HeXp£Øi±
Well-Known Member
On the subject of North Korea, there are two groups of people in Washington today: People who are terrified, and people who aren't paying attention. Unfortunately, the latter category seems to include the president of the United States.
In recent days, Pyongyang has begun an escalating series of military provocations. On February 20, a North Korean fighter jet crossed into South Korean airspace, leading Seoul to scramble its own jets and put a missile battery on high alert. On February 24, North Korea greeted the inauguration of South Korea's new president by launching an anti-ship missile into the Sea of Japan. And, on March 1, North Korean MiGs trailed a U.S. spy plane for 22 minutes, the first such incident since 1969. "If an encounter like this happens again," a former North Korean general told The Washington Post, "I think they will shoot down the U.S. plane. North Koreans don't have any fear of war."
But all this pales before the provocation looming in the distance: Pyongyang's reopening of the Yongbyon nuclear reprocessing plant. U.S. spy satellites show feverish activity around the long-dormant site, and Bush administration officials say they expect it will be reopened within weeks. "Once they start reprocessing," an American official recently told The New York Times' David Sanger, "it's a [nuclear] bomb a month from now until summer." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress in February that North Korea might well sell that nuclear material to "a non-state actor or a rogue state."
Not long ago, administration officials were telling journalists that the reopening of Yongbyon was a "red line." More recently, as Pyongyang has gotten closer to crossing it, the Bush team has taken a more accommodating line--suggesting that the plant's reactivation will jolt North Korea's neighbors into finally applying serious diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. But that's probably a pipe dream. Once North Korea starts turning spent fuel rods into plutonium, its willingness to negotiate away Yongbyon will dramatically diminish. And, if it becomes clear that diplomatic overtures are worthless, the Bush administration will feel enormous pressure to do something to prevent Pyongyang from producing bombs that could end up in Al Qaeda's hands.
Already, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration are tiptoeing in the direction of a preemptive strike. In the March issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik writes, "Not only does the North's belligerence leave us no choice but to `think' about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves." Defense Policy Review Board Chairman Richard Perle recently said the Bush administration needed to consider ways to "neutralize" North Korea's massive military firepower. As the Nelson Report, an influential Washington newsletter on Asian policy, put it last week, "The dirty little secret ... is that some Bush hard-liners not only are willing to risk war, they think that if the U.S. pushes hard enough, N. Korea will prove to be a paper tiger and swiftly collapse." When Pyongyang begins building nukes and the U.S. military is done toppling Saddam, that dirty little secret will become a full-blown policy option.
Given these circumstances, you'd think the president and his top advisers would be frantic. Instead, they're eerily sanguine. For weeks now, Bush officials have been denying that North Korea's behavior constitutes a "crisis." Secretary of State Colin Powell called Pyongyang's missile test "fairly innocuous" and "not surprising." One Bush official told Sanger that "nothing is happening--and no one knows how we will respond when the bomb-making starts."
The administration would like observers to interpret its calm as steely resolve. But it actually signifies a refusal to face reality. The Bush administration says it wants multilateral talks with Pyongyang and a series of other countries, including South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan. The theory behind this approach is that only a united front among North Korea's neighbors can exert the pressure necessary to convince Kim Jong Il to turn back. But the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti-Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone.
Recognizing this diplomatic reality means accepting unconditional, one-on-one talks with Pyongyang. There's a modest chance such negotiations could defer the reopening of Yongbyon. (One China insider speculated to Chris Nelson recently that, if the United States made progress in such negotiations, Beijing might use its leverage with Pyongyang to help secure a deal.) But, whether or not such talks avert an international crisis, they would create a domestic political one. For conservatives--who have called Bill Clinton an appeaser and a dupe for his 1994 deal with Kim Jong Il--unconditional, bilateral talks by the Bush administration would constitute something close to a betrayal. Indeed, when senior Bushies seemed to contemplate them last fall, they were roundly denounced on the right. And now the president has reportedly prohibited top officials from even raising the possibility.
The administration may be waiting to begin bilateral talks until after an Iraq war, when presumably it will be in a position of overwhelming domestic political strength. But, by that time, Yongbyon may well be up and running (many experts think North Korea will deliberately start the reactor while the United States is at war), and thus it will probably be too late. Today, when it really matters, the Bush administration effectively has no policy at all.
If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, "If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense."
This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americans realize. And, whether out of political self-interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn't seem to mind.
Source
The New Republic
In recent days, Pyongyang has begun an escalating series of military provocations. On February 20, a North Korean fighter jet crossed into South Korean airspace, leading Seoul to scramble its own jets and put a missile battery on high alert. On February 24, North Korea greeted the inauguration of South Korea's new president by launching an anti-ship missile into the Sea of Japan. And, on March 1, North Korean MiGs trailed a U.S. spy plane for 22 minutes, the first such incident since 1969. "If an encounter like this happens again," a former North Korean general told The Washington Post, "I think they will shoot down the U.S. plane. North Koreans don't have any fear of war."
But all this pales before the provocation looming in the distance: Pyongyang's reopening of the Yongbyon nuclear reprocessing plant. U.S. spy satellites show feverish activity around the long-dormant site, and Bush administration officials say they expect it will be reopened within weeks. "Once they start reprocessing," an American official recently told The New York Times' David Sanger, "it's a [nuclear] bomb a month from now until summer." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress in February that North Korea might well sell that nuclear material to "a non-state actor or a rogue state."
Not long ago, administration officials were telling journalists that the reopening of Yongbyon was a "red line." More recently, as Pyongyang has gotten closer to crossing it, the Bush team has taken a more accommodating line--suggesting that the plant's reactivation will jolt North Korea's neighbors into finally applying serious diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. But that's probably a pipe dream. Once North Korea starts turning spent fuel rods into plutonium, its willingness to negotiate away Yongbyon will dramatically diminish. And, if it becomes clear that diplomatic overtures are worthless, the Bush administration will feel enormous pressure to do something to prevent Pyongyang from producing bombs that could end up in Al Qaeda's hands.
Already, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration are tiptoeing in the direction of a preemptive strike. In the March issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik writes, "Not only does the North's belligerence leave us no choice but to `think' about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves." Defense Policy Review Board Chairman Richard Perle recently said the Bush administration needed to consider ways to "neutralize" North Korea's massive military firepower. As the Nelson Report, an influential Washington newsletter on Asian policy, put it last week, "The dirty little secret ... is that some Bush hard-liners not only are willing to risk war, they think that if the U.S. pushes hard enough, N. Korea will prove to be a paper tiger and swiftly collapse." When Pyongyang begins building nukes and the U.S. military is done toppling Saddam, that dirty little secret will become a full-blown policy option.
Given these circumstances, you'd think the president and his top advisers would be frantic. Instead, they're eerily sanguine. For weeks now, Bush officials have been denying that North Korea's behavior constitutes a "crisis." Secretary of State Colin Powell called Pyongyang's missile test "fairly innocuous" and "not surprising." One Bush official told Sanger that "nothing is happening--and no one knows how we will respond when the bomb-making starts."
The administration would like observers to interpret its calm as steely resolve. But it actually signifies a refusal to face reality. The Bush administration says it wants multilateral talks with Pyongyang and a series of other countries, including South Korea, Russia, China, and Japan. The theory behind this approach is that only a united front among North Korea's neighbors can exert the pressure necessary to convince Kim Jong Il to turn back. But the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti-Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone.
Recognizing this diplomatic reality means accepting unconditional, one-on-one talks with Pyongyang. There's a modest chance such negotiations could defer the reopening of Yongbyon. (One China insider speculated to Chris Nelson recently that, if the United States made progress in such negotiations, Beijing might use its leverage with Pyongyang to help secure a deal.) But, whether or not such talks avert an international crisis, they would create a domestic political one. For conservatives--who have called Bill Clinton an appeaser and a dupe for his 1994 deal with Kim Jong Il--unconditional, bilateral talks by the Bush administration would constitute something close to a betrayal. Indeed, when senior Bushies seemed to contemplate them last fall, they were roundly denounced on the right. And now the president has reportedly prohibited top officials from even raising the possibility.
The administration may be waiting to begin bilateral talks until after an Iraq war, when presumably it will be in a position of overwhelming domestic political strength. But, by that time, Yongbyon may well be up and running (many experts think North Korea will deliberately start the reactor while the United States is at war), and thus it will probably be too late. Today, when it really matters, the Bush administration effectively has no policy at all.
If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, "If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense."
This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americans realize. And, whether out of political self-interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn't seem to mind.
Source
The New Republic
Damn Hex...Does it always have to be a term paper?
"Told you the dummy was crazy..."
