Real mystery around N. Korea: what Bush's team has in mind
Posted on 01/12/2003 5:00:45 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Real mystery around N. Korea: what Bush's team has in mind
01/12/2003
WASHINGTON - An Asian diplomat emerged from one of the many meetings on defusing the North Korean nuclear crisis saying that no one could know what Kim Jong Il wants: a nuclear arsenal or a new relationship with the West.
But the real mystery, he said, is in Washington. "I'd just like to get a handle on what President Bush has in mind," he said. This administration, he said, "sends as many conflicting signals as the North Koreans."
Even many of Mr. Bush's staunchest loyalists concede that the administration's approach to North Korea has been a confusing case study in atomic diplomacy.
The White House, faced with a split in attitudes among senior advisers, took 18 months to settle on a strategy that promised engagement, including eventual security guarantees and normalization of relations that North Korea has craved for years. In the end, the offer was never made because of revelations about North Korea's secret nuclear program.
Then, perhaps hoping that it could avoid a confrontation that would distract from its campaign against Iraq, Mr. Bush never described to North Korea what might happen if it crosses the nuclear "red lines."
Not specific
Although he has often said he will never allow "the world's worst dictators to obtain the world's worst weapons," Mr. Bush has never specifically warned North Korea about what would happen if it began producing bomb-grade plutonium.
"We ended up with a policy that could best be described as 'hostile neglect,' " said one senior official.
The North Koreans bear primary responsibility for the crisis, he said. But he added: "We managed to back ourselves into the worst of both worlds. We won't describe to the North Koreans what good things might happen if they reverse direction, dismantle their nuclear facilities and rejoin the world."
At the same time, he added, Mr. Bush's team is so intent on not risking a military confrontation with North Korea as tens of thousands of troops are headed toward the Persian Gulf region that Mr. Bush has suppressed his natural inclination to "warn them of the very bad things that this president could make happen to them if they start producing bombs."
Pre-emptive strike?
In background conversations, officials have acknowledged that if North Korea takes its stockpile of 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods out of storage and begins trucking them to a nearby nuclear reprocessing center, Mr. Bush may have to decide whether to run the enormous risk of ordering a pre-emptive strike on the plant - a scenario the Pentagon planned years ago in detail - or to allow North Korea to spend the next few months building a serious nuclear arsenal.
With diplomacy under way in New Mexico and through China, it is an option no one in the White House wants to discuss. Even some of the administration's most outspoken hawks say a pre-emptive strike might not solve the problem, now that North Korea has admitted to a second nuclear project that U.S. intelligence agencies have not found.
Nonetheless, several officials have circulated among themselves an op-ed article, written in 1994 and advocating exactly that choice, by Brent Scowcroft, who was a national security adviser to the first President Bush and a mentor to many of the current president's top aides.
Aimed at the time at the Clinton administration, it argued that the United States should never allow a desperate state like North Korea to crank up a plutonium production line that it could use to blackmail the United States - or sell nuclear materiel.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Scowcroft indicated that what made sense in 1994 makes sense today. "While many of the circumstances are different today," he said, "the nature of the threat and the consequences of action or inaction have not changed."
Arnold Kanter, a State Department official in the first Bush administration, was more cautious. In 1994, he said, a military attack on the North Korean reprocessing plant "was a risk worth running." Now, he said, "the consequences of retaliation could be even more devastating."
Many experts inside and outside the administration are convinced that North Korea is racing to produce nuclear weapons.
Some Republicans like Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have said the administration must show North Korea "a light at the end of the tunnel." In effect, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico gave the same advice on Saturday.
"The question," one senior administration official said, "is how willing is the president to tolerate a nuclear armed North Korea?" He added: "I don't know. I don't know if anyone knows."
The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't think that is such a great idea. ;-)
Solution: nuclear blackmail.
That's correct but it isn't the whole picture. The other part of the picture says that there are still too many people starving in North Korea for us to allow them to have nuclear weapons. There is an obvious incentive for them to want to earn money by being in the nuclear weapon business, selling to Tom, Dick, Harry, and Osama...
I am not an expert. I think that since we are on the brink of military ops against Iraq, NK senses that we don't want/can't do two ops at the same time. Whether they are correct is debatable. Either way, they are, as cgbg suggests, pushing their weight around in a blackmail-like attempt to coerce terms with the U.S. weighted in their favor. I could just scream...lol !
Would, that be the American terrorists da$$hole, Gephardt and Belafonte?...
< /bad humor >
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