Leon Sigal on 38 North has some more complaints about journalists trying to cover the history of North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. It’s thorough, but just as I was about to skip on by as repetitive, this popped up:
In October 2002, having balked at talks for nearly two years, President Bush sent James Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to Pyongyang—not to negotiate but to confront it over its clandestine uranium enrichment program. The North Koreans offered to forego uranium enrichment, as well as plutonium production, in return for diplomatic recognition, legal assurances of nonaggression, including nonuse of nuclear weapons, and not impeding its economic development, as Kelly himself acknowledged three weeks later: “They did suggest after this harsh and—personally, to me—surprising admission that there were measures that might be taken that were generally along those lines.” Under strict instructions, Kelly ignored the offer. In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice is more forthcoming. Kelly, she recalls, was bound in a diplomatic straitjacket:
Usually there is enough trust in an experienced negotiator that the guidance is used more as points of reference than as a script. But in this case, given the fissures, the points were to be read verbatim. There were literally stage directions for Kelly. He was not to engage the North Koreans in any side conversation in any way. That left him actually moving to the corner of the table to avoid Pyongyang’s representatives.
Rice’s conclusion is worth underscoring: “Because his instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the program on the table.”
Instead, administration officials claimed that the North Koreans had “admitted” they had an enrichment “program” and said they should be punished. They overcame resistance from South Korea and Japan to suspend shipments of heavy fuel oil, thereby tearing up what little was left of the Agreed Framework. While US forces were tied down preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea retaliated by reprocessing the five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium, which, when weaponized, would allow it to conduct nuclear tests for the first time. It also moved to restart its plutonium reactor, ramped up imports of enrichment equipment, and aided Syria in constructing a reactor of its own. The North’s nuclear effort, largely held in check for a decade through negotiations, was now unleashed.
Look, I have no idea if Sigal is offering a fair view of how the history of negotiations over the North Korean nuclear weapons program proceeded and went awry. And, certainly, when confronted with a regime in which a portion, any portion, of the populace is consigned to hard labor camps that are tantamount to death, there must be a moral element to a country’s relations with that regime, especially given the superior firepower that the United States brings to the game, although that power is considerably attenuated when one takes into account the decay of that moral position at the thought of civilian casualties in either North or South Korea. This is true so long as the United States has the gall to consider itself the epitome of moral leadership. But these are all assertions which can be fact-checked by competent historians.
But when I see “administration officials”, and know that means “Bush administration officials,” I’m afraid the red flags start waving. Given the willingness of Bush, Cheney, & Co. to see what they wanted to see, whether it was WMDs in Iraq or the success of American torture, rather than realities on the ground, I’m more than willing to believe the Bush Administration officials saw what ideology dictated they saw.
Or, not to mince words so much, they lied through their teeth.
I was brought up to believe lies have consequences. It degrades your reputation, and, worse yet, it may lead you down paths which have negative consequences. In the above sequence, the Clinton Administration negotiated with the North Koreans to the point where they were signed up to an agreement in which the North Koreans abandoned nuclear weapons development. Clinton handed it off to Bush, and Bush basically said, We think they’re probably cheating, so we’re abandoning it to. And it’s not at all clear Bush’s minions had anything concrete to justify their position – it was simply ideological. It’s even possible that, as something Clinton started, they felt it had to be destroyed. Remember the affect the word Clinton seems to have on conservatives, after all.
Fifteen years later, what do we have? A nuclear armed North Korea.
But I’d like to take this a step further. The Bush electoral victories were essentially powered by the Evangelical right wing in the belief that the evident religiosity of Bush and his cohorts made him the preferred pick for the White House; indeed, some really felt he was the selection of God.
There’s little need to go into the many scandals and failures of the Bush Administration, as they’ve been documented so far and wide that the GOP is unwilling to really acknowledge him as a Republican President. They were that bad. But it is worth asking, was there a common failing which explained how we ended up in two wars, only one of which was even arguably justified, as well as indulging in the horrific practice of torture, not to mention the rampant mismanagement of Congressional duties, particularly financial, once the Republicans held both Congress and the Executive?
For my money, yeah.
They were fucking overconfident that they knew how things worked.
And, you know, while some people are just overconfident because they don’t understand the depth of the pool they’ve jumped in, there’s also the shared overconfidence that comes from folks who think God has blessed them. They get things backwards, believing they can indulge in any sort of shenanigans because God has touched them. Somehow, they don’t understand that, if God even exists and has chosen them, that bloody well means the bar is a helluva lot higher for them than for anyone else.
Being chosen by God means you have a lot higher to jump, froggy boys, than everyone else.
And if God doesn’t exist, you’d better learn a bit of humility because this job is bigger than anyone. Maybe look back at others’ successful work on these problems, eh?
So, one of Trump’s constituencies was reportedly the Evangelical right, although I seriously doubt Trump would recognize a Bible if Melania whacked him in the back of the head with it. But some of his nominations happen to be highly religious, such as Carson and DeVos. The behavior of both since their confirmations has not inspired confidence, and so I have to wonder if they’re wandering about, destroying the good works of their predecessors while believing that God might, oh, I don’t know, be guiding their feet on the path?
Rather than using good judgment and even Science?
I suspect I’m just not going to sleep well over the next few nights. I certainly didn’t last night.
