RSS
Using PayPal
Paul Glastris: Character over Capability
Share / Recommend - Comment - Print - Friday, Jul 29 2005, 11:04PM
I took Peter Scoblic's suggestion and read his new piece in The New Republic, and I must say it's magnificent. Scoblic is one of the few journalists in America - Fred Kaplan and Soyoung Ho are two others -- who grasp just how utterly foolish, incompetent, and disastrous the Bush administration's policy towards North Korea has been.
In the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003 the president and his people literally sat back and watched as Kim Jong-il's troops marched into a North Korean nuclear fuel storage facility then under international lock and key and trucked off its contents to who knows where to be turned into nuclear weapons.
There was no good reason for this to have happened. When faced with almost precisely the same situation in 1994, the Clinton administration, in what Scoblic calls "a superb example of coercive diplomacy," threatened North Korea with force while opening up a direct negotiating channel to the regime. The result was the deal that put the nuclear fuel under international monitoring for nearly a decade, until the Bush administration let the regime walk in and take it.
Scoblic's explanation for this seemingly-insane passivity is that the administration is driven by conservative ideology; it is "consumed by the idea that the character of states is of primary importance to U.S. security." It believes, in other words, that the threat from a regime like North Korea's is not so much its capabilities -- i.e., its weapons -- but its evil intentions; that the only way to change those intentions is to change the regime; and that to negotiate with such a regime is to risk strengthening it.
Of course we now are negotiating with Pyongyang, in six-party talks underway in Beijing. This is a welcome change, a sign of rational though from the Bush administration (and of a healthier environment in a post-John-Bolton State Department). But keep this in mind: we're negotiating to get North Korea to give up weapons it did not have until we let it have them!
« Previous Article - Charging RINO: Little Late, Linc ...» Next Article - Doug Bandow: A Dignifiied Foreign Policy
Hi. I have a question, I'm hoping someone who is more knowledgeable about DC information esp. concerning Bolton.
In an open letter to Nicholas Kristoff posted at anti-war.com on 4-27-05 (URL below quote), Jude Wanniski wrote:
" It was Bolton who was the source of the assertion that North Korea had secretly been enriching uranium in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty and that it had admitted as much to an American diplomat at a cocktail party in Pyongyang."
http://www.antiwar.com/wanniski/?articleid=5741
Is it possible that there was no 2nd North Korean nuclear program except in the mind of John Bolton?
That the "admission of Kim's government that there was was just something "overheard at a cocktail party" according to him?
I believe I understand (from finding what I can of the history of the problem) that the nukes that North Korea has made since they threw the inspectors out come from fuel in "plutonium" rods that were created by a heavy water reactor they were using during the Bush 41 tenure, whereas the 2nd nuclear program was supposed to be a furtive attempt to enrich "Uranium" that hadn't created enough for even one bomb yet.
But could it be that the whole scandal was cooked up by Bolton and the neocons to discredit the Clinton administration and the 94 agreement with North Korea?
Most Americans don't even realize that intelligence sources had assumed that NK had 2 nukes by 1993. (A speech by Pete Fortney in March 1993, I found in the Congressional record, talks about them.) Yet, most Americans assume all the NK nukes they read about in the papers came from the Clinton administration's looking the other way.
That is a result of the mainstream news media's very sad record of informing Americans of what is really going on in this world (outside of celebrity affairs and crimes).
I don't know how much to trust Wanniski's apparently inside information on this.
His credentials include (as reported next to the article at anti-war.com):
Jude Wanniski, founder and chairman of Polyconomics, Inc., is a world-renowned political economist whose 1978 book The Way the World Works was named one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th Century by the editors of the National Review. He was an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981.
Anyone know the guy?
Wanniski is interesting, and a bit cracked.
He was the reason we got Supply Side Economics. Rather than convince economists, he had regular lunches with Scalia, Bork and Kristol. They were convinced, and it snowballed from there.
But he believes a lot of conspiracy theories (other than SSE ;)
For example, he believes that Iraq had nothing to do with the 1993 assassination attempt against GHW Bush.
He's a nice guy, just a bit gullible.
He has been against the war since the beginning. I used to read his stuff on the Bloomberg.
By the way, another informative source on North Korea is Arms Control Wonk.
He knows the details a lot better than most anyone. Here is the most recent post on North Korea, and the North Korea archive.
The author, Jeffrey Lewis, also has lots of good details on Iran. Like me, he actually reads the Goldschmitt reports :)
In other words, John Bolton has the "character" that is missing in Kim Jong-il. Once again, down is up, up is down ....
BrStarr...
For all things Jude, Wanniski has a website (and why doesn't everybody?):
Martin:
"down is up, up is down"
Sounds like an up-or-down vote. (No pun intended)
One critical issue is to understand the fundamental criminality of necocon foreign policy strategies:
Their defense strategy for the country consists of putting the country into danger. Their aim is to put our lifes at risk in order to bring about regime change.
Their aim is to create explosive, instable situations all around the world that would allow them to push military action against their favourite ideological hate-targets.
Its crucial to understand that that is what Bolton's North Korea 'policy' has been all about -- to create massively dangerous, highly volatile situations that could be exploited to justify American military action against the 'axis of evil'.
It is very possible that Horth Korea does not have a uranium enrichment program, or at least that it does not have anything beyond the exploratory stages. Much of the intelligence indicating the existence of such a program was acquired third hand through the AQ Kahn network.
Certain stories that seem to confirm the existence of the program, like the March series about North Korea selling uranium hexafluoride to Libya (UF6 is a highly processed precusor to fissionable uranium), turned out to be inaccurate -- it appears to have been Pakistan that processed the uranium.
There is intelligence pointing to a uranium program, but certainly nothing approaching a smoking gun.
Clinton thought he had handed the Bush administration a winner with a deal on Korea. Bush immediately screwed it up. Is there anything Bush has got right? other than delivering tax breaks and corporate welfare to those who paid his campaign bills?
Thanks for all the great info, insight and links.
I did know about Wanniski's own place, but live on the European model, meaning I seldom have extra cash. (Well that's the best face I can put on it.) and he requires payment.
"Arms Control Wonk" looks fantastic.
Funny, but I've done many a search on NK nuclear program and never saw that site near the front on Google. Maybe I should switch search engines. That is the kind of site I've been needing on the issue.
I haven't gotten around to checking out the blogs I see linked under names. I'll do so now.
Reader Comments (10) - post a comment