Korea, sit down with the North Korean leader at that time, Kim Il-sung.
And out of that meeting came the kind of germ of a compromise.
So Jimmy managed to get this compromise.
And the compromise was relatively simple.
It acknowledged the fact that North Korea was desperate for energy and wanted energy.
And saw nuclear energy as a kind of solution to its problem of electricity.
So instead of a nuclear program or at least a program that could easily produce a nuclear weapon, there was a substitute.
And this is the kind of the basis of the agreed framework.
The United States agreed to provide North Korea with two light water nuclear reactors.
In other words, reactors that did not produce the kind of uranium or plutonium rather.
Plutonium that could be easily turned into a plutonium device.
As well as heavy fuel oil that could be used as well in the interim period.
Between the time that it took the international community to actually build these light water reactors.
And in exchange, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear weapon development program.
Now the Clinton administration basically brought that to Congress.
And Congress was not all that happy over the summer of 1994.
It was very skeptical about negotiating with North Korea in the first place.
And much of the negotiations that were taking place were not particularly transparent as these negotiations tend to be.
I mean it's just diplomats who are trying to hammer something out in a closed environment.
Now the problem was of course that the congressional complexion shall we say changed in 1994.
Both houses of Congress became Republican.
And the Republicans had even greater skepticism about this entire process.
And when they looked at this agreed framework, they were not happy with it.
And the Clinton administration said, well look, I know you're not happy that we're giving this country and adversary of ours these nuclear reactors.
But you have to understand that this is a compromise.
And it's better than their developing a nuclear weapon.
And, and they said this rather quietly, you probably don't have to worry too much about this.
Because North Korea will probably not be around by the time these reactors are actually built.
So that was the agreed framework.
And Donald Rumsfeld's company got the contract to build those light water reactors.
And they got the money whether they ever delivered the reactors or not, right?
That's correct.
And now the lead for the construction, although there were American companies involved, the lead player was South Korea.
They were the people that brought in the personnel to build it, try to build it.
And they provided much of the resources.
The lion's share of the money came from South Korea, not the United States.
The U.S. Congress did, however, appropriate some money for the construction of the reactors as well as the money for that fuel oil.
Another component of the deal was that both sides would work toward economic and political normalization.
In other words, eventually, as part of this rapprochement, the United States would recognize North Korea diplomatically and lift eventually economic sanctions.
But that never happened.
I mean, in part because Congress was very skeptical about the entire arrangement.
Congress made it more difficult even to supply the heavy fuel oil.
There was a great deal of mistrust on both sides.
Eventually, North Korea made a tactical decision to pursue a different path for the bomb secretly, uranium enrichment.
And the whole deal eventually fell apart by 2002.
All right, now hold it right there because there are some things I want to go over there.
First of all, as far as congressional opposition, what's the big deal?
I mean, I'm a libertarian.
I'm not for anybody getting any kind of welfare.
But if we're talking about America paying a little bit of welfare and fuel oil and subsidizing some light water reactors to keep the North Koreans inside the NPT, what the hell could be wrong with that?
Even if you're a Republican and you hate things that are true and reasonable?
Well, I think animating much of the Republican opposition was a pretty simple postulate.
And it was phrased later by Dick Cheney.
And that is you don't negotiate evil with evil.
You defeat evil.
And so their operating assumption was we shouldn't be negotiating with North Korea at all, much less giving them anything.
We shouldn't be giving them heavy fuel oil.
We shouldn't be giving them nuclear reactors.
We should be seeking regime change.
And so the idea of coming up with any kind of agreement with this country that would, in essence, extend the life expectancy of the regime in Pyongyang was anathema.
So, in other words, they bought the, I guess, the CIA or whoever's estimate that North Korea will fall pretty soon.
And then just based on that prediction of a possible future, they decided they wouldn't want to go the extra mile to keep them in the NPT.
Basically.
And now, to be fair, North Korea didn't look like it was in particularly good shape circa 1994, 1995.
Shortly after the agreed framework was negotiated, Kim Il-sung died.
And he'd been the only leader that North Korea had had since 1945.
And the second thing was that the country was experiencing a pretty severe food crisis and economic crisis more generally.
So the expectations that North Korea would collapse were quite popular at the time, either as a result of a leadership crisis, result of the economic crisis, or simply because, you know, when people were looking at Eastern Europe and they saw the example of all these communist countries, they're collapsing.
They just expected North Korea would fall.
Right.
Man, these segments go so fast.
I'm sorry I've got to stop you here, John.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great John Pfeffer, writing this time at lobeblog.com.
Jim Loeb's great blog, Iran, North Korea, and the Congress that says no.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Jon Pfeffer, writing that Loeb blog here.
Iran, North Korea, and the Congress that says no.
So we're talking about the deal that Bill Clinton struck with the North Koreans back in 1994, the agreed framework.
We'll give you fuel, oil, and money, and light water reactors, if you'll promise, which can't be used to make nuclear weapons, to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
If you promise to leave off your Soviet-era reactors that do, in fact, produce weapons-grade plutonium.
And how the deal fell apart, and this is one thing I wanted to get a point of clarification on.
I know we've been over this, but now I forget.
You just said, and you say in the article here, that the North Koreans went ahead and embarked on a second track to a bomb, and that was a secret uranium enrichment program.
Now I know that the Bush administration, when they broke the agreed framework deal, they claimed that the North Koreans had broken it and that they had admitted to it at a dinner party or cocktail party or something.
The North Korean ambassador, apropos nothing, said, oh yeah, by the way, we're in violation of the NPT and we're secretly enriching uranium for a bomb.
And they said, oh yeah, well, we're going to put all these sanctions on you, and we're going to create the proliferation security initiative, and we're going to renounce the deal and claim that you broke it.
And yet, I never knew of a reason to believe that that was true.
What's his name?
Cerencioni from the Ploughshares Fund says, oh, trust me, I know the guy that he said it to, and he really said it.
And I know that North Korea has a uranium enrichment program now, but what reason do you have to believe that that's actually correct, that they had a secret uranium enrichment program back in 2002, John?
Well, apparently, and I haven't verified this with my own eyes, I simply have gone by the statements of experts who have examined the evidence, that the Clinton administration had evidence as early as 1998 that there was a secret enrichment program going on in North Korea.
In other words, prior even to the admission by the North Korean diplomat.
Now, how developed was this program?
That's hard to say, probably wasn't that well developed.
It was probably something the North Koreans were using as an insurance policy.
And it was certainly possible when the Bush administration came into office that they could have negotiated on this issue as well.
Right.
To maintain the agreed framework and perhaps even to make it more comprehensive.
Right.
Yeah, that's an important point, that even if they were in violation of the deal, that didn't mean that we had to just go ahead and break the deal and shove it in their face and force them out of the nonproliferation treaty, because basically what they did was just beat them over the head with sanctions until they finally renounced the treaty and started making nukes.
And as we know, they've done three nuclear tests.
And I don't know about the third one, but the first two supposedly were plutonium attempted implosion bombs, not uranium.
And a uranium nuke, a simple gun type nuke is much easier to set off.
They could have had a very successful nuclear test.
It seems like if they had enough weapons grade uranium to build a gun type nuke, but they keep trying to implode plutonium bombs and they keep fizzling out.
Yeah, I think the reason probably is because the amount of plutonium they have, you know, it requires a certain amount.
And if you use it all up and you frankly have no deterrent in any shape, size or form.
So my guess is that they just don't have sufficient amounts of enriched uranium to test.
Whereas ever since they started up their plutonium program again, and remember, there was an option about midway through the Bush administration to effectively roll back that plutonium program.
But unfortunately, that too fell victim to politics and North Korea started up again.
So my guess is that they have enough plutonium to warrant the use of that.
And yeah, and that's an important point, right?
That it was Christopher Hill, right?
Convince Bush to ignore Cheney and let him go over there and make a new deal in what, 2007 or 2006?
And then how did that one get screwed up again?
Well, that's complicated.
And perhaps we want to segue.
I don't know how much time we have.
Oh, yeah.
No, go ahead.
We can talk about Iran instead.
Yeah.
Anyway, the point being that the North Koreans have nukes now because of the complete and total failures of American diplomacy here, and especially because of congressional obstruction, I think is the point you're getting to.
That's correct.
And, you know, we have this kind of deja vu happening again, in the sense that we have an administration that's committed to making some kind of a deal with Iran, a strong deal, not a concessionary deal.
And Congress has put up any number of roadblocks to that.
And I should emphasize it's not just the Republicans here.
I mean, there are plenty of people on the other side of the aisle that are not happy with the deal with Iran, in part because they've essentially taken the same position as Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, and that is they want to have as strong a negotiating position as possible, in other words, one that provides no compromises, in order to effectively force the Iranians into a bad situation.
Now, then there are people further to the right of that, people like John Bolton, for instance, who wrote recently an op-ed saying we should just go ahead and bomb Iran, which is not terribly difficult.
They're different from positions that Bolton and others took back in the 1990s with respect to North Korea.
Well, in 2002, was that their plan, that we're going to force them out of the NPT, and once they start making nukes, then we're going to attack them, but then they just got too bogged down in Iraq to do so, and so now they've got nukes and now we can never attack them?
Is that it?
Well, they certainly had contingency plans for an attack on North Korea.
I think there are a couple of reasons that they didn't.
Number one, as you point out, we were certainly overwhelmed with other issues at the moment, and the prospect of not only waging a war in Afghanistan, but preparing for a war in Iraq, it is very difficult for the Pentagon to even contemplate an attack on North Korea as well.
The second is that once the Pentagon did some serious research and what the consequences would be of an attack on North Korea, they got cold feet, and the consequences were not so much for the United States, although obviously we did have at that point about 35,000 American troops in South Korea, the consequences were largely for South Korea, and the Pentagon made it clear that if we were to attack North Korea, the bulk of the casualties and consequences would fall on South Korea, our ally.
So there were a number of reasons why we didn't go ahead with it.
So in other words, they didn't really have their policy very well thought out, it doesn't sound like, and I guess if we're talking about, and that's the Bush administration, if we're talking about Congress, forget it, they don't have a plan.
All they know is what they don't want.
Right, and the level of sophistication when it comes to an attack plan to North Korea is roughly comparable to the level of sophistication in the attack plan on Iran.
I mean, it sounds good, perhaps, to a certain constituency, which would like to punish Iran for what Iran has done to the United States, or because they don't like Islam, or they are concerned about the so-called Shiite Crescent in the Middle East.
I mean, any number of reasons suggest to certain people that bombing Iran is the right idea.
But once you actually look at the difficulties of that, number one, in other words, identifying where the nuclear facilities are located, and how difficult it would be to take them out, but number two, the kind of consequences it would have for the Middle East once Iran retaliates, would be devastating.
It would be devastating throughout the region, it would be devastating not only for U.S. policy and U.S. interests, but certainly the interests of our allies in the region.
So, it doesn't take very long for either the Pentagon or for any government organ to understand that bombing Iran's strategy is ridiculous.
It has no military value in the sense of actually eliminating Iran's nuclear capability, and it would have tremendous side effects that would harm U.S. interests for decades to come.
Yeah, well, and I mean, the best that the war party can come up with, like, I mean, I think, the best that I've read from them along these lines would have been, not Bolton, but Joshua Marovchik in the Washington Post said, well, and you know, if we bomb them and that makes them decide that now they want to finally start making nukes, well, then we'll just have to keep bombing them, and we'll just have to go back and keep bombing them and bombing them and bombing them, and that'll prevent them from ever making nukes.
That's their idea.
Yeah, it's not really, it doesn't qualify as an idea, really.
It qualifies as just a knee-jerk reaction based on failed policies of the past.
And, you know, the bottom line is the negotiations that take place, that are taking place today in Switzerland in order to wrap up some kind of a blueprint for negotiations by the end of this month, in many ways are far more sophisticated than the negotiations that took place around the agreed framework.
Back in the 1990s, we had only a dim understanding of what North Korea's nuclear capabilities were, and we had only a dim understanding of how North Korea might break out of any kind of agreement.
But today we have a great deal more sophistication, and as a result of the kind of verification methods that the IAEA have been pursuing with respect to Iran for many years, we have a great deal of understanding of where Iran is right now in its program, and how best to retard any kind of efforts to create a bomb.
And when people talk about a breakout time of, you know, six months or a year, to be honest, that's not exactly correct.
The breakout time, functionally speaking, would be much greater than that in any kind of agreement that's being considered.
You know, people talk more in terms of five or six years that Iran would have in order to create any kind of feasible nuclear device.
So this is a much better agreement than what we were considering back in the 1990s with respect to North Korea.
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly when they say breakout, they just mean the amount of weapons-grade material that they would have.
But now, you know, Gordon Prather likes to emphasize how when they did the Trinity test, that that was for the Nagasaki bomb.
They knew the Hiroshima bomb would work, a simple gun-type nuke.
It's difficult to deliver, you know, and it would be much bigger, but they could make a pretty simple gun-type uranium nuke.
But then what?
They have one nuke.
Big deal.
They sure couldn't use it on anyone.
And then obviously for them to make any kind of, you know, sophisticated, miniaturized implosion plutonium bomb or something like that, as you're saying, would take years.
It would take a huge amount of infrastructure.
Gordon Prather says, yeah, let me know as soon as the Iranians have built their own replica of the Lawrence Livermore or Sandia National Laboratories, because that's what it takes to make a real implosion bomb, the kind that you could fit on the end of a missile and launch toward, I don't know, Riyadh or something.
So we are, you know, we have about only a few days before we will see some kind of an agreement.
And people are saying that it's likely we'll get something at the end of this weekend.
But the debate really continues in Congress, where Congress is pursuing two strategies.
One is an attempt to kind of oversee any kind of agreement and requiring the president to sign off that Iran is still abiding by the agreement.
Or in some cases, Iran is not committing any terrorism acts.
Another effort.
And then the other effort is to increase the threat of sanctions.
In other words, to ensure that there are another round of sanctions at ready, even before the diplomats have managed to come up with a final agreement.
All of which sends the wrong signal, to say the least, to the Iranian negotiators.
The same kind of signal, for instance, that Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, sent when he corralled 46 other senators to send a letter to the Iranian leadership saying, Hey, you know, a future Congress, a future president can basically tear up this agreement and say it's worthless.
In other words, Congress is basically saying to the Iranians, you can try all you want to get this agreement.
But ultimately, we're the ones who make the decisions, not only about the longevity of this agreement, but also about the sanctions and how long they're going to remain in place.
Yeah.
Now, one thing is that they seem now to the Israelis have kind of pushed it too far and and turned enough Democrats against them that they don't have a veto proof majority on these sanctions anymore.
It doesn't look like Newsweek is reporting this morning that, for example, the Congressional Black Caucus is now 100 percent in the president's camp on this because of the offense that they've taken to Netanyahu's speech.
And also his racist remarks on Election Day, Election Day Eve or whatever over there in Israel.
So that's good news.
But I wonder, you know, as far as it goes, the threats in the letter and and all the Republican hype.
Have you seen much of an effect in in terms or do you know of if there's been much of an effect in Iran and in Iranian politics against the deal?
Is this really strengthening the hand of the hardliners?
Are they calling Rouhani a fool for trying to deal with us?
So far, no.
I mean, there are you know, it's not like the hardliners are just sitting around twiddling their thumb.
Right.
They are pushing for, for instance, you know, Ali Khamenei, the Ayatollah, the supreme leader is sick and he has cancer, I believe.
Who knows how long he's going to last?
And so the battle that's shaping up in Iran today is who's going to be the successor?
Are we going to have someone like, for instance, Rouhani, who's more or less a reformer?
Or are we going to have somebody who's a little bit more in the Khamenei camp, much more of a hardliner?
And that ultimately will determine the future of Iran, not this nuclear agreement.
Nuclear agreement, in some sense, is just a tool that one side or the other uses in this larger battle over the future of Iran.
But at the moment, at least going into the negotiations, or as we come to the end of this particular round of negotiations, the reformers seem to be in some control, at least of these details.
And the Iranians are trying to get the strongest possible deal that they can get so that the reformers, when they bring it back to Tehran, people don't laugh at them and say, well, you just gave away everything to the Americans.
So they have to demonstrate that they have compromised fairly and strongly.
But other than that, I think they're in reasonably good shape.
All right.
Well, I've already kept you away over time here, but thank you so much for your time and coming back on the show, John.
It's a pleasure.
And good luck with the show.
Thank you.
Always good to talk to you, sir.
That's the great John Fett for everybody.
He's from the Institute for Policy Studies, Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org.
And this one is at loblog.com.
Iran, North Korea, and the Congress that says no.
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