Why Is Korea Not Reunified Already?

This is my article in the current EIR explaining why the current crisis in Korea was intentionally created by the Bush and Obama administrations, on behalf of the British Empire's division of the world into warring blocks, East vs.West, which President Trump is threatening to abolish by creating friendships and cooperation with China and Russia -- to the horror of London and their assets on Wall Street, in the press, and in government. If Trump proceeds with joining Xi Jinping's New Silk Road, the Korea problem will be easily solved, as it nearly was twice before through cooperative development, only to be sabotaged by Bush and Obama. 

     To watch my presentation on this subject on the LaRouche PAC weekly webcast, see  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzk1s8336aU

                                     Mike Billington

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KOREA CRISIS --

Why Is Korea Not Reunified Already?

by Michael Billington

April 22—There is no legitimate reason why Korea has

not already been reunified, or why there must now be a

festering crisis over North Korea, threatening to spark a

war that would devastate most of Asia and could possibly

provoke a global nuclear war. The overtly British

assets in the White House over the past 16 years—

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama—

intentionally created the crisis, not because of any actions

by North Korea, but in order to provoke

confrontation or even war between the United States

and China, to sustain the British division of the world

into East against West. Likewise, we see the desperate

effort by the British today to stop President Trump’s

intended cooperation with Russia—using British-manufactured

crises in Ukraine and Syria aimed at maintaining

U.S.-Russia antagonism and possible war.

As this article will demonstrate, the foundation for a

peaceful resolution to the Korea conflict—including

ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—was

firmly established in 1994, and was functioning reasonably

well until the Bush-Cheney White House shut it

down unilaterally, based on lies of the sort later made

famous by Tony Blair’s fabrication of Saddam Hussein’s

supposed weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent

steps taken by Russia, China, Japan, and both North

and South Korea, nearly saved the peace process, and

set the pace for a peaceful reunification of the Koreas.

Again, however, Bush, Cheney, and then Obama intervened

to crush that effort, in favor of confrontation and

military build up for war.

The Agreed Framework

North Korea had been a member of the Non-Proliferation

of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) since 1985,

but the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA) believed

in the early 1990s that Pyongyang was hiding

some quantity of plutonium (produced at its graphitemoderated

nuclear reactor) from IAEA inspectors. A

back-and-forth took place with the IAEA and the Clinton

Administration, leading to a serious threat from

Washington, then represented by Clinton’s Defense

Secretary William Perry, that a military strike was being

planned to take out the Yongbyon nuclear plant which

produced the plutonium.

Former President Jimmy Carter then made a personal

trip to North Korea and met with Kim Il-sung (the

supreme leader of North Korea from the time of its creation

after World War II), resulting in an agreement to

reach a deal with Washington.

In the resulting “Agreed Framework” of October

1994, North Korea agreed to shut down the 5 megawatt

(MW) plutonium-generating nuclear plant and stop

construction on two others of 50 MW and 200 MW, and

the United States and South Korea would provide a

1,000 MW light-water nuclear reactor that would not

produce weapons-grade plutonium. Oil would be provided

to the North until the new nuclear reactor came

on line. Most important, talks toward normalization of

relations would take place immediately, and the United

States committed to neither use nor threaten to use nuclear

weapons against North Korea while the talks were

underway (the Korean War of the 1950s never officially

ended—an armistice was signed, but never a peace

treaty). Both sides agreed that the Korean Peninsula,

North and South, would remain free of nuclear weapons.

The IAEA would make routine inspections of the

North to confirm compliance.

In 1998, Kim Dae-jung was elected President of

South Korea. He had been a leading opponent of the conservative

governments in Seoul, was imprisoned several

times, and had even been condemned to death at one

point. But circumstances changed, and he was elected.

He moved immediately to implement a “Sunshine

Policy,” opening up relations with North Korea. In 2000,

he made an historic visit to North Korea and met with

supreme leader Kim Jong-il, who had succeeded Kim Ilsung

after his father’s death in 1994, soon after meeting

with Jimmy Carter. Dramatic motion toward peace and

cooperation on the Korean peninsula was nearly assured.

Former Defense Secretary Perry has just written, in

an April 15 article in Politico magazine, that during

Clinton’s second term, he and others were negotiating

a further deal with Pyongyang aimed at a long-term

solution for peace on the peninsula. “With allies in

South Korea and Japan,” Perry wrote, “we discussed a

bargain that offered a highly desirable outcome: normalization

of relations with North Korea in exchange

for its giving up its quest for nuclear weapons. We

were tantalizingly close to an agreement, including a

presidential visit to Pyongyang, when the clock ran out

on Clinton’s term.”

What happened next was one of the most bloodthirsty

and insane acts in history. George Bush’s Secretary

of Defense Colin Powell, who clearly had more

sense than his boss, openly declared on March 6, 2001

that the new Administration intended to “engage with

North Korea to pick up where President Clinton left off.

Some promising elements were left on the table and we

will be examining those elements.” But the very next

day, President Bush—under the influence of his controller,

Vice-President Dick Cheney, and with support

from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s

deputy —snubbed the visiting South Korean

President Kim Dae-jung, announced that there would

be no engagement with “dictator” Kim Jung-il (sound

familiar?), and essentially scrapped the entire Agreed

Framework.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were, of course,

the team of neoconservatives that gave us the war on

Iraq on false pretenses, based on Tony Blair’s lies, unleashing

the destruction of Southwest Asia.

The result of this insanity can be seen today—North

Korea now has an estimated 10-20 nuclear weapons.

This should not be seen as a terrible blunder by the neocons:

It must be seen as their intention. As long as North

Korea could be presented as a threat, the United States’

expansion of military power in a ring around China

could be maintained and expanded. The British imperial

division of the world, East against West, could be

sustained.

Progress Without British/U.S. Support

President Kim Dae-jung was undaunted in his pursuit

of the Sunshine Policy towards North Korea. At

the time, Lyndon LaRouche and representatives of his

movement were meeting regularly with people in and

around Kim Dae-jung’s administration, promoting the

idea initiated by LaRouche in 1992 called the “New

Silk Road.” The concept, following the collapse of the

Soviet Union, was that a series of economic development

corridors connecting Europe and Asia through

high-speed rail lines—passing through Russia and the

Central Asian republics—would create the conditions

for “peace through development,” uniting former adversaries

in mutually beneficial infrastructure and investment

projects. From the beginning of this initiative,

LaRouche identified the New Silk Road as

proceeding from “Pusan to Rotterdam,” noting the importance

of resolving the conflict on the Korean peninsula

through mutual development between North

and South Korea, together with Russia, China and

Japan.

In 2002 this effort nearly achieved success, when

the two Koreas opened the gates dividing North and

South, began clearing the land mines on both sides of

the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and began rebuilding

the severed rail connections between North and

South.

The September 27, 2002 issue of EIR carried an article

by EIR’s Kathy Wolfe, who had been organizing

for LaRouche’s ideas in South Korea, which read:

    "At 11 a.m. on Sept. 18, North and South Korea

cut open the DMZ barbed-wire fences which

have divided them for 50 years, in ground-breaking

ceremonies to rebuild the “Iron Silk Road”—

the trans-Korean rail and road links severed

since the Korean War.

    "In the west, where the Seoul-Pyongyang

Kyongui line is being rebuilt toward China,

South Korean soldiers unlocked the ten-foothigh

fence that runs the 250-kilometer length of

the DMZ, at Dorasan Station in Paju, as thousands

applauded. Simultaneously, 14.2 kilometers

to the north, North Korea opened its fence at

Kaesong Station. On the peninsula’s east coast,

where the Donghae-Wonsan line is being rebuilt

toward Russia’s Vladivostok, North Korean

Prime Minister Hong Song-nam, Railway Minister

Kim Yong-sam, and 3,000 guests cut the

north fence of the DMZ at Onjong-ri at the foot

of Mt. Kumgang (Diamond Mountain). Some 27

km to the south, South Korea opened its east

coast fence in Kosung at the Unification Observatory,

as crowds gazed north toward the revered

Diamond Mountain.

    "At all four points, ceremonies with fireworks

and music exploded. . . . They joined a chorus

singing the emotional “Our Wish Is Unification,”

as a train decked with a unification flag

and flowers rolled slowly toward the fence

where the rails end. . . .

    "In more ceremonies on Sept. 19, construction

began: South and North Korean soldiers simultaneously

entered the DMZ at all four points for

mine-clearing operations. Near Dorasan, 50 soldiers

with live ammunition and 50 engineering

troops followed a German-made mine-sweeper

along the rail lines in a massed procession of

trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, and an ambulance."

The two Kims, from the North and the South, also

set up an industrial complex in the northern city of Kaesong,

near the border; South Korean companies set up

factories with North Korean employees, benefitting

both sides and setting a course for closer cooperation.

They also arranged for family visits; members of families

long separated by the division of the country after

World War II were able to visit each other.

Other stirrings toward peace had taken place just

days before these events, when Japanese Prime Minister

Junichiro Koizumi travelled to Pyongyang on September

17, 2002, to meet with Kim Jong-il. The two

issued full apologies to each other—Japan for its invasion

and occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, and

North Korea for the abduction of eleven Japanese citizens.

They also agreed to formal diplomatic normalization

talks, to begin in October.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had held

several summits with both Kim Jong-il and Koizumi

leading up to the meeting, offered his full support for

the New Silk Road process.

At the same time, China initiated six-party talks

among the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan, and the

United States. It was hoped that the rail connections linking

South Korea to China and Russia through North

Korea would be up and runnng by the end of 2003,

and that the road to reunification would lie just ahead. It

was not to be.

Subverting the Six-Party Talks

The Bush Administration launched its war against Afghanistan

in 2002 and another against Iraq in 2003.

Over the next fourteen years, Bush and Obama would keep

the United States in a state of permanent warfare, targetting

the three secular nations in Southwest Asia—Iraq,

Libya, and Syria—none of which was Islamist,

while all were firmly anti-terror.

These two Anglophile presidents also sustained the longest

war in United States history, continuing still today,

in Afghanistan.

In his 2002 State of the Union Address, as Japanese

and South Korean leaders were meeting with North

Korean leaders and preparing joint development projects,

George W. Bush pronounced that North Korea was

part of an “Axis of Evil,” together with Iraq and Iran.

As former Secretary of Defense Perry said in the article

quoted above, the North Korean leadership may be

reckless, but it is “not crazy or suicidal.” It would never

use its nuclear weapons offensively, he noted, since it

knows “the American response would bring death to the

leadership and devastation to its country.” To that must

be added that Pyongyang is fully aware of what happened

to both Iraq and Libya, which gave up their nuclear

weapons programs voluntarily, only to then be

bombed mercilessly, their leaders killed, and their countries

left in the hands of warring terrorist factions. North

Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons program

unless it has normalized relations with the United States

and has obtained a non-aggression pledge. This is in fact

what Perry recommends to President Trump.

As in Southwest Asia, so also in East Asia: Bush and

Obama played along with the six-party talks, but found

every excuse to claim—almost always falsely—that

North Korea was cheating. On this false basis, Obama

imposed more and more sanctions while deploying

more and more military forces into the region. Obama

then officially adopted a policy called “strategic patience,”

which really meant refusing all contact, increasing

sanctions every time Pyongyang tested a missile or

nuclear weapon, and “patiently” waiting for either a collapse

of the regime or an excuse to start a war. As with

Bush’s policy, it was an assured failure, by intention,

aimed at justifying the build-up around China.

Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” was the most blatant case

of this fraud. The claim that the Pivot, and his later deployment

of THAAD missile systems to South Korea,

were meant to deter North Korea, fooled neither Beijing

nor Moscow. Under the Pivot policy, Obama deployed

massive U.S. military power in a ring around

China and the Russian Far East, while the Trans-Pacific

Partnership (TPP) trade policy was openly aimed at isolating

China and slowing down its increasing dominance

of economic relations in the region. This attempt

at economic isolation was a colossal failure, since

China was at the same time implementing Xi Jinping’s

New Silk Road policy (the Belt and Road Initiative),

bringing real development, not military coercion, to the

nations of the region.

Sad Case of Park Geun-Hye

The other major tragedy brought on by Obama’s role in

Asia was the destruction of President Park Geun-hye’s government

in South Korea. Park is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the leader

who transformed South Korea during his presidency, from 1961-

1979, from one of the poorest nations on Earth after the Korean

war to what is today one of the leading industrial powers. His

daughter Geun-hye was not a strong leader, but she had a vision,

which she called “the Eurasian Vision,” that Korea, together with

Russia and China, would play a key role in the development of the

entire Eurasian continent. In September 2015, she attended the celebration

of victory in World War II in Beijing, standing proudly on the

podium with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Clearly this Eurasian Vision required a peaceful resolution

of the conflict with North Korea, so that the rail

and other connections between South Korea and Russia

and China could be restored. It was also understood that

South Korean technology and skilled North Korean

labor could, together, contribute to the much needed development

of the Russian Far East, to the benefit of all.

In fact, although her government maintained a “no

official contact” policy towards the North, she had allowed

an extraordinary consortium to be established

between Russia, North Korea, and three leading companies

in the South—Hyundai Merchant Marine, a logistics

and container freight company; Posco, the largest

South Korean steel company; and Korail, the Korean

state rail corporation. The consortium sent Russian coal

by rail to a new port structure built in the North Korean

city of Rason, where it was shipped by Hyundai Merchant

Marine to South Korea, then by Korail trains to

Posco steel mills. This was in fact the model for a

system of state-industry cooperation which could have

led to a “peace through development” solution.

Then, in January 2016, after the fourth North Korean

nuclear weapons test (a test that everyone knew would

happen eventually for the reasons given above), President

Park Geun-hye capitulated totally to the Obama

policy. Not only did she order the closure of the consortium

of North Korea, Russia, and the South Korean corporations,

but she even closed the Kaesong Industrial

Complex, which by this time was employing more than

50,000 North Koreans in 123 South Korean companies.

This left virtually no ties between North and South—

political, economic, or social. While the legal removal

of President Park from power through impeachment

was not specifically over this policy, but over corruption

issues internal to South Korea, the impeachment

was nonetheless aided by her obvious failure, and

weakness, in letting Obama’s policies poison Seoul’s

relations with China, Russia, and North Korea, creating

the threat of a war provoked by the United States—a

war that would be devastating to South Korea.

The election to replace Park will be held May 9, creating

the potential for a new approach.

Trump Rejects the Imperial Divide

The Trump campaign made very clear that he intended

to be friends with Russia, much to the horror of

London and the warmongers in both the Democratic

and Republican parties. Although he was critical of

China’s economic policies during the campaign, he has

now established a close relationship with Xi Jinping,

including their personal meeting in Florida in April.

Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airbase on April 6

went against his pledge to end Bush’s and Obama’s

wars of aggression against nations which were no threat

to our own and was a clear violation of international

law. But it was done on the basis of lies provided by

British intelligence, claiming to have proof that the

Assad government was responsible for a chemical

weapon attack—a total absurdity.

Similarly, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson

has been screaming for war against Syria and goading

Trump to prepare for a preemptive attack on North

Korea. Even if North Korea’s nuclear weapons were

destroyed in a first strike, its conventional weapons

could, and likely would, totally destroy the beautiful

city of Seoul, only 35 miles from the well-fortified

border, and other sites in South Korea.

Although it would be an act of lunacy to launch such

an attack on North Korea, and it is highly unlikely that

Trump could be induced to do so, there will be no solution

to the conflict until the British are acknowledged as

the source of the crisis, aiming to prevent President

Trump from carrying out his expressed intention to

bring the United States into a new relationship with

both China and Russia.

The Russian Deputy Permanent Representative to

the UN, Vladimir Safronkov, responded on April 12 to

a typically virulent rant against both Syria and Russia

by the British Permanent Representative Matthew Rycroft,

CBE (Commander of the Order of the British

Empire), in a manner which profoundly located the fundamental

intention of the British Empire:

    “The essence is,” Safronkov said, “and everyone in

the UN knows this very well, is that you are afraid, you

have been losing sleep, over the fact that we might be

working together with the United States, cooperating

with the United States—that is your fear. You are doing

everything to make sure that this kind of cooperation be

undermined.”

Safronkov’s statement is accurate. He is perhaps the

first world leader to identify what Lyndon LaRouche

has identified for more than 50 years: The British will

stop at nothing to prevent the United States from breaking

the imperial divide between West and East and creating

with Russia and China the basis for a new paradigm

based on the common aims of mankind.

Now is the time to make that break, to establish a

new era of mankind based on development, and end the

British Empire once and for all.