Richard Lloyd Parry reviews Victor Cha's "The Impossible State: North Korea Past and Future" in the LRB.
Cha was Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, and George W. Bush's top advisor on North Korea. Though I haven't read the book, it's clear from other reviews (here, for example) that he's generally positive about Bush and his handling of North Korea - unsurprisingly, given his role in the administration. For an LRB readership, though, such endorsement of the appalling Bush and his cronies is entirely unacceptable. As a result, most of Lloyd Parry's review is an attempt to pour as much blame as possible for the current state of North Korea on the dreaded neo-cons:
Cha puts the best possible face on the works of his former master, describing Bush’s later efforts to ‘humanise’ the suffering of ordinary North Koreans, and his White House meetings with defectors. But while the hunt was on for a ‘poster child’ for human rights, everything else was falling apart. The US seized on the covert uranium programme as a reason for not delivering the oil it was contracted to supply under the Agreed Framework. The North, which already thought the US wasn’t meeting its obligations, responded by restarting the Yongbyon plant, throwing out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and eventually announcing that it did indeed have nuclear warheads and was working on more. Clinton had prepared, reluctantly, for war; having averted it, he had energetically concluded three separate diplomatic agreements with North Korea, with a fourth (on limiting ballistic missiles) in the works. After four years of Republican government all those agreements, and the safeguards they incorporated, had collapsed, with nothing to take their place. This was the sum achievement of George Bush, foe of rogue states and protector of the nation: to allow the world’s most isolated government to acquire the Bomb.
"Seized on the covert uranium programme as a reason for not delivering the oil it was contracted to supply" - yeah, what a pathetic excuse. The North screws the Agreed Framework backwards forwards and sideways, and the White House then has the nerve not to deliver the contracted oil. You just can't trust those war-mongering neo-cons.
Lloyd Parry's problem is that he rather likes the book, but can't allow anything that might reflect creditably on the Bush administration. So he pretends it's a different book:
Cha’s account depends on the symbolic annihilation of the men who did most to fashion Bush’s thinking. Paul Wolfowitz is not mentioned; Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Bolton, the moustachioed Strangelove of the mid-Bush years, between them merit only seven references in the index. Three of these are to page 84, where Cha unexpectedly records at length the epithets applied to them by the North’s propaganda organs. Cheney: ‘the most cruel monster and bloodthirsty beast’. Rumsfeld: ‘a political dwarf’, a ‘human butcher’, a ‘fascist tyrant who puts an ogre to shame’, and the ‘kingpin of evil’ who puts ‘Hitler into the shade in man-killing and war hysteria’. Bolton, rather anti-climactically, is merely ‘human scum and bloodsucker’. It is tempting to infer a mischievous relish in the decision to include all this.
The "symbolic annihilation", note. The book itself, as we see, barely mentions the terrible foursome: no annihilation of any kind takes place except in the mind of the reviewer. "It is tempting to infer" that Lloyd Parry himself badly wants Cha to share his own particular prejudices, despite a complete absence of evidence. He certainly seems to relish those childish DPRK insults; almost as though - surely not! - he actually agrees with them.
Cha’s anecdotes evoke an administration in which the president’s ‘loathing’ expressed itself in frat house boorishness on the part of his diplomatic teams. At one point, officials from the State Department and the Treasury came close to a fist fight over a difference in approach. At another, members of the US delegation could be heard ‘giggling loudly’ at the film Team America, in which Kim Jong Il is represented as a grotesque singing puppet. ‘One of our members, a jaded foreign service officer, thought it would be “funny” to take the iPod into the adjacent room and show it to the North Koreans,’ he recalls. ‘We decided against this impromptu introduction to American pop culture, and probably avoided a diplomatic incident.’
Well, some of us did actually think Team America's take on Kim Jong Il was pretty funny - but there you go: it just shows our frat house boorishness.
It gets worse. North Korea's militarism is, we learn, entirely understandable in the face of Western threats:
Is it remotely surprising that a leader in this situation should turn to the single institution on which he can rely, the army, and do what he can to strengthen it? Is there any question that without such an army, and without nuclear weapons, North Korea would sooner or later become the victim of Western ‘intervention’?
In fact it's the West who are the real aggressors:
The noises from the North are widely misunderstood. They are not unilateral threats of war, but promises of retaliation in the event of US and South Korean attack.
Well they certainly sounded like unilateral threats of war. All that stuff about having a right to carry out a pre-emptive nuclear strike, for instance....
There are some interesting points in the review, though, despite the relentless playing to the LRB gallery - particularly on China's continued support for Kim Jong Un's nightmare regime:
The standard explanation points to China’s long border with North Korea and the chaos of refugees and fleeing soldiers which could follow a regime collapse in Pyongyang. But Cha identifies a stronger reason: the valuable cross-border trade, and the coal, iron and minerals which China extracts from the North. Copper, gold, zinc, nickel and rare earth metals like molybdenum can be mined more cheaply in North Korea, and with even fewer concerns for health and safety. China keeps the North afloat through gifts of cash, grain, as well as ‘friendship prices’, not out of fraternal feeling, but ‘to sustain a minimal level of stability and subsistence so that China can continue its economic extraction policies.’ It encourages Chinese-style economic reforms not for reform’s sake, but because they will suit Chinese business.
That sounds all too plausible.
