While Bush's neocons forced North Korea to restart its nuclear program, a second attempt for a nuclear agreement was destroyed by Obama
While
Washington's hawks keep pushing for war in the Korean peninsula, the
corporate media assist their effort through the ordinary propaganda,
depicting North Korean leadership as, more or less, an evil regime.
Very few things about the US destructive policies and actions in the
region are known to the American public, like, for example, the fact
that the US had put barriers to the unification of the two Korean
states and had literally flattened North Korea in the Korean war.
While
Jimmy Carter tried to put the foundations for a nuclear agreement
with North Korea, all the US administrations afterwards seem to be
pushing for war, sabotaging every effort for a viable agreement that
would remove nukes from the Korean peninsula.
Tim
Shorrock, journalist and expert on US-Korea relations, spoke to Abby
Martin about the dirty US tactics against North Korea, especially
when Bush's neocons - the ones who brought absolute chaos in the
Middle East after pushing for US invasion in Iraq - decided to close
all doors against any prospect for a deal with North Korea.
As
Shorrock states:
In the
late 80s, North Korea under Kim Il-sung were looking at having
nuclear weapons and part of the reason was because until 1991, the US
had hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, these kind
of hand-held weapons that US soldiers would carry their nuclear
weapons.
And, of
course, the US 7th fleet is in Yokosuka-Japan and very close to Korea
and there are ships there that have nuclear arms, planes, and
Okinawa, the US bases are there, and so they saw building a nuclear
capability it was a way of defending themselves.
Jimmy
Carter went to North Korea, met with Kim Il-sung and they hammered
out what became this agreed framework under which North Korea agreed
to end its nuclear program, stopped its production of plutonium at
this plant.
When
Bush took over in 2001 with all these neocons in his government, like
John Bolton and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were against
this agreement, any agreement with North Korea. And in his State of
the Union address Bush labeled North Korea as part of the axis of
evil with Iran and Iraq. So, this was like the last straw for the
North Koreans. They said, 'OK we now see that you believe we're back
in enemy status', and so they pulled out of the agreement themselves
and started proceeding on their plutonium program. By 2006, they had
built their first atomic weapon and tested their first weapon in
2006.
In 2005,
there was a declaration by all South and North Korea, US, Japan,China
and Russia, that Korea itself would not be nuclear, would not allow
nuclear weapons north, or south. All countries agreed to that
agreement and had been violated by the US because at the time the US
was still imposing sanctions.
When
Obama came in 2009, he and his people sort of had this idea that
somehow the problem of North Korea would go away because it was going
to collapse and they did not want to negotiate directly with North
Korea. So, even Bush was willing to have direct talks to them, Obama
was not.
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