PRESS RELEASE
Gelb: Obama Threatened Regime
Change in North Korea
April 4, 2012 (EIRNS)—Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, writing in The Daily Beast April 1, provides yet more evidence of why President Obama must be constitutionally removed from office without further delay, before he manages to ignite a thermonuclear war. The current crisis around North Korea's planned mid-April satellite launch was worsened by Obama, himself, when he was in Seoul for the Nuclear Security Summit, when, after warning of increased sanctions and more diplomatic isolation if North Korea went ahead with the launch, he declared that North and South Korea were "one people."
Gelb notes that, to most of us, that sounds like nothing, but to the regime in Pyongyang "it had to sound like a U.S. commitment to destroy North Korea and reunify the peninsula under South Korean and American rule." In other words, as a Chinese writer emphasized earlier this week, Obama was de facto threatening regime change, something the North Koreans see as an existential threat, and which convinces them that they should never back down.
Also contributing to the inability of the North Koreans to back down is the fact, reported to EIR by a reliable Washington source, that the satellite launch, being done in honor of Kim Il-sung's 100th birthday, was prescribed in Kim's last will and testament, and is seen as a sacred obligation in that country.
Gelb also notes that the U.S. has known about the planned launch for some time, and had told the North on Feb. 29 not to go ahead with it. Now, both sides have gotten themselves to the point of being unwilling to back down.
Yet, as with Iran, North Korea has been very explicit as to how to get out of the stand-off. According to Gelb, this is what the North Koreans have been saying: "We intend to keep our nuclear weapons for some time to come, until we feel secure from your American threats. We see these talks as a process that might take one or two decades. In that time, we might give up our plutonium reprocessing plant but retain its newer uranium enrichment facilities. We might even identify our nuclear capabilities, and perhaps reduce it somewhat. Of course, all this would be in return for unspecified U.S. goodies."
As difficult as this appears to be for Washington to accept, Gelb seems to think that that's what is likely to happen, whether it is admitted or not.
