Koreans say Libya proves need for strong defense [Workers World]
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has drawn an important conclusion from the unprovoked bombing of Libya by U.S. and NATO forces: Developing countries should never let down their guard and believe promises made by the imperialists.
In 2003 the U.S. got Libya to agree to dismantle its nuclear weapons program after giving the Libyan government guarantees of its security. Today, as the imperialist countries continue to drop their bombs on Libya, anyone can see that those guarantees were worthless.
Libya made several important concessions to the U.S., NATO and the International Monetary Fund after Washington’s unprovoked attack on Iraq in March 2003. The U.S. had invaded Iraq on the pretext that it had weapons of mass destruction — which was later exposed as a lie. The Pentagon was able to destroy much of that country’s infrastructure and open the door for U.S. oil companies to get hold of Iraq’s most valuable resource.
Libya, another oil-rich country in the region, must have felt vulnerable. In December 2003 it agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees from the U.S.
Now look at what has happened! The U.S., Britain and France have been bombing Libya to try to accomplish there what they did in Iraq: Destroy a government that blocked them from taking over its resources and economy.
In 1950, after a socialist revolution there, the U.S. imperialists invaded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. After three years of a devastating war that killed millions of people, the U.S. agreed to a cease-fire but refused to sign a peace treaty — meaning that Washington has technically been at war with the DPRK ever since. U.S. bases have become permanent fixtures in southern Korea, and the U.S. has been staging joint war exercises off the shores of north Korea with both Japan and the south Korean regime.
At the same time, the world’s biggest nuclear power has put enormous pressure on the DPRK to abandon its efforts to build its own nuclear defense, which the Koreans call “Songun.” However, a representative of the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK told a reporter on March 22:
“The present Libyan crisis teaches the international community a serious lesson.
“It was fully exposed before the world that ‘Libya’s nuclear dismantlement,’ much touted by the U.S. in the past, turned out to be a mode of aggression whereby the latter coaxed the former with such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations’ to disarm itself and then swallowed it up by force.
“It proved once again the truth of history that peace can be preserved only when one builds up one’s own strength, as long as high-handed and arbitrary practices go on in the world.
“The DPRK was quite just when it took the path of Songun and the military capacity for self-defense built up in this course serves as a very valuable deterrent for averting a war and defending peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”