It’s hard to disagree with Charles Krauthammer’s assessment:
Just four months after Sept. 11, George Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the “axis of evil” and declared that defanging these rogue regimes was America’s most urgent national security task. Bush will be judged on whether he succeeded.
Six years later and with time running out on this administration, the Bush legacy is clear: one for three. Contrary to current public opinion, Bush will have succeeded on Iraq, failed on Iran and fought North Korea to a draw.
<more> And in closing, Krauthammer reminds us of a bit of true history:
It took Bush three years to find his general (as it did Lincoln) and turn a losing war into a winnable one. Baghdad and Washington are currently discussing a long-term basing agreement that could give the United States a permanent military presence in the region and a close cooperative relationship with the most important country in the Middle East heartland — a major strategic achievement.
Nonetheless, the pressure on this administration and the next to get out prematurely will remain. There are those for whom our only objective in Iraq is reducing troop levels rather than securing a potentially critical Arab ally in a region of supreme strategic significance.
I will speculate that this John Bolton piece is the most accurate we’ll see on the NOKO intelligence flap. Yes, Bolton could be spinning, but my take is that if he is willing to talk, he talks straight. Which may not be a Good Thing for a long pants diplomat.
Washington’s most important person–the Anonymous Senior Official (”ASO”)–was busy last week, briefing reporters on North Korea’s uranium enrichment program.
The North’s pursuit of nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment, an alternative to reprocessing plutonium from spent fuel at the Yongbyon reactor, constituted both a material breach of the 1994 Agreed Framework and an enormous challenge to the hope that it could ever be negotiated out of pursuing nuclear weapons. Based, however, on one public comment and much work by Mr./Ms. ASO, the media last week set about deconstructing a critical strategic concern underlying Bush administration Korea policy. According to their breathless reporting, yet another threat to America was disappearing, revealed as simply more intelligence hype from an administration that apparently did little else in its first term.
The reports raise three separate issues. First, what exactly is the intelligence judgment about North Korea’s enrichment activities, and how valid was it in 2002? Second, what are the implications for the administration’s ongoing negotiations with North Korea? And third, is Mr./Ms. ASO speaking for the Bush administration, or for those elements in the permanent bureaucracy that have consistently opposed key elements of the Bush foreign policy, at least as conducted until recently?
On the first question, concerning North Korea’s enrichment activities, there is actually less here than meets the eye. The only attributable public comment is from Joseph DeTrani, mission manager for North Korea for the Director of National Intelligence, who said that he now had a “mid-confidence level” about North Korea’s program, down from “high confidence.” Mr. DeTrani’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee recounted how, in October 2002, the U.S. confronted Pyongyang “with information they were acquiring material sufficient for a production-scale capability of enriching uranium,” and how North Korea “admitted to having such a program.” Mr. DeTrani continued, “we’ve never walked away from that issue.” Indeed, in 2002, intelligence community officials told me that new evidence erased existing, long-standing disagreements within the community about what the North was up to since the mid-1990s, producing a remarkable consensus that has not, to my knowledge, broken down since.
…And that brings us to the third issue: Where exactly is the administration headed? Mr./Ms. ASO’s identity is by definition unknown, but the view is spreading that this backgrounding is more than the bureaucracy’s ruminations. I have my own unnamed senior officials who tell me it’s not so, but the question remains. President Bush himself must speak, and sooner rather than later, to tell us what he thinks of the intelligence, and the direction of his own policy. Recent polls show his approval rating near 30%, with support among Republicans falling precipitously. If the president’s conservative base erodes further, where will his support come from? From liberal editorialists enthusing about his newfound foreign policy “pragmatism”? Based on my personal experience, the president will not have both.
RTWT.
The most useful analysis I’ve seen so far is from Richard Fernandez, who has reviewed the deal with Dr. Robert Ayson of the Australian National University. There are several key issues raised - one is that North Korea’s primary aid lifeline depends upon their nuclear threat:
…there is the circumstance that the nuclear threat is actually Pyongyang’s meal ticket. Giving up its nuclear program is essentially to dismantle its sole means of support. In a really curious type of feedback loop, the more nuclear weapons North Korea has the more of both sanctions and concessions it can hope for. The fewer weapons it has the fewer sanctions and inducements it can expect. North Korea’s past track record suggests it will be loathe to every fully give up its WMD program.
As usual with Richard’s work, RTWT.
Another Kofi Annan scandal
Whatever the motive, the Cash for Kim scandal is one more blot on the record of former Secretary General Kofi Annan. It also raises questions about the role played in North Korea by Maurice Strong, the Canadian who was Mr. Annan’s envoy to Pyongyang.
We’d feel a lot better if the U.N. had quickly responded to U.S. queries and tried to get to the bottom of the mess at UNDP. But the exchange of letters between U.S. Ambassador Mark Wallace and UNDP officials described by Ms. Kirkpatrick is certainly reminiscent of the early U.N. stonewalling on Oil for Food.
Mr. Wallace and his colleagues from other nations on the UNDP executive board are right to demand a stop to the program and an independent investigation. The U.N.’s new Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, could make his own early mark by calling for a probe as part of a new era of U.N. transparency. Democrats in Congress could also be constructive by insisting on accountability, especially given how much stock they put in a competent U.N. to promote American security.
One lesson of Oil for Food, and its failure to lead to any serious reform, is that to some foreign policy elites there can be no such thing as a U.N. “scandal.” That’s because for them the U.N. is all about good intentions, and the hopes and dreams for peace, rather than about actual results. But it is precisely that forbearance that has allowed too many dictators to exploit the U.N. for their own purposes, and has brought Turtle Bay to its current low ebb. Getting to the bottom of Cash for Kim is one more chance to make the U.N. shape up, and to stop financing a global menace in the bargain.
Austin Bay: The bitter irony of times is the ability of dictators to threaten neighbors with their own collapse..
The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks “amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world.” South Korea’s military estimates half of North’s long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable.
Watching the United Nations Security Council grind its way to a compromise resolution on North Korea, it’s hard to avoid returning to one question: What took them so long to do something about North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction? Over the past 45 years, North Korea has assembled a huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons - namely biological and chemical weapons. Yet it is only when North Korea gets as far as possible nuclear capability the U.N. rouses itself from its slumbers and waddles into action.
I’ve been writing and researching the subject of biological and chemical warfare on and off for six years. The extent of North Korea’s completely operational biochemical warfare program is widely known and frequently assessed by the U.S. and its allies, as well as many non-proliferation organizations such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague in the Netherlands. North Korea’s program has been in development since the ’60s under the control of the fabulously Orwellian Fifth Machine Industry Bureau. In that time, North Korea’s Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) program has assembled a formidable array of poisons, toxins, chemicals and weaponized germs…
John Bolton, now leading the charge at the U.N., gave a speech in 2002 as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in which he stated: “North Korea has a dedicated, national level effort to achieve a BW capacity and has developed and produced and may have weaponized, BW agents …. the leadership in Pyongyang has spent large sums of money to acquire the resources ….. capable of producing infectious agents, toxins and other crude biological weapons. It likely has the capability to produce sufficient quantities of biological agents for military purposes within weeks of deciding to do so and has a variety of means at its disposal for delivering these deadly weapons.”
…In contrast, as one North Korea expert explained to me, CBW is mass destruction on the cheap. “Biological and chemical weapons are very inexpensive, many, many times cheaper than nuclear.” Another expert gave this grim assessment: “The use of anthrax is a distinct possibility for this nation [North Korea].”
I know that a lot of Americans long to return to the holiday from history that we enjoyed from the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But, alas, while we were on holiday, the forces of evil determined to destroy us were gathering strength.
Michael Barone asks “What Is Kim Jong Il Up To?“.
I’m not sure what to make of Michael Yon’s post at The Corner:
A very well-placed government source told me Tuesday afternoon that the North Korean explosion was non-nuclear. The explosion may have been an actual nuclear test — this is unknown — but the source reports the outcome was non-nuclear. The source stressed the importance of bearing in mind that though the explosion occured in North Korea — if it was actually a test and not merely a dictator clamoring for attention and influence — the test may have been by or for the Iranians. The source reported that American physicists with access to the information see no sign of nuclear activity, however. My source also mentioned that Japanese sensors picked up no radiation signatures.
McCain posted this at Ed Morrisey’s blog!
…I would remind Senator Hillary Clinton and other Democrats critical of Bush Administration policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure. The Koreans received millions in energy assistance. They diverted millions in food assistance to their military. And what did they do? They secretly enriched uranium.
Prior to the agreement, every single time the Clinton Administration warned the Koreans not to do something — not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor — they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton Administration with further talks. We had a carrots and no sticks policy that only encouraged bad behavior. When one carrot didn’t work, we offered another.
This isn’t just about North Korea. Iran is watching this test of the Council’s will, and our decisions will surely influence their response to demands that they cease their nuclear program. Now, we must, at long last, stop reinforcing failure with failure.
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