Sayonara Iraq, G'bye Okinawa, .. when do we bomb Pyongyang ?

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso and Fukushiro Nukaga, the head of the Japanese Defense Agency met Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on Monday May 1st.They had a full agenda.

IRAQ

Fukushiro Nukaga, has called for the Japanese military contingent which is currently 600 non- combatant troops , deployed in the southern Iraqi zone of Samawah (Samaga),who help with water purification and other humanitarian projects and 200 are engaged in transport and logistics in Kuwait will pull back from Iraq in June.

Public opinion polls show the majority of Japanese oppose the mission, which has been criticized as a violation of the pacifist constitution whilst many politicians claim the deployment has made Japan a target for terrorism. Nothing has been finalised but it appears that the US have not publicly disagreed.

US TROOPS IN JAPAN

Another public concern , especially in Okinawa are the more than 40,000 US troops in Japan, more than half of them in the Okinawa chain where islanders have long demanded a reduction in the US presence.When the pentagon saod last months that they expected to Japan that they pay an estimated 26 billion dollars for re-organising troops in Japan = US$20 Bn.US$6 Bn for moving 8,000 US Marines to Guam. This will all be complete by 2014.

It appears that finally there has been an agreement a month after officials missed a self-imposed March 31 deadline by working on details of a broad realignment plan they had adopted Oct. 29 after more than three years of talks.

U.S. Consul General Thomas G. Reich on Tuesday called the plan “the most sweeping reconfiguration of bases in Japan since World War II. And it’s a big step forward for Okinawa … lessening the burden of hosting so many troops” and returning “quite a bit of base land south of Kadena Air Base.”

NORTH KOREAN "NUCLEAR WEAPONS" AND 6 PARTY TALKS

Subsequently there was some further discussion about the six party talks and Raro Aso, said “The nuclear missile issues of North Korea, are a real security issue". Jointly the US and Japan have pressed Pyongyang to resume the stalled six-nation negotiations. They said North Korea should “to return expeditiously to the talks without preconditions, to dismantle its nuclear programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner, and to cease all illicit and proliferation activities,” according to a joint statement. (Illicit = drug running , counterfeiting currency etc.,)

“There is a false notion in this town that America loses in any such discussion,” former State Department official James Kelly the former top US negotiator with North Korea, said during a speech in Washington at a conference on Monday held by the Seoul-Washington Forum sponsored by Washington-based Brookings Institution and the Seoul-based Sejong Institute.

“Reality is that direct contact may be helpful, or they may be neutral. Awkward absence (of contact) undercuts support among Asians and provides a handy excuse for North Korea to delay,” Kelly said, who has kept a fairly low profile since leaving the administration early last year and has held any criticisms largely in private.

Probably most disturbing was his warning, even though military conflict with North Korea is unlikely to occur, “tragedy is not impossible.”

“No one should ignore the possibility,” he said. “No one should be satisfied with a stretched-out non - solution in which North Korea becomes a nuclear power.”

Kelly also faulted Japan for focusing too much on North Korea’s Cold War-era abduction of Japanese nationals “incommensurate with dangers North Korean weapons present”

At the same event U.S. expert on inter-Korean relations Prof. Bruce Cummings of the University of Chicago claimed there is a high possibility that Pyongyang already has six to seven nuclear bombs. (Lord Patel is of the opinion that this is bollocks)

The man who took over on April 8th 2006 as Assistant Secretary of State is Christopher Hill, chief U.S. negotiator to the nuclear negotiations and is a career diplomat (see pic left).(Fluent in Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Albanian which limits him a trifle in Asia) He warned that electricity (intitially from March 14th this year from state-run Korea Electric Power Corp supplied power to South Korean companies in North Korea's border town of Kaesong) shortage could "“.... for every four weeks they delay, they lose $80 million, and you can do the math from here,” because they continue to boycott the 6 party talks and seek bilateral talks with the US.

Hill added that the United States would not conduct bilateral negotiations with North Korea until it agreed to resume multilateral talks.

“We are not prepared to try to sit outside the six-party process and allow D.P.R.K. to boycott the process and look for favors in order to bring them back,” he said.

Again it is unsettling that Michael Green, former Special Assistant to the President and Asia director at the National Security Council ( He has been since January at Georgetown University and He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute for International Security Studies.) says such things as ....“There is no evidence at all that the Bush administration has plans to attack North Korea.” (!)

Green claims this idea is a North Korean "mythology" dating to the 1990s when the Clinton administration considered a surgical strike on North Korean nuclear installations. A visit to Pyongyang by retired cardigan wearing U.S. President Jimmy Carter caused the administration then to rethink the plan....

Vice President Cheney and other hard-liners want to restrict meetings to a minimum and are believed to have urged such a policy on diplomats Kelly and Hill.

...you really think these mongers of war in the White House have ruled out a "surgical" nucular strike ? ... well why do the likes of Kelly and Green keep mentioning it whilst Japanes Foreign Minister Taro Aso and Japanese defense Secretary and Fukushiro Nukaga, the head of the Japanese Defense Agency are in town ?