For Pacifica Radio, September 10th, 2017.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the opinion editor of Antiwar.com.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,500 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
And you can follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
All right, again, introducing our good friend, Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, The Truth Behind the Iran Nuclear Scare.
And he's also an expert on virtually all of America's wars.
His latest piece at Antiwar.com is called Can the US and North Korea Move from Threats to Negotiations?
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Gareth?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
I appreciate having you here.
And this was originally a Truthout piece, am I right?
Want to give correct words to.
That's right.
It's an alternate Truthout, now also at Antiwar.com.
Can the US and North Korea Move from Threats to Negotiations?
So, you know, Donald Trump is the President of the United States right now.
And so.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
Well, this is a real problem, you see, because here he's a belligerent hawk, just like any Republican.
And yet he seems to know even less about the world than Tom Cotton.
Or you pick your worst Republican in the Senate who wants to get us into trouble.
So we have this country, North Korea, who really is no offensive threat to us.
And yet their missiles keep getting better and better.
And according to the President and to the rest of Washington, D.C., that's intolerable.
That slowly but surely, American cities are becoming within range of their ballistic missiles.
And then, hypothetically anyway, they're getting more and more able to miniaturize their nuclear weapons so that one day they may be able to put one on the tip of one of these ballistic missiles.
And then we have a real deterrent.
So to D.C., this is a red line.
Their ability to deter us, basically, is a red line.
And they're determined on exactly what?
Regime change?
Or they're determined to get the North Koreans to change their behavior in what ways, exactly, Gareth?
Well, that is indeed the question, Scott.
I mean, what is the aim of the president administration's policy?
It is absolutely not clear what they hope to accomplish under the circumstances, the realities that they face in regard to North Korea.
Because look, they know perfectly well, as I stated in my article, that there is no military option.
They do not have the freedom to credibly threaten that they're going to attack North Korea as part of their pressure on the regime in Pyongyang, because the North Koreans, regardless of the status of their ICBM program and their nuclear program, have the ability to devastate the capital of South Korea, Seoul, which is only 26 miles south of the 38th parallel, and therefore absolutely vulnerable to the most devastating kind of an attack by conventional artillery from North Korea.
And you know, most people are not aware that between 200,000 and 250,000 Americans actually live in Seoul or its environs.
So, you know, we could have truly mass casualties of Americans in any war between the United States and North Korea.
Now, North Korea knows that they're going to end up being totally devastated.
They were devastated, as many people are aware, in the 1952 Korean War by U.S. airpower, basically destroying two-thirds or more of their, well, basically all of their cities, and killing 3 million people.
So the North Koreans are deterred from doing anything stupid or irrational.
That simply is not the problem.
The problem, I think, as you stated correctly, is that for not just the present administration, but every administration essentially since the Clinton administration, has been taking the position that it is intolerable that North Korea could have a potential deterrent to U.S. military force.
Now, that to me, I'm sorry, that gets into what I call the dominance problem that the U.S., United States as a society, and the Pentagon as an institution have had for generations now, which is that the mere fact of U.S. military dominance creates this expectation that we can, in fact, force smaller, weaker countries to be at the mercy of our demands.
And that means preventing them, of course, from having a nuclear deterrent.
And so that is, as I understand it, the essential problem that is driving and that has driven U.S. policy toward North Korea, just as it has driven U.S. policy toward Iran for generations now.
Well, I'm a little confused.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I understand an A-bomb is an A-bomb, and if it's boosted or a full-fledged H-bomb, that's even worse.
Okay, I get it.
But as you're saying, though, as even Stephen Bannon famously put it, there is no military option in Korea anyway.
Forget nukes, because we don't even know if they really have the ability to deliver them.
I mean, what do they got, a big trebuchet or a flatbed truck or something?
But they do have a million billion rockets and artillery pieces, and so we're already deterred, right?
Well, I think we are already deterred, but I have to say that you have to look at the North Korean policy toward the situation in the Korean Peninsula and the U.S. military presence there in historical perspective.
And I've been reading about this now pretty intensively for the last few months, and there's a wonderful book about the background of this by Leon V. Siegel called Disarming Strangers, which documents the earlier period of this history of North Korean-U.S. relations over the nuclear issue.
And what Leon Siegel documents in his book is that the North Koreans have always, since the Korean War ended, have been very, very concerned about the U.S. military presence in South Korea and the fact that that presence has been carrying out joint exercises with South Korea, which are extremely aggressive, for decades now.
And he points out that during the 1970s and early 80s there was serious consideration given by the U.S. government to suspending those in order to try to deal with North Korea, to make an arrangement with North Korea to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.
They never did it.
They never really went as far as they needed to go, but that was seriously considered.
And since then, really, the U.S. government has never made the kind of effort to negotiate a final deal with North Korea that's necessary in order to lay to rest the North Korean worry, a real, genuine worry, that the United States, under some leadership, someday is going to get the idea that they could conquer North Korea.
And so maybe that's not totally rational, because they do, as you say, have this deterrent, but they don't feel they can rely on that.
It's not sufficient.
And there's more to the story.
Just over the weekend, or I guess Friday, there was a story, an article, not a story, an article in The Washington Post about the fact that when the Reagan administration invaded Grenada in 1982, the North Koreans were freaked out.
Kim Il-sung was freaked out.
He believed that this was a signal that the Reagan administration might be the one that would take on the task of trying to conquer North Korea.
And that's when, three years later, they made the decision to start the nuclear weapons program.
So, I mean, this is just another insight into North Korean thinking.
Yeah.
Oh, actions and consequences.
Next you're going to tell me that the Chinese started their buildup after America's great success in the first Gulf War, or in reaction to Bill Clinton sailing the 7th Fleet in between Taiwan and China back in 1997, or something like that.
But anyway.
There could be some possibility of some linkage between these things.
All right.
Well, now listen.
So, my hero, Dr. Gordon Prather, well, he used to make nuclear bombs for a living, and then after that, he retired and he started debunking war party lies.
And he wrote himself a whole career, really, there at antiwar.com for quite a few years.
And one of the things that he liked to say to illustrate the entire crisis of the 21st century here, basically, is that when the Bush administration came into power, they had a real problem.
They had an axis of evil that they wanted to overthrow.
Of course, there was no axis at all.
Iran and Iraq were enemies and their ties to North Korea limited to just arms sales, no real strategic alliance whatsoever.
And of course, Osama had nothing to do with Saddam, the Ayatollah, or North Korea at the time.
But anyway, this is who they wanted to overthrow, these three major countries.
But they had a major problem, Gareth, and that is that all three of these countries were members in good standing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And they all had safeguards agreements with the IAEA, and there goes your costus belli.
You can't get the Americans to agree to start a war unless maybe it's the threat of nuclear weapons.
They learned that from the focus groups in the first Gulf War, and they sure applied it in Iraq War II as well to get us afraid of those nukes.
So with Iraq, they basically just bulldozed right in there, and never mind his denials.
We'll just pretend he kicked the inspectors out, even though the whole world knows that's not true.
We'll just hurry, basically, to get that one done.
So that left Iran and North Korea.
The Iranians said, our hands are up, our books are wide open, we're not making nukes, don't shoot.
And they said it so loud that they actually, so far at least, have been able to prevent war, prevent the Americans from having a good enough excuse to start one.
But- Yeah, I see where you're going with this, and you're asking, is it really about regime change?
Because that would be the logic of what you're saying, right?
Right.
And I mean, what happened with North Korea was they broke the deal, the Bush administration broke the deal with North Korea, and basically did everything they could to twist their arm and force them out of the nonproliferation treaty.
But then they didn't follow that up by saying, if you try to get nukes, we'll invade you.
They said, if you try to get nukes, we'll back down and you'll get some nukes.
And now here we are 15 years later, and they've got nukes.
Let me just add one more asterisk to what you just said, and that is that it wasn't only the George W. Bush administration that, you know, really basically backed out of any possible deal with North Korea on nuclear weapons or on their nuclear program.
It was the Clinton administration, actually, that negotiated.
They went farther in negotiating with North Korea than anybody else.
It was the 1994 Agreed Framework Agreement, which actually called for normalization of political and economic relations.
And of course, the North Koreans were to give up their nuclear program.
Now, there is on the record, there are statements by high-ranking Pentagon officials saying that, yes, the North Koreans did uphold their side of the agreement, of the Agreed Framework, and the United States did not.
The United States did not deliver on the, particularly the economic normalization, but also on the political normalization.
Well, they never delivered the light water nuclear reactors that were supposed to be an alternative to the weapons-grade plutonium-producing Soviet-era reactor.
My understanding is that they did move in that direction.
It was not quite as on target or on schedule as it should have been, but that was not the primary focus.
But still, it was Bush who broke the deal.
Clinton never lived up to his end of the deal.
It was Bush who abrogated the thing.
He abrogated the deal.
That's right, exactly.
So the question is, is this really all about regime change?
And I have to say that, you know, looking at the whole history of U.S. relations, U.S. policy toward North Korea, that has always been either in the background or in the forefront of U.S. policy.
Now, in the late 1990s, there was an anticipation, this is well documented, that the North Korean regime was on its last legs, and this was the big opportunity, that if we could keep the pressure up, that the regime would simply collapse peacefully and we'd have peaceful reunification of North and South, of course, with the South being the stronger party.
And of course that didn't happen.
That was part of the illusory basis of U.S. policy toward North Korea.
They were, again, you know, in my view, the fact of dominance leads to inevitable consequences that have to do with, I would call it irrational expectations about how things are going to go, because we're so powerful and they're so weak.
And so there's consistent over-reliance on what they regard as some advantages that we have over North Korea.
And I think this is a key to the whole problem.
Now, does the present administration believe that North Korea's on its last legs?
I don't think they believe that.
But they do believe that if they somehow keep up the pressure, primarily economic pressure, that eventually North Korea will give in, they'll have no choice but to give in to our demands.
I think that's really the fundamental problem that we face right now.
Well, and there's also this too.
It's like the Marianas Trench, the depth of ignorance of the American people of this issue.
You know, like Chalmers Johnson said, blowback is supposed to be the consequences of secret foreign policies that the American people have no idea about.
So they can't really, they're susceptible to false explanations about what's going on.
But of course, Americans are so ignorant about foreign policy that they don't have to be secret foreign policies at all.
Who the hell knows anything about the agreed framework or how Bush ruined it, right?
Why this is all John Bolton's fault.
And so they're willing to believe the Washington Post and CNN when they say Kim Jong Un, well, his problem is, is that he's got a personal problem.
In fact, yes, a mental illness.
Why?
He's crazy and irrational and we can't deal with him and he's aggressive.
And I see people in my Twitter feed all day long, they go, well, I agree with you about ending all the wars and everything, but I think we might need to start one here in North Korea because they're giving us no choice.
They're threatening the world.
What are we ever going to do?
Why are we waiting so long to preempt their attack, Gareth, is what people believe.
You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
That is indeed the bedrock of the ability of the present administration to manipulate public opinion in order to get support for whatever they want to do.
I agree with that.
And I just want to add that that is not just this administration.
This has been going on again for generations.
The idea that whoever, whether it's Kim Il-sung or his son or the incumbent in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un, they've always had the idea or put forward the idea that they were really mentally unstable, irrational, not really all quite there.
And there's simply no evidence whatsoever to support that.
By the way, I wrote a piece in Foreign Policy magazine.
People may not believe this, but you can look it up.
In the spring of 1979, I believe it was, I wrote a piece called Time to Talk with North Korea.
And in that piece, I document the fact that the reigning idea about Kim Il-sung is that he is irrational.
That's the problem, and that, therefore, we have to base our policy on, you know, worst-case scenarios.
And I also document the fact that Kim Il-sung, since the late 1960s, this was a decade earlier, had stopped any idea that there was any possibility for reunification of Korea by force, whereas previously there had been the idea that there could be a South Korean communist movement that would be able to seize power.
He gave up on that.
He recognized the reality that it wasn't possible, and he began a decades-long search for a diplomatic political solution to the problem.
And so that was the basis for my calling on the U.S. government to begin talking with North Korea.
But, of course, it didn't happen.
It didn't happen for quite a while after that.
Amazing.
And apologies.
I mean, the fact that you're still making this argument 37, 38 years later here, you know, it's just...
Well, I fault myself for not having stuck with the issue of U.S.-North Korean relations.
I should have kept with it, having written that piece, but I got involved with other things, unfortunately.
You got a lot of wars to debunk the excuses for here, you know.
Wars and potential wars, yes.
As George W. Bush said, it's hard work, but we're making progress.
All right.
Now, listen here.
Jonathan Schwartz has had a couple of great pieces at The Intercept recently on the question of the American media and their dishonest narrative about what's going on here.
And, you know, the common refrain goes along something along the lines of, they refuse to negotiate.
They are absolutely intransigent, et cetera, et cetera, to go along with the crazy.
And Jonathan Schwartz says, yeah, but that's just not true.
I mean, here's the quote where they said in the plainest of English that we absolutely are willing to even negotiate the status and the existence of the nuclear program.
If the Americans are willing to negotiate on the question of the regular exercises and the position of troops and the threats and et cetera, et cetera.
I don't even think, I don't have it right in front of me, but I don't even think they were saying, you know, if you completely withdraw from the peninsula or some kind of poison pill that would, you know, obviously a bridge too far for the Americans, but something that actually is reasonable sound, something that we could negotiate.
Okay.
We'll stop practicing invading your country every few months or twice a year, whatever it is.
You're absolutely right, Scott.
I mean, it is precisely the fact that the North Koreans have been putting forward positions that involved negotiation with the United States on a package, a package deal that clearly involved, you know, change on the North Korean, excuse me, on the Korean peninsula about the American military presence.
Now apparently, and I haven't seen this myself, but apparently there is a statement on the record suggesting that the North Korean government under some circumstances would be willing to keep American troops in South Korea as a check against the Chinese influence or power over North Korea.
So it's a bit like North Vietnam and the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, because they came to the same conclusion after the, after the war with the United States.
So so, so, you know, they are flexible.
They are reasonable.
They are rational.
Believe me, there's a long history of this.
I can document that.
I guarantee it.
Yeah.
All right, Gareth.
Now, I don't know if you saw this.
It was in the Los Angeles Times.
You bring up China here.
There's a piece by a guy named Michael Auslan, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and he wrote this piece in the LA Times.
And I don't know, maybe this is an outlier.
Maybe this really is the group think in Washington, D.C.
Maybe you can help.
But the title reads, a grand bargain with China could remove North Korea's nuclear threat, but it would destroy America's global influence.
And the article is about how we don't have to have.
And this was at the height of the brinksmanship.
This was at the height of Donald Trump saying, you know, we'll we'll destroy you with fire the likes of which the world has never seen in all this.
And this guy's saying, yes, it is nuclear brinksmanship, but it's worth it.
Because if we were to neutralize the threat of North Korea, then we wouldn't be able to hold the threat of North Korea over the heads of South Korea and Japan.
And we might, one, lose influence over them.
But even worse, too, they might end up spinning off over toward China and China might end up gaining influence over them.
And that would be the worst thing in the whole world.
So it's better to keep nuclear brinksmanship even at the level of this level of crisis with North Korea and that, as you mentioned before, all of Seoul held hostage and all of this in order to keep the Japanese down.
It's a very intriguing analysis.
I think that there is something to that.
I think that it does play a role.
Absolutely.
I mean, this this is in line with the fundamental, you know, understanding that I have of what shapes U.S. policy in East Asia and the Middle East as well, that that there's a huge vested interest in keeping the U.S. military presence in South Korea as well as, of course, in Japan.
And that, you know, that really forms the basis for whatever policy is going to be adopted towards North Korea.
It has to be somehow consistent with maintaining the U.S. military presence, because that is the crown jewel.
Those are the crown jewels of U.S. global military power.
And so it's bound to influence the diplomacy of the United States towards North Korea.
I have no doubt about that.
Now, whether it is as explicit as it is stated by this guy, I'm not so sure, but I'm quite sure that that it plays a role in whenever the National Security Council sits down to talk about North Korea.
That's in the background.
No doubt about it.
Well, you know, I remember again, hat tip to Gordon Prather here, there was a joint press conference between George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh back in, I don't know what year, man, 2005 or six.
And Roh misunderstood Bush Jr.through the translator.
And he said, oh, I'm sorry, Mr. President, did you just say that it's OK with you if we begin negotiations on reunification and peace now before we resolve the nuclear issue?
And this is after Bush has pushed them to nukes, right?
And Bush says no and gets all indignant.
No, that's not what I said.
You misunderstood.
I said only once the nuclear issue is resolved, then we can talk about negotiating a peace on the peninsula.
And you know, it may have been Chalmers Johnson back then who who pointed out that basically look at the position the Americans are in there.
They're worried about North Korean nuclear weapons in the hands of a South Korea, a reunified Korea under the leadership of the South.
Then without that blackmail, this would now be a new independent power in Asia that America has to deal with.
Right now, they're pliant.
And if they had reunification, they'd be able to declare independence.
God, hold on.
It was more than that.
It was much more immediate.
The South Koreans were already signaling that they wanted nuclear weapons, that they intended to get nuclear weapons.
And the Bush administration at that point was intent on making sure that that didn't happen.
And so they were what he was talking about, if I understand it.
And Siegel has material on this in his book.
What happened there was that the Bush administration was making a deal that if the South Koreans agreed to not go ahead with nuclear weapons, then that there was then they could say, yes, there's North-South rapprochement moving towards reunification.
That was what he was doing.
It wasn't simply saying the North Korean nuclear weapon issue has to be resolved before you can move.
It was immediately the problem was the South Korean nuclear issue, because they were definitely making it clear that they wanted nuclear weapons.
And then so, well, same problem, right?
If they have nuclear weapons, then why do they need the U.S. at that point?
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
No question.
All right.
Now, listen, I'm sorry.
It's just the last couple of minutes here.
But they really are replaying the destruction, the Bush Jr. destruction of the agreed framework deal with North Korea right now with Iran.
It sure looks like, doesn't it?
It does.
And again, I have to say that this is, to me, a clear illustration of the problem of the dominance issue in U.S. foreign policy, because they don't know what they're going to do with it.
They don't know how they're going to do it.
All they know is that they want to insist that basically North Korea come to heel and agree to things that simply—excuse me, Iran has to agree to things that they're not going to agree to.
I mean, they're not going to give up their nuclear program.
They're not going to agree to stop enrichment.
They're not going to agree to the other things that the U.S. is demanding, such as no ballistic missile program.
It's simply, you know, a completely illusory idea.
And you know, one has to wonder to what extent this is playing to a domestic audience, to what extent it is based simply on the illusion that Iran is going to cave in.
We just don't know.
But what we do know is that it's completely illusory, it's not going to happen, and that they're setting themselves up for failure.
And we don't know what the consequences of that are.
I mean, that's the thing, right?
If we're talking about Kim Jong-il, well, you can tell he's going to make nukes now.
Deal's broken.
He kicks the inspectors out of the country, withdraws from the treaty, makes nukes.
It was all Bill Clinton and then could do to keep him from not doing that.
But in the case of Iran, they don't want nukes in the first place.
The Supreme Ayatollah says that Allah says that no nukes allowed, period.
So it's a political and a religious fatwa, as you've reported in depth there.
But so if America does break the deal, they still have a deal with the rest of the U.N. Security Council, and they still are in the nonproliferation treaty anyway.
You don't expect that to change, do you?
No, I don't expect that to change.
And you know, I can't understand how they expect to prevail in this situation.
And therefore, you know, I'm tempted to believe that this, like many other things that this administration, the president administration is doing, is fundamentally playing to a certain domestic constituency, which it believes, you know, wants this and believes in this.
And therefore it's going to strengthen its hold on its on its constituency.
That's the only thing I can make out of it.
All right.
You know, see, there is no policy dominance or otherwise.
This presidency is just a TV show.
That's all it is.
Well, that's that's a pretty good that's a pretty good way of summing it up.
You know, I like that, actually, man.
I'm sorry that you do.
I was hoping you'd disagree.
But if it's just that, I think we're in real trouble.
We are in trouble.
We are in trouble.
No question about it.
All right, you guys.
That is the heroic Gareth Porter.
He writes at Truthout.org and we reprint it all at Antiwar.com.
He's the author of the book on Iran's nuclear program.
It's called Manufactured Crisis.
The truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
Thank you very much again, sir.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Bye bye.
All right, Sean.
That's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You can find my full interview archive at Scott Horton.org.
More than 4,500 of them now going back to 2003 and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
See you next week.
Bye bye.
