Posted on 07/09/2007 7:36:57 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
By David Frum Posted: Monday, July 2, 2007
ARTICLES National Post (Canada) Publication Date: June 30, 2007
Resident Fellow David Frum
The BBC interviewer was solicitous. "Mr. Froom," he began. (British interviewers almost always pronounce my name with a long vowel, just as they invariably pronounce Paul Wolfowitz's name, "Vulfovitz." I suppose they must be trying to encourage us to take more pride in our Eastern European roots. Or something.)
"Mr. Froom: Isn't this newest North Korea deal a great victory for realism over the more ideological approach of the 'axis of evil'?"
I like questions like that--puts the cards right on the table. But you need a little history to understand what the interviewer was driving at.
| These negotiations reassure North Korea they can have their weapons and their aid too: a perfect outcome from a North Korean point of view, a pretty good one from China's, and absolutely appalling from the point of view of the rest of the world. |
North Korea has pursued a nuclear bomb since at least the 1980s. It completed a Soviet-style plutonium-production reactor at Yongbyon in 1986. By 1992, North Korea had extracted enough plutonium to build at least two nuclear bombs.
President Clinton seriously considered bombing the North Korean reactors. In the end, however, he struck a deal: The U.S. and its allies Japan and South Korea would provide the North Korean regime with food and energy aid. In return, North Korea would suspend its weapons program.
Hands were shaken, and aid delivered--and the cheating began almost at once. In 1997, U.S. intelligence discovered that North Korea had made a secret deal with Pakistan: In exchange for North Korean missile technology, the Pakistanis gave North Korea high-speed centrifuges and advice on building a uranium-based bomb.
In February, 2002, President Bush cited North Korea as one of the "axis of evil" states allied with terrorists and arming to threaten the peace of the world. In October, 2002, the Bush administration confronted North Korea with proof of its cheating. Aid to North Korea was suspended, and new sanctions imposed.
North Korea reacted by restarting its old plutonium reactors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and quickly extracting more plutonium from its old Yongbyon fuel rods. In October, 2006, North Korea tested a plutonium-based nuclear bomb.
The test jolted the Bush administration into relaunching Clinton-style diplomacy: direct face-to-face negotiations with North Korea. In February, 2007, the administration announced a Clinton-style deal: economic aid to North Korea would resume in exchange for more North Korean promises to behave in future.
Alas, no sooner had the deal been struck than North Korea began to break it. It missed an April deadline to shut down its reactor, demanding the release of U.S. $25 million in frozen North Korean funds. The Bush administration gave way in mid-June. The North Koreans still did not close the reactor, but they agreed to allow UN inspectors into the country.
President Bush's special envoy, Christopher Hill, now predicts that North Korea will shut down the reactor in mid-July. We'll see.
But what if anything will that accomplish?
Graham Allison, a nuclear expert who served as assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, estimates that North Korea has built an arsenal of 10 nuclear weapons. In a May, 2007, oped in the Boston Globe, Allison observed:
"[Kim Jong-Il's] goal is to keep these weapons, sell the aging Yongbyon reactor and reprocessing facility for the highest price, and do this in a way that shows sufficient deference to Beijing to restore its de facto protection."
Allison predicts that Kim Jong-Il will succeed.
"After the closing and disabling of Yongbyon, expect lengthy slogging through incomplete records, all in Korean script, missed deadlines, disputes about who can visit where, and all the other antics that have left International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors unable to close the nuclear file in Iran after 20 years of efforts."
In other words, the Bush administration's diplomatic policy will deliver the worst of all possible outcomes: a nuclear-armed North Korea sustained by Western economic aid. And the BBC calls that "realism."
The North Korean regime survives courtesy of Chinese aid and protection. It is China that provides the North Korean regime with coal, food and credit. Without Chinese aid, the regime could not endure: remember, this is a regime that regards U.S. $25-million in frozen assets as an enormous sum. (South Korea generates $25 million in new wealth every 11 minutes.)
China supports North Korea because it dreads a North Korean collapse. The Chinese leaders know that such a collapse would unify the peninsula under a democratic government based in Seoul and aligned with the U.S. and Japan--for them, a terrifying outcome.
These negotiations reassure North Korea they can have their weapons and their aid too: a perfect outcome from a North Korean point of view, a pretty good one from China's, and absolutely appalling from the point of view of the rest of the world.
If this is "realism," what would fantasy look like?
This is Kim Jong-il's game plan. Incremental maneuver to get to the point blank range. He may not live long enough to see it succeed, but it has been his long-term plan all along.
Uh, yeah, A.I.T...maybe you've been breathing too many fumes in Shinagawa to remember that this is how The Republic works over here. 4, maybe 8 years max, then the most powerful man in the world hands it over to the next guy. Peacefully. Over a traditional morning tea served by the outgoing first lady.
Dictators, see, they get to stay in until they are killed, and when you kill them, you smash Pandora's box.
What you prefer? Bush nukes Iran, NoKo, Putin etal on his last day in office, and THEN go to his ranch?
Leave 2, 3 maybe 4 more Iraq-like unintended mega-consequences for the next guy/gal to deal with?! Nobody can even agree on what a post-Kim peninsula would look like! More socialist/pro-China? Millions dead?
Calm down willya?
Imagine if Iraq -had- had nukes, like NoKo, and during the collapse of the Kim regime, those nukes went wandering as so many things did in the immediate chaos of the Iraq invasion. Then what?
Oh. And by the way, Saddam is still dead.
Agreed. China’s check is due for their super-inflated economy but they are still propping it up and I assume they will do so until after the Bejjing Olymics in summer of 2008. Their economy is due for a massive correction. When that occurs, will they shut off aid to North Korea? Without them, Kim either uses that bloated military or loses it and could face losing all his power.
I don’t think we can or should preempt an attack using nuclear weapons. However, I do feel we should have a complete navy blockade so military technology stops flowing to Iran and other bad guys. This will force their hand one way or the other now instead of letting them hit the USA with an ICBM and invade South Korea at the time of their choosing or out what they feel is necessity.
You are correct. The West as a whole learned nothing from WWII and so we are doomed to repeat such horrific events and then some due to the nuclear weapon equation. What a shame. I am doing my part but I feel I am a drop in the bucket to people’s self-absorbed stupidity instead of learning and understanding how valuable freedom is and that it must be protected.
Agreed.
Yeah, we'd be so much better off if Bush had done like Clinton and kicked the Saddam problem down the road.
When you have no good options available, a man does the best that he can with what is available.
Or, you can cry like a child that you didn't get everything just like mkjessup would have had it.
Or, you can put on your George W. Bush kneepads like Sam_Paine does and worship at the altar of ‘compassionate conservatism’.
Looks good on you Sparky.
if you say so, perhaps
LOL.
mkj with the ‘cool kids’ over in the corner kicking Bush when he’s down. Anyone not with the cool kids like mkj is gay.
Very impressive and mature.
No doubt there’s always something for you to look down on with other people from your dizzying peak of perfection!
What a sad state we’d be in had the Imperial Presidency of MKJessup done everything correctly with hindsight up front.
GFY Sam, your worship of GWB is exactly what is wrong with conservatism in this country. I voted for that now-revealed RINO three times, in the 2000 primaries, and in the general elections of 2000 and 2004.
This isn’t about ‘kicking Bush when he’s down’, Bush put HIMSELF down, by losing whatever vision he had, making common cause with the likes of Teddy Kennedy, and allowing himself to be diverted from his job responsibilities which is to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution of the United States. His abysmal failure to secure our southern border, his naive and childish characterization of Islam as a ‘religion of peace’, toadying up to Muslims and showing weakness, not strength, and p*ssing all over the people who helped put him IN the damn White House, is why he finds himself a lonely man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And wise up smart ass, I have never claimed to be perfect, but I don’t have to be perfect to recognize that George W. Bush is on the wrong path, that despite his words about not cutting and running, about not allowing terrorism to claim Iraq, about not allowing Iran to go nuclear, about not allowing North Korea to go nuclear, etc., the only theatre of operations where he seems to be hanging on is in Iraq.
Try taking a look around and ask yourself what is wrong with the picture when a Democratic Senator (Joe Lieberman) is calling for military force to be used against Iran, and our own Commander-In-Chief is dragging his heels?
And let’s not forget that damnable ‘Two State Solution’ that the Bush Administration has been ramming down Israel’s throat, should that ever come to pass, the only lasting legacy will be a further ramping up of terrorist strikes against our only real ally in the Middle East. Bush will end up doing to Israel what Jimmy Carter did to our former ally Iran, when the Shah was still in power.
Your problem Sam, is that your own kneejerk support of George W. Bush has blinded you to the fact that many of the policies of our President can no longer be supported by any true conservative. Take your pick: CFR, NCLB, Failure to secure our borders, the recently attempted amnesty debacle, letting Scooter Libby twist in the wind and then issuing only a half-measure ‘commutation’ when he should have been firing Fitzfong and directing his alleged Attorney General Alberto VO5 to go after that scumbag Armitage who was the REAL source of the Plame ‘leak’. The list goes on and on.
I voted for, and I supported, and I will continue to support our President WHEN his positions are not in conflict with the Constitution, and are not detrimental to America’s national security, despite his claims to be so very much ‘aware’ of his job to ‘protect the American people’.
You apparently voted for the man, and that’s all you can see, true myopia in action.
Try educating yourself and have yourself a stiff cup of reality why don’t you?
I assume you mean "Good For You, Sam....."
I don't worship Bush. But I don't worship myself as a know-it-all, either.
I see clearly that the President had choices between bad and worse, given to him by a corrupt, broken government bureaucratic intelligence structure and state dept infrastructure that is completely unreformable, IMO.
I am not ashamed to say that I don't think I could do a better job of making the decisions he has made about what to do vis-a-vis the "axis of evil."
Unlike you, I don't even think there was a set of decisions that could be made back then, now with 100% hindsight that would put us in a better position today.
That's not worship, that's being smart enough to know I'm not omniscient.
You can make excuses for yourself, and you can make excuses for George W. Bush, but what you’re overlooking Sam is that it doesn’t take an intellect or an IQ the size of Mt. Everest to understand and comprehend the threat(s) that are facing our Nation. The average American most certainly *can* comprehend it.
Even the most simple minded oaf understands that if you leave your back door (i.e., our southern border) undefended, unprotected and unlocked, that you might as well post a sign inviting thieves, killers, rapists, terrorists, every kind of human scum to waltz right in and have their way with whoever is in the house, and take whatever there is of value.
Here we are in year 6 of GWB’s second term, and there have been all kinds of alleged security enhancements made when it comes to air travel, but our southern border remains as undefended as the aforementioned back door. And the increasing amount of crime, be it murder, DUI/uninsured wrecks caused by illegal immigrants, rape, child molestation, dope dealing, all of that constitutes a solid body of evidence that our President is not doing his job when it comes to securing the borders of our Nation. He can put any spin on it he wants to and so can you, but the fact remains that even when it comes to the authorized border fence legislation that Bush signed, only a token amount of that fence has been built, and the illegals continue to flood in from Mexico.
You don’t have to be a political science major, or even a college graduate to understand that this is a fundemental failure on the part of the Administration to defend the citizens of the United States. Why bother with more stringent passport requirements (which are beginning to look more and more like one more cash grab by the Feds), when there is no sense of urgency to shut down the countless illegals coming across the southern border 24 hours a day?
Now if you want to talk about Iraq, our President allowed himself to be dragged through that insane U.N. song and dance which bought Saddam Hussein enough time to get his WMD out of Iraq, and into Syria. It also gave the Baathists more time to prepare for the low level ‘asymetrical’ sort of warfare we are now seeing employed against our troops in Iraq, with a big ol’ assist from al Qaeda, Iran, and others.
And guess what? One reason we’ve got terrorists pouring into Iraq is because once again, there has been a failure to *secure the borders* of IRAQ, I detect a pattern here, how about you?
One does not have to be ‘omniscient’ to see that when it comes to prosecuting the War on Terror, that for all the hoo-hah and the initial successes that we have witnessed, the President has fumbled the ball and now it’s late in the 4th quarter and the enemy is threatening to blitz, get it? (the enemy being terrorists on the outside, combined with the Democrat fifth column, operating on the INside)
Now in addition to our military response(s), the United States could have already put a major squeeze on the likes of Syria, Iran, AND North Korea by informing each and every nation that has diplomatic relations with us, that IF they have any economic or diplomatic relations with those rogue states, that the United States will break OFF all diplomatic relations with THEM. If the global community had been forced to choose between standing with despots like Asshat in Syria, Ahmadinejerk in Iran, and Comrade Chia Pet in North Korea, or staying in the good graces of Uncle Sam, the majority of those nations are going to cut ties with those rogue nations, and the ones who go the other way?
They make it easier for us to determine who is ‘with us, and who is with the terrorists’ (that was a great policy that President Bush enunciated, a shame he didn’t follow through with it).
Don’t underestimate yourself Sam, I’m willing to bet that you most likely could have done a better job as President than George W. Bush.
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