The deployment last week of 15 stealth fighters to South Korea, along with the severing of the US military's only official interaction with North Korea, appears to be part of a new push by the Bush administration to further isolate Pyongyang despite China's hesitation to join the effort.
The deployment, confirmed by the Pentagon on Friday after several news reports, came just after the Defense Department said Wednesday that it was suspending the search for soldiers missing in action since the Korean War.
Although senior Pentagon officials say the F-117 stealth fighters are part of preparation for a long-planned training exercise, the show of force comes at a delicate moment both militarily and politically. China, South Korea and some experts in the US have urged the administration to make a more specific offer to the North, laying out what it would get in return for giving up its nuclear arms program. Administration officials, however, have suggested in recent interviews that they are headed toward taking a hard line, cracking down on the North's exports of missiles, drugs and counterfeit currency.
The US warned its allies this month that the North might be preparing to test a nuclear weapon. Now senior officials say US intelligence agencies are still monitoring several locations in the North where a nuclear test might be held, though they readily concede the evidence that the North will proceed with a test is "partial."
Some officials say they doubt that North Korea's leaders are ready to risk galvanizing its neighbors against it by conducting a test and removing all ambiguity about claims that it has built nuclear weapons.
"It's a very tough calculus for the North Koreans," said one senior official.
In struggling to deal with the North's threats and its demands for concessions in return for coming back to the negotiating table, the Bush administration has sent a series of seemingly mixed messages. President George W. Bush himself has repeatedly said he has no "intention" of attacking North Korea. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said several weeks ago that the US recognized the North as a sovereign state.
In a change that reflects a failure of the present policy, some officials say they will no longer rely heavily on China to sway the North Koreans. Senior officials say they now realize that China may never be willing to use its leverage over Pyongyang.
The Chinese appear to be perfectly happy to have North Korea "roll along in this seemingly stable netherworld" one official said, rather than risk destabilizing the nation, possibly unleashing a flood of desperate and hungry refugees across its eastern border.
But in the absence of talks, much of the discussion inside the administration now is about instituting strong punitive measures, including interceptions of any shipments of suspected illicit goods.
On Saturday, however, one official said that such an effort "just won't work if we can't get the Chinese to go along."
Even as the administration accepts a more pessimistic view of China's willingness to help, almost every option under discussion similarly relies on China.
A senior State Department official said the Chinese "are genuinely concerned about North Korea's nuclear weapons."
The official added: "They can make life uncomfortable for them in small ways. They are still working on it. Will they succeed? I don't know."
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS