The Unknown Candidate: All Threats, No Talk

Monday, October 09, 2006

All Threats, No Talk

Nicholas Kristof talks foreign policy sense in today's Times op ed, while highlighting the ever-mounting failures of the neo-con-artists' ideological, idiotic, foreign policy.

Are you feeling safer yet?

Talking With the Monsters
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

If there’s one overriding lesson from North Korea’s apparent nuclear test, it’s this: We need to negotiate directly even with hostile and brutal regimes.

It’s probably too late to clean up the mess that President Bush has made on the Korean peninsula, but there is time to apply the lesson to Syria and especially Iran — where we may soon be facing a third military conflict in a Muslim country.

As former Secretary of State James Baker noted in an ABC News interview on Sunday: “I believe in talking to your enemies. ... It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies."

As former Secretary of State James Baker noted in an ABC News interview on Sunday: “I believe in talking to your enemies. ... It’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

The administrations of both the first President Bush and of President Clinton talked to North Korea. That engagement sometimes seemed distasteful, but it averted war and created incentives for North Korea to moderate its behavior — just a bit.

The bottom line is reflected in the plutonium obtained by North Korea. Here’s the scorecard: Amount obtained during the Clinton administration, zero; amount obtained under this administration, enough for about eight nuclear weapons. (North Korea has also tried since late in the Clinton administration to enrich uranium for a separate path to nuclear weapons, but apparently still hasn’t succeeded and perhaps never will.)

“By not having any contact, we’ve lost any way of controlling or directing the outcome,” noted James Laney, a longtime Korea specialist and former ambassador to South Korea. “As this test indicates, we’re completely out of the picture.”

The real culprit, of course, is not President Bush but Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s “Dear Leader.” That said, if Colin Powell and other administration moderates had been allowed to engage North Korea as they had wanted, we would not now be caught in this nuclear crisis.

Administration hard-liners believe that North Korea’s regime may collapse at any moment. Maybe. But when I visited last year, the regime seemed as solid (and repressive) as when I first visited in 1989. Sure, it will collapse at some point, but waiting for disintegration is not a strategy.

Indeed, North Korea may be less vulnerable now, partly because its economy has improved significantly since the late 1990’s as a result of increasing trade with China. Last year, North Korea’s trade with China was double the level of 2002 and quadruple that of 1999.

The China-North Korea border crossing at Sanhe has just expanded its operations, and trade could rise sharply if the two countries follow through on discussions to expand rail links and export Chinese containers from the North Korean port of Rajin.

Mr. Bush’s push for tough U.N. resolutions is welcome but is no substitute for direct talks. The reality is that even if China and South Korea were willing to apply tough economic sanctions to the North — which they are not — the Dear Leader would stick to his guns. After all, this is a man who imported Mercedes-Benzes in the late 1990’s while two million of his compatriots were dying in a famine.

So our huffing and puffing won’t cause North Korea to back down, but we could drift toward greater dangers: If we move to enforce naval inspections of ships coming in and out of North Korea, the Dear Leader will threaten war. I doubt if he means it — but I still wouldn’t buy real estate in Tokyo, Okinawa or Seoul right now.

So what should we do?

While proceeding with U.N. resolutions, we should also talk to North Korea directly. It’s probably too late to persuade it to give up its nuclear arsenal, but it’s plausible that it would freeze plutonium production and suspend missile and nuclear tests. Those are feasible goals that China might use its leverage to help achieve.

To show that talking with enemies doesn’t mean rolling over, we can also insist on raising human rights issues. American conservatives have led the way in protesting brutality in North Korea, but the protests simply aren’t effective. The U.S. government could add to the pressure by going public with satellite images of concentration camps and publicizing other intelligence about North Korean human rights abuses.

The challenge is larger than North Korea, though — it concerns how to stand up to all of the world’s rogue regimes. Notably, in the two where Mr. Bush has tried engagement he has enjoyed bits of success. Those are Sudan and Libya.

Even though Mr. Bush says that Sudan is engaging in genocide in Darfur, we continue (quite properly) to negotiate with Khartoum — and that helped end the war between north and south Sudan, after two million deaths. Likewise, negotiations with Libya led it to give up its W.M.D. programs.

In contrast, we eschewed most direct diplomacy with North Korea and Iraq, and the result has been disastrous. So as we lurch ahead toward a showdown with Iran, let’s remember the historical evidence: We sometimes do better talking to monsters than trying to slay them or wish them away.

Photo credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Norman Solomon: Welcome to the Nuclear Club!
"Rest assured that while President Bush was at a podium in the White House on Monday denouncing the North Korean nuclear test as a 'provocative act,' Karl Rove was hard at work to fine-tune plans for a rhetorical onslaught linking this crisis to the 'war on terror.' Bush was already laying the groundwork for such an effort as he spoke -- warning of 'a grave threat to the United States' if North Korea gives nuclear-related technology to 'any state or non-state actor.'

For the next four weeks, the Bush administration will do its best to exploit the North Korean nuclear test to stave off a loss of the Republican majority in Congress. We should not allow those efforts to obscure how Bush's reckless record has heightened the nuclear dangers for everyone."
Bush is Making us Safer?!
Experts warn of an accidental atomic war / Nuclear missile modified for conventional attack on Iran could set off alarm in Russia.
North Korea; another foreign policy meltdown
It took 6 years of relentless threats, sanctions and belligerence, but Bush finally succeeded in pushing Kim Jong-Il to build North Korea’s first nuclear bomb. Now, Kim can just add a few finishing touches to his ballistic-missile delivery system, the Taepo-dong ICBM, and he’ll be able to wipe out the 9 western states with a flip of the switch.
Truthdig - Chris Hedges: Bush's Nuclear Apocalypse
The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.
The New Yorker: THE COLD TEST - What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program.
Last June, four months before the curren crisis over North Korea became public, th Central Intelligence Agency delivered comprehensive analysis of North Korea' nuclear ambitions to President Bush and his to advisers. The document, known as a Nationa Intelligence Estimate, was classified as To Secret S.C.I. (for "sensitive compartmente information"), and its distribution within th government was tightly restricted. The C.I.A report made the case that North Korea had bee violating international law—and agreement with South Korea and the United States—by secretly obtaining the means to produc weapons-grade uranium

The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan. Since 1997, the C.I.A. said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology, warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime. Pakistan, one of the Bush Administration's important allies in the war against terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.