镝木旋风雄就是春道吧:DPRK & US Meeting

On July 26, who should land at New York's JFK Airport for official talks with his United States counterpart Stephen Bosworth but the emissary of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, first vice foreign minister Kim Kye-gwan, a veteran nuclear negotiator.

The emissary arrived in the US at a time of high tension in more than half a century of fractious relations between North Korea and the US after a most fiercely-fought war, which General Omar Bradley described as "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy".

The Financial Times wrote July 27: "Kim Kye-gwan's visit to the US is meaningless in terms of nuclear disarmament but the US government's invitation of the North is meaningful in that Washington is moving away from its stance of "strategic patience".

Peace treaty the first step for denuclearization
July 26 was the eve of the 58th anniversary of the armistice in the 1950-53 Korean War - an agreement that still keeps the two former enemies locked in a potentially explosive technical state of war, in the absence of a peace treaty.

The timing of the North Korean emissary's visit symbolizes the top priority of the direct talks between North Korea and the US: the long-elusive issue of turning the near war state between the two nuclear powers into a state of durable peace.

It's obvious to everyone is that the foremost factor keeping the Korean Peninsula the world's biggest potential flashpoint point is the absence of a peace-keeping mechanism between the main parties in the Korean War.

War in Korea that erupted by design, accident, or miscalculation, would be the world's first nuclear war between two nuclear powers, making the wars in Libya and Afghanistan look like child's play. It would dwarf the two world wars by promptly enveloping the whole of Northeast Asia and the US mainland.

The Financial Times quoted on July 27 Victor Cha, a former North Korea adviser to former president George W Bush, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as observing: "The last thing [Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state] needs on her record is a crisis on the peninsula in which the history books would record that she oversaw a policy of sanctions and non-dialogue which led to war."

The state news agency of North Korea, the Korean Central News Agency, on July 27 called for a peace treaty to be concluded to replace the armistice:

The fragile state of armistice has always barred the peaceful solution of the Korean issue and seriously hamstrung the efforts to realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula for several decades. Concluding a peace agreement may be the first step for settling the Korean issue including the denuclearization.

A series of negotiations including the six-party talks for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula underwent twists and turns in the past due to the failure to properly understand that the establishment of a peace-keeping mechanism is essential for settling the Korean issue.

It is impossible to wipe out the mutual distrust nor is it possible to achieve a smooth solution of the issue of denuclearization as long as there persists the hostile relationship between the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] and the US, the signatories to the AA [armistice agreement], the relationship in which they level their guns at each other. This is the lesson drawn from the process of the six-party talks [on Pyongyang's nuclear program].

Kim Jong-il's envoy to talk from position of strength
Two things distinguish Kim Kye-gwan from Bosworth. One is the obvious superiority complex of the North Koreans to the Americans who share an indisputable inferiority complex to the North Koreans. The other is the position of strength from which Kim Jong-il's envoy will talk to the Americans.

This accounts for why Kim struck journalists as "upbeat, confident, calm and composed all the time, more than ready for action" as the Korean-language South Korean Yonhap News Service reported on July 26 and 27 from New York.

What lies behind the remarkable attitude of Kim Kye-gwan are four major facts.

It is of particular importance to in note the first fact that the Americans are suffering from a long-running post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Korean conflict, a sort of governing code of conduct, as the adage goes, "Once bitten, twice shy," leaving all successive US administrations feeling awkward and inferior vis-a-vis the North Koreans. The first fact aids the second and begets the third, the first three facts combine to generate the fourth.

The first fact is that in a way worthy of an ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander, North Korean founder Kim Il-sung inspired the Korean People's Army and the Korean people to greater efforts to survive the massive bombing raids and naval bombardments by the military forces from 16 countries and successfully inflict the nuclear-armed US armed forces their first military debacle. Their heroic patriotism, resourcefulness and resilience was tapped to maximum to the purpose.

By badly mauling the US in the Korean War, Kim Il-sung, his armed forces and people showed for all the world to see that the Invincible US was nothing but a myth at their merciless hand as its streak of victories in foreign wars came to a sudden end.

The 1953 Korean ceasefire agreement was nowhere what the US had taken for granted: unconditional surrender of the enemy, occupation of enemy land, and a military tribunal to punish enemy leaders as they did with Germany, Italy and Japan, each far more industrialized, populous and larger than North Korea.

A vulnerable US and a ferocious North Korea is well illustrated in the American TV series M*A*S*H, based on a 1968 novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, dealing with a fictional US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the war.

This why Americans have banished the Korean War to oblivion as a forgotten war but whose bitter memory refuses to die, tormenting them as, so to speak, a national PTSD.

Starting with the Korean armistice, all the Americans settled for in subsequent foreign wars of aggression is merely a piece of paper, namely, the ceasefire accord in Vietnam and Yugoslavia, but even another remains a distant goal in Afghanistan and in Libya.

When it comes to the adverse economic impact, its first military debacle sent the US descending the slippery slope into decline. Overseas wars ruinously drained the US economy, although Pentagon-led capitalism may temporarily only benefit the privileged few.

An aftereffect of the Korean War was the decision taken by President Richard Nixon to end the direct convertibility of the dollar to gold as the US was bogged down in Vietnam.

The war in Iraq and Afghanistan paved the way for the epic 2008 financial crisis.

To make matters worse, combined with the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in its fourth month, the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization war on Libya is already showing signs of playing havoc with the British, French, Italian and American economies.

The second hard fact of reality is that Kim Jong-il has turned out a second Kim Il-sung and super-Kim Il-sung and that the Korean armed forces and people today see in his heir designate Kim Jong-eun the rosy prospect of three straight generations of policy leadership no less brilliant than that of legendary founding father.

Kim Jong-il has enabled the nation to stand united, presiding over North Korea's emergence as regular members of two elite clubs of nuclear powers and space powers and putting the country on track to the door of the third club of affluent nations, less than a half year away. All these miraculous achievements have been attained while the nation has found itself exposed to nuclear threats and criminalizing sanctions and isolation bids.

Kim Jong-il and his people look to see a most dramatic transformation of their country into one of the most advanced countries by the end of the 2010s without massive infusions of aid for disarmament from the US and its allies or their guarantee of peace and security.

The third fact is that Kim Jong-il has had the US "yielding to North Korea too often" in the words of former China ambassador Winston Lord and Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations in their co-authored op-ed published in the Washington Post on April 26, 2006.

North Korea has won all five major showdowns with the US since the war ended. Before the present Barack Obama administration, seven US administrations directly dealt with North Korea. Of them, five found themselves close to a general war with North Korea and two quietly dealt with Pyongyang. The five were Lyndon B Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and the two were of Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush.

The North Korean counterpart who has dealt with US presidents since taking power in 1994 is Kim Jong-il, a canny fox who is described as "a veteran practitioner of the 'Art of War'," by Dr Anne Wu, a scholar at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Unless Obama and the Republicans strike a budget deal, the US will default as its national debt now stands at just over $14 trillion, while net total liabilities are estimated at over $200 trillion according to a July 23 Bloomberg report.

Revealingly, North Korea's top nuclear negotiator happens to be in New York to witness the net result of the Korean War and foreign wars: a series of developments leading up to the weakening and bankruptcy of the US.

The Korean War showed that it is not air supremacy and material and technological superiority that decides the outcome of war, but mental and ideological superiority. This little-noticed truth goes a long way toward explaining the US failure to win in Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and is being verified once again in Libya.

The commitment of air power, far from weakening Libya, is causing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to begin to fall apart. Jorge Benitez, a veteran NATO watcher at the Atlantic Council of the United States, told the Seattle Times July 5: "The question is: Whose coalition will break first, Gaddafi's or NATO?"

The fourth point is that North Korea can afford to dispense with a peace treaty and full relations with the US if the Americans do not care to.

True, it is advisable to have good relations with the US and Western countries, but it is too risky to trust the fox-like Americans and company and jettison all-important nuclear potential and the capability to strike with long-range missiles. Libya is a case in point of a treacherous US guarantee of peace and security for disarmament.

It is entirely up to the Obama administration to negotiate a peace treaty with the Kim Jong-il/Kim Jong-eun administration.

A Libya-like action against North Korea would lead to an instantaneous torching of the country concerned by a Korean People's Army that is bristling with nuclear-tipped inter-continental ballistic missiles within effective range of the whole of metropolitan America.