On arriving for her first visit to South Korea as Secretary of State, Condi Rice undiplomatically went straight to Command Post Tango, the underground bunker from which Air-Naval-Ground operations would be controlled in the even of a “contingent” war with North Korea.
Rice’s visit coincided with a twice-yearly “exercise” of that contingent war plan.
Two years earlier, on the eve of the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq, Gen. Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told NBC that if President Bush decided “to apply military forces to resolve special issues,” he was ready.
Gen. Myers added that North Korea – which had just withdrawn from the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and had “unfrozen” the facilities formerly subject to the Agreed Framework – could be one of the targets. “All” military options – including preemptive nuclear attacks – are periodically updated for North Korea.
Did Condi’s briefing include a contingency plan to preemptively nuke North Korea?
Perhaps, but South Korea recently revealed that it had decided in January to “rebuff” Washington’s “contingency plan” for taking “military action” against North Korea in the event of “serious internal turmoil.”
The contingency plan – code-named OPLAN 5029-05 – comprised a range of increasingly serious military actions, corresponding to the seriousness of North Korea’s internal troubles, which could range from mass defection to revolution.
Apparently the South Korean National Security Council “determined that several points in the operation plan could serve as factors limiting South Korea’s exercise of its sovereignty.”
In particular, Bush and his “command authorities” would assume “wartime command” of both American and South Korean forces in the event Bush decided that “internal troubles” in North Korea required “military action.”
The North Koreans had this to say:
“The U.S. ‘OPLAN 5029-05’ – unlike the previous ‘plans’ – is chiefly aimed to deliberately create a war state on the Korean Peninsula and spark a military conflict on its own initiative.
“Large-scale joint military exercises have been staged with huge aggressor armed forces involved, new type shells with high destructive power are being provided to the U.S. forces present in south Korea, the reorganization of their Second Division is expected to be completed by this summer – that is, two years earlier than scheduled – and the U.S. is contemplating shipping smaller nuclear bombs capable of destroying underground facilities into South Korea before any other places.
“These dangerous military moves can be seen only on the eve of war.”
So, Condi – the diplomat – appeared on CNN last week to alleviate their fears.
North Korean reaction?
Rice in her appearance on CNN chat on May 12 let loose a spate of sophism that the DPRK violated the 1994 DPRK-U.S. Agreed Framework even before the ink of its signature to the agreement was dry, and asserted that its system is a “terrible regime” and it should be “reformed.”
It was none other than the Bush administration that scrapped the DPRK-U.S. Agreed Framework.
The DPRK fully implemented all its commitments such as freezing all its nuclear activities and perfectly ensuring the surveillance by IAEA inspectors according to the AF.
Paragraph 1 of the AF commits the U.S. to providing light water reactors (LWR) to the DPRK by 2003. But only groundwork had been carried out for their construction in ten years.
Under this paragraph the U.S. is also obliged to deliver heavy fuel oil to the DPRK every year until the construction of LWRs is completed. But it totally suspended this supply after inventing the rumor about the nonexistent “enriched uranium program” of the DPRK.
Paragraph 2 calls on the DPRK and the U.S. to go in for fully normalizing the bilateral political and economic relations.
The U.S., however, had persistently pursued its hostile policy and economic embargo and, worse still, listed the DPRK as part of “an axis of evil.”
Paragraph 3 commits the U.S. to giving its formal assurances that it will neither use nukes nor pose any nuclear threat to the DPRK. But, it designated the DPRK as a “target of preemptive nuclear attack,” far from offering such assurances.
In the long run, all the paragraphs of the DPRK-U.S. Agreed Framework had been scrapped due to the U.S. noncompliance with all its promises for ten years and what it called “enriched uranium program” cooked up by it to evade its responsibility for the non-compliance with them.
All the remarks of Rice prove that she is either a woman ignorant of the DPRK-U.S. history or a brazenfaced liar.
Well, they’re not mutually exclusive.
