Fletcher dean speaks on North Korea, Iraq

With tensions between the US and North Korea heightened due to the war in Iraq, students heard the perspective of the former ambassador to South Korea and director of the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) Stephen Bosworth in a speech on Tuesday night.

The Dean of the Fletcher School weighed in on the situations in both North Korea and Iraq, and told the audience that "there is a struggle going on for the soul of American foreign policy."

Bosworth first described the history of the Koreas through his own experiences and visits to North Korea. "It is one of the bleakest, most depressing places imaginable," he said, calling the North Korean political climate the "Heaven's Gate of international politics."

Almost daily, according to Bosworth, the North Korean government will do something to incite the United States into negotiating a "public, binding legal statement that we will not try to attack them." This has most recently culminated in a restarting of the North Korean weapons program and the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors from the country.

These actions stem from North Korea's perception of a US-North Korea agreement negotiated under Jimmy Carter and then-North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Agreed Framework between the two countries called for North Korean compliance in halting the creation of nuclear weapons and promised to provide increased heavy fuel oil and light water reactors to North Korea

Interpretation of the agreement, Bosworth said, is what created many of the problems surrounding it.

"From the North Korean perspective, it was a political agreement, the end goal of which was to normalize relations between North Korea and the US," Bosworth said. "They think they have enemies, and they think their enemy is the US."

In response to the problems surrounding North Korean, Bosworth said, the US has three options.

The first option would follow the actions of the Clinton administration and would call for the US to wait for the North Korean regime to collapse. Bosworth said, though, that current North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il "would not go gently into that dark night."

The second, and riskier, option would be to conduct a "surgical" military strike to take out the known nuclear weapons producing plants. While this plan might succeed in completing its goal, it would be "a very risky proposition," according to Bosworth. The US does not know where all the weapons plants are, and North Korea could retaliate by firing over 50,000 artillery shells an hour into Seoul, the South Korean capital.

The final, and most wise decision, Bosworth said, is negotiation. "Only the US can give North Korea what it wants: an assurance that we will not attack them." Unfortunately, according to Bosworth, there are some within the US government and especially within the Bush administration that consider negotiation with North Korea to be unwise and even immoral.

On Iraq, Bosworth said that he was "fairly certain that the US led coalition will prevail," but the problem lies in what the US does next. "The specter of a large US military presence running the country -- which we would have to do -- gives me great concern," said Bosworth. "It will be tremendously corrosive to the relationship between the US and the Islamic world."

In general, US foreign policy has changed dramatically since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Bosworth. "It's an unusual situation without a historical precedent," he said. The United States is the most economically, militarily, and politically powerful country in the world, but it has an "acute sense of fear and vulnerability." In Bosworth's view, this "makes other countries very, very nervous about what we might do."

During the short question and answer period following the speech, Bosworth was asked whether a "threshold" was crossed in Iraq. "We've crossed that Rubicon some time back," he said. "The cogent argument is whether containment could've worked. [By military action], I feel we're becoming a prime recruiter for al Qaeda and organizations of that sort. The ultimate answer is not exclusively military."

"Clearly, we are doing something that people don't like," Bosworth said. "Some of it we can change, some of it we cannot."

According to International Relations Professor Christiane Romero, who introduced Bosworth, it was the first time a dean of the Fletcher School had specifically addressed undergraduates.