http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
October 09, 2006
By Josh Marshall
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For the US this is a strategic failure of the first order.
The origins of the failure are ones anyone familiar with the last six
years in this country will readily recognize:
chest-thumping followed by failure followed by cover-up and denial.
The same story as Iraq.
Even the same story as Foley.
North Korea's nuclear program has been a problem for US presidents
going back to Reagan, and the conflict between North and South has
been a key issue for US presidents going back to Truman.
As recently as 1994, the US came far closer to war with North Korea
than most Americans realize.
President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart
agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of
plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear
reactors (the kind that don't help making bombs) and a vague promise
of diplomatic normalization.
President Bush came to office believing that Clinton's policy amounted
to appeasement.
Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of
force, diplomacy and aide.
And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994
agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium
enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years:
Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.
All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush's idea was that the
North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton's mix of
carrots and sticks.
Then in the winter of 2002-3, the US prepared the invade Iraq, the
North called Bush's bluff.
And the president folded.
Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren't so
grave and vast.
Threats are a potent force if you're willing to follow through on
them.
But he wasn't.
The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994,
got unshuttered.
And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this
correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked
almost four years ago.
So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his
bluff and he folded.
And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics
to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially
nothing.
Indeed, from the moment of the initial cave, the White House began
acting as though North Korea was already a nuclear power
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/000826.php (something that
was then not at all clear) to obscure the fact that the White House
had chosen to twiddle its thumbs and look the other way as North Korea
became a nuclear power.
Like in Bush in Iraq and Hastert and Foley, the problem was left to
smolder in cover-up and denial.
Until now.
Hawks and Bush sycophants will claim that North Korea is an outlaw
regime.
And no one should romanticize or ignore the fact that it is one of the
most repressive regimes in the world with a history of belligerence,
terrorist bombing, missile proliferation and a lot else.
http://www.burmanet.org/news/2006/02/23/yonhap-news-agency-calls-rise-for-review-of-1983-rangoon-bombing-by-north-korea-kim-hyung-jin/
They'll also claim that the North Koreans were breaking the spirit if
not the letter of the 1994 agreement by pursuing a covert uranium
enrichment program.
And that's probably true too.
But facts are stubborn things.
The bomb-grade plutonium that was on ice from 1994 to 2002 is now
actual bombs.
Try as you might it is difficult to imagine a policy -- any policy --
which would have yielded a worse result than the one we will face
Monday morning.
Talking tough is great if you can make it stick and back it up;
it is always and necessarily cleaner and less compromising than
sitting down and dealing with bad actors.
Talking tough and then folding your cards doesn't just show weakness
it invites contempt.
And that is what we have here.
The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria
once aptly called "a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots."
It failed.
And after it failed President Bush couldn't come to grips with that
failure and change course.
He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and
basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem
would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that
no one would notice.
Do you notice now?
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Harry
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