Isn't Fostering North Korean Nuclear Weapons Anti-Patriotic??
Since we have had the government initiate an ever-so-rare treason case in the last week or so, I have to ask whether the non-elected white-houser isn't an even more logical potential target for that charge. We had NK nukes kicked years down the road until george's laziness (actually probably cowardice) when it comes to the hard work of actual negotiations (it would interfere with those glorious months of bike rides and brush-cutting) restarted this particular terrorist.
Come to think of it, have terrorists ever had a better bosom buddy? He and Osama are obviously natural buds, each having had their careers gloriously enhanced and extended by the other. But he and Kim Il are obviously also sneaking out at nights together too. Do you suppose the three of them get together? And which combinations of them have also partied with Mr. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear proliferator?
The North Korean imbroglio, besides scaring the bejeebers out of some, does an exceptional job of limning the routine foreign "policy" of the bush-cheney-rumsfeld-rice gang. This excerpt from a great essay may be helpful in reminding how we got where we are and as fodder for nudging those around us who may be prone to get their "news" from sycophantic bush-could-never-do-wrong sources to at least entertain some doubt.
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Think about this for a moment. We were considering going to war with Iraq, ostensibly because we were worried that it had weapons of mass destruction that it might sell to terrorists. Suddenly, we discover that North Korea, which is willing to sell more or less anything to anyone, is trying to make not just any old WMD -- not, say, mustard gas or anthrax -- but nuclear weapons. On any plausible view of our rationale for going to war with Iraq, North Korea had just revealed itself to be a much more serious threat than Iraq.
The obvious response would have been to put Iraq aside while we tried to come up with a solution to the more pressing problem of North Korea's nuclear program. Bush's response was to conceal this more pressing problem lest it distract us from the one he wanted to deal with. That's like not telling someone he's flunked out of school because you're afraid it will distract him from his upcoming social studies quiz. It makes no sense at all, if you're actually worried about the threats in question.
Bush announced that he was withdrawing from the Agreed Framework. North Korea then announced that it was withdrawing from the NPT. It put out some diplomatic feelers, but got nowhere. Then, in early 2003:
"U.S. spy satellites detected trucks pulling up to the site where the fuel rods were stored, then driving away toward the reprocessing facility. When Kim Il Sung threatened to take this step back in 1994, Clinton warned that it would cross a "red line." When Kim Jong-il actually did it in 2003, George W. Bush did nothing.
Specialists inside the U.S. government were flabbergasted. This was serious business. Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation changed: Even if we could get the North Koreans back to the bargaining table, even if they would agree to drive the fuel rods back, we could never be certain that they'd totally disarmed; we could never know if they still had some undeclared plutonium hidden in an underground chamber. (Even before this crisis, the CIA estimated that the North Koreans might have built one or two bombs from the plutonium it had reprocessed between 1989 and 1994.)"
Flabbergasted is the appropriate word here. In May 2003, Bush "declared that the United States and South Korea “will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea.”" That's drawing a line in the sand and announcing that you will not allow it to be crossed. When the North Koreans removed the fuel from Yongbyon, they crossed what should have been a red line, one over which Clinton had been prepared to go to war. But Bush did nothing. From the NYT:
"“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world’s sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that’s it?”
Mr. Allison was touching on the central dilemma facing Washington as it tries to extract itself from the morass of Iraq. Whether accurately or not, other countries around the world perceive Washington as tied down, unable or unwilling to challenge them while 140,000 troops are trying to tame a sectarian war."
We allowed North Korea to take an irrevocable step that made any future attempts to control its nuclear weapons program vastly more difficult. Moreover, we laid down a line, we let it be crossed, and then we did nothing. In so doing, we forfeited our credibility. And that really is a foreign policy disaster. It ought to be completely unacceptable.
***
Since then, our policy towards North Korea has been, essentially, frozen. We spent ages arguing about whether to have bilateral or multilateral talks, when the best solution would obviously been to have both. Once the six-party talks actually got started, we seem to have been relying on the good offices of the People's Republic of China rather than displaying any leadership ourselves. Throughout this period, and later, the Bush administration seemed to have no consistent policy at all.
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Come to think of it, have terrorists ever had a better bosom buddy? He and Osama are obviously natural buds, each having had their careers gloriously enhanced and extended by the other. But he and Kim Il are obviously also sneaking out at nights together too. Do you suppose the three of them get together? And which combinations of them have also partied with Mr. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear proliferator?
The North Korean imbroglio, besides scaring the bejeebers out of some, does an exceptional job of limning the routine foreign "policy" of the bush-cheney-rumsfeld-rice gang. This excerpt from a great essay may be helpful in reminding how we got where we are and as fodder for nudging those around us who may be prone to get their "news" from sycophantic bush-could-never-do-wrong sources to at least entertain some doubt.
-clip-
Think about this for a moment. We were considering going to war with Iraq, ostensibly because we were worried that it had weapons of mass destruction that it might sell to terrorists. Suddenly, we discover that North Korea, which is willing to sell more or less anything to anyone, is trying to make not just any old WMD -- not, say, mustard gas or anthrax -- but nuclear weapons. On any plausible view of our rationale for going to war with Iraq, North Korea had just revealed itself to be a much more serious threat than Iraq.
The obvious response would have been to put Iraq aside while we tried to come up with a solution to the more pressing problem of North Korea's nuclear program. Bush's response was to conceal this more pressing problem lest it distract us from the one he wanted to deal with. That's like not telling someone he's flunked out of school because you're afraid it will distract him from his upcoming social studies quiz. It makes no sense at all, if you're actually worried about the threats in question.
Bush announced that he was withdrawing from the Agreed Framework. North Korea then announced that it was withdrawing from the NPT. It put out some diplomatic feelers, but got nowhere. Then, in early 2003:
"U.S. spy satellites detected trucks pulling up to the site where the fuel rods were stored, then driving away toward the reprocessing facility. When Kim Il Sung threatened to take this step back in 1994, Clinton warned that it would cross a "red line." When Kim Jong-il actually did it in 2003, George W. Bush did nothing.
Specialists inside the U.S. government were flabbergasted. This was serious business. Once those fuel rods left the storage site, once reprocessing began, once plutonium was manufactured, the strategic situation changed: Even if we could get the North Koreans back to the bargaining table, even if they would agree to drive the fuel rods back, we could never be certain that they'd totally disarmed; we could never know if they still had some undeclared plutonium hidden in an underground chamber. (Even before this crisis, the CIA estimated that the North Koreans might have built one or two bombs from the plutonium it had reprocessed between 1989 and 1994.)"
Flabbergasted is the appropriate word here. In May 2003, Bush "declared that the United States and South Korea “will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea.”" That's drawing a line in the sand and announcing that you will not allow it to be crossed. When the North Koreans removed the fuel from Yongbyon, they crossed what should have been a red line, one over which Clinton had been prepared to go to war. But Bush did nothing. From the NYT:
"“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world’s sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that’s it?”
Mr. Allison was touching on the central dilemma facing Washington as it tries to extract itself from the morass of Iraq. Whether accurately or not, other countries around the world perceive Washington as tied down, unable or unwilling to challenge them while 140,000 troops are trying to tame a sectarian war."
We allowed North Korea to take an irrevocable step that made any future attempts to control its nuclear weapons program vastly more difficult. Moreover, we laid down a line, we let it be crossed, and then we did nothing. In so doing, we forfeited our credibility. And that really is a foreign policy disaster. It ought to be completely unacceptable.
***
Since then, our policy towards North Korea has been, essentially, frozen. We spent ages arguing about whether to have bilateral or multilateral talks, when the best solution would obviously been to have both. Once the six-party talks actually got started, we seem to have been relying on the good offices of the People's Republic of China rather than displaying any leadership ourselves. Throughout this period, and later, the Bush administration seemed to have no consistent policy at all.
-clip-
posted by Sir Gumbo at 9:52 PM
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