Statement of Frank Gaffney, as Transcribed from the Press Conference, July 26
I wanted to suggest that what’s in order here is a sanity check.
It’s hard for me to imagine a more inopportune time or more inappropriate circumstances to be signaling to the North Korean regime that we are interested in some kind of new end-of-war declaration or other settlement on terms other than the end of the North Korean regime.
It is, after all, as you all know, actively engaged in some of its most belligerent behavior in decades.
It has just tested a new intercontinental-range missile or a new one, one that they have been developing for some time, which is clearly attended to threat in the United States with horrific nuclear death and destruction.
There is talk, and that has been now for some time, that there will be a nuclear test, yet another, and there certainly has been no limit to belligerent rhetoric coming out of the regime, including now with some regular threats of nuclear attack against South Korea and I think against us as well.
That is kind of a problem. Then there is the problem that the North Korean regime under the Korean dynasty has not honored a single agreement that it has entered into. Not one.
Samuel Johnson, the famous British wit, had a marvelous turn of phrase about second marriages being the triumph of hope over experience.
That is true of states, of people who think that one more deal will result in a different outcome. Einstein said that was insanity, and it is, in this case.
But perilously, reckless insanity like that.
Let’s be clear. The North Korean regime under successive Kim [unintelligible] has never wavered from its determination to destroy South Korea.
To unify with it by force and to force it to submit to the same horrors that have been inflicted upon the people of North Korea.
It is beyond my comprehension that anyone thinks that an agreement that legitimizes the Kim dynasty is a good idea.
To say nothing of under the present circumstances and so on. When they have not departed from a goal that we have spent tens of thousands of American lives, and countless amounts of treasure trying to ensure did not happen, namely the conquest of our friends and allies in South Korea.
The other piece of this, and I think David talked a little bit about it, is that inevitably, just so we are again perfectly clear, what flows from an end-of-war declaration will be pressure to remove U.S. forces from South Korea.
And I’m convinced, I think successive administrations of the United States have been convinced, I would like to think the present one included, that the thing that has prevented North Korea from acting on its determined efforts in interests and objective of destroying South Korea is the presence of American forces in South Korea.
Why anyone would think, and honestly, Brad Sherman’s fill up on this latest iteration of this ill-advised legislation, that nothing in this is intended to conduce to the withdrawal of American forces as a matter of fact, is frankly a very thin fig leaf.
It ignores the inevitable reality that people will press to have our forces withdrawn. People in South Korea, people here, and I think again that simply invites aggression that we have invested enormously over many years in preventing.
Lastly, I just would say, and David did talk about this too. In addition to legitimizing arguably the most odious regime on the planet, and that is saying something, and I shamelessly promote it – I’ve written a book published in May titled “The Indictment”, which talks about the Chinese Communist Party as in a class by itself in terms of the horrors that it has inflicted on its own people and others.
But the North Koreans may be pikers by comparison to the Chinese Communist Party, but they work for the Chinese Communist Party, and they aspire to do in their way, whatever they can, to rival the oppression, the terror, and the rapaciousness of their Chinese Communist Party master’s invasion.
Human rights in South Korea, as well as in North Korea, should remain our fixed object, protecting them, recovering them, and otherwise safeguarding them.
Anything that diverts us from that, specifically something that is as fraught as this particular idea under these particular circumstances, in the face of the hostility of this particular regime, is, I believe, the height of irresponsibility.
The good news is it isn’t going to go anywhere in the United States Congress. So we need to make sure that the Biden administration does not think it would be a good idea to do it on its own.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
