Left Flank

John Isaacs at Right Web (via Nukes of Hazard's «John Isaacs: Hand-Wringing over Success in North Korea») offers an account of the conservative opposition to the Bush administration's moderate turn on DPRK policy in 2006.

To be sure, Bush’s June 2008 North Korea declaration left many ambiguities about the country’s nuclear program. First and foremost, it remains uncertain how many nuclear weapons Pyongyang actually produced, and no timetable has been set for North Korea to destroy its nuclear weapons. Moreover, there are many questions about the extent of Pyongyang’s possible nuclear proliferation to other countries (such as Syria), about whether it has enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, and about whether North Korea’s plutonium declaration is complete.

But the six countries involved in the negotiations are continuing to make progress, even if it is agonizingly slow. On July 13, China announced in a joint communiqué that the countries had agreed on a blueprint for verifying North Korea’s nuclear declaration and its disarmament pledges.11 Under the latest agreement, international inspectors will visit North Korean nuclear facilities, review documents, and interview personnel at the plants. The International Atomic Energy Agency will participate in the verification process.

The negotiations and bargaining will continue, slowly, with many twists in the road. Conservatives will pour more withering scorn on the Bush administration’s reversal, but undeniable progress is finally being made.

I doubt conservatives see it that way.

I'm not going to spend good money on a hardback, but here's two books any conservative can send me.

Firstly, there's Ambassador John Bolton's Surrender Is Not an Option (available in Palm Reader format). Bolton sounded almost human on the clip above.

Then, there's The Reluctant Communist. Richardson at DPRK Studies has pre-ordered and already plugged Charles Robert Jenkins' chance to cash in on treason.

Update: Richardson accuses me of flipping on Jenkins. Actually, I haven't. I still believe he's a traitor, and the Constitution is quite unequivocal about the penalty for treason. Traitors are the only criminals who deserve to die by the State's hand. Along with Richard Hanssen and other spies, Jenkins deserves death.

But, I accepted Richardson's argument that Jenkins' book might include valuable information on DPRK. Also, I do feel compassion for his family. Similarly, I would consider Bolton's arguments, notwithstanding his efforts to undermine the IAEA and tarnish Mohammed ElBaradei's reputation.

The old habits of the blogosphere based on linking and engagement have broken down. If Richardson's blog is so popular with conservatives, that he doesn't need anyone else's links, I salute him. As a centrist, I look beyond my comfort zone routinely. But, I realize regrettably there are bloggers who take engagement as a signal for defending the fort.

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb argues that "nothing possibly could be any worse" in DPRK? I think this is the first bloggingheads TV diavlog that so well captures the humdrum Washington debate between Clintonians and Neo-cons on the DPRK issue right now. Just as in Iraq, no one can think beyond the fall of the government, or to consider the non-proliferation regime as a whole, and Neo-Cons assume that there's a nascent government waiting to stop an even more tragic catastrophe from ensuing.

Actually, Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell, Goldfarb's interlocutor, is still just too optimistic about the disablement of the Yongbyon plutonium reactor, and both fail to mention the HEU (highly-enriched uranium) issue. The Syrian connection is a red herring, most probably more of the Israel-Bush administration echo chamber seeking to stir up a controversy to derail the Six-Party process.

In the end (and in "What happens if the Kim regime collapses?"), this is at best a much more civil, yet equally as arid and boilerplate a discussion, as the Korean blogosphere produces on a daily basis.