Left Flank

It's so easy to become frustrated with North Korean tactics.

Still, I noticed three aspects of this latest episode, when DPRK objected to the Bush administration's failure to remove it from the list of terrorist states and threatened to restore its plutonium-producing capabilities.

Firstly, Pyongyang can play the tedious legalism card as well as American neocons.

In no agreement among the six parties or between the DPRK and the United States does an article stipulate the issue of verifying our nuclear declaration as a conditionality for the removal from the list.

Secondly, American neoconservatives think East Asia is a nuisance that can just go away and leave America to more enjoyable diplomatic pursuits, like abolishing the State Department.

«Just when we thought the six-party talks where dead ... they keep coming back to life,» Klingner said of the talks between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Lastly, Pyongyang is really intent not to have a kimchi revolution.

Disabling the complex does not meet Washington's ultimate goal of dismantling it. The United States wants full access by inspectors to all locations it suspects of being nuclear sites to ensure that there are no hidden nuclear assets.

The North bristled at this demand. «The U.S. is gravely mistaken if it thinks it can make a house search in our country as it pleases, just as it did in Iraq,» the North Korean spokesman said.

He said North Korea was still technically at war with the United States because the 1950-53 Korean War had ended only in a cease-fire. He added that asking the North to give up its nuclear programs while it was not allowed similar inspections in South Korea, to make sure that there are no American nuclear weapons there, amounted to «a gangster's demand.»

How much of this is perspectival, a matter of looking for a conclusion when the process is the solution, is an American problem. Pyongyang can play this game indefinitely.

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It might be wishful thinking, but when Pyongyang is involved, that luxury can turn to disappointment.

The two-pronged approach grew out of an agreement reached by Pyongyang and Washington in Singapore on April 8. Unlike the North's production of plutonium, whose existence is acknowledged by both the North and the United States, the two countries differ on the existence of highly-enriched uranium being produced by the North and the North's proliferation activities.

The establishment of a system for monitoring the North's activities, in particular, seems to be a strategic attempt to ease tensions via diplomatic compromise and block nuclear activity by North Korea in the future, rather than a resolution of the nuclear issue that continues to focus on past activities.

ACW's James Acton acknowledges this, and is not taking sides. Which, BTW,is what the members of the Six-Party process should remember.

Dr. Siegfried Hecker warns that Pyongyang's disablement, dramatically demonstrated in the detonation of its Yongbyon cooling tower, is not irreversible.

«Highest priority must be placed on completing the disablement ... and proceeding to the dismantlement state,» wrote Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Lab and current professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, in a report on his recent visit to Yongbyon.

The US State Department says North Korea has completed at least eight of an agreed-upon 11 disablement steps.

According to Dr. Hecker, actions taken so far include removal of all of the Yongbyon complex's uranium conversion furnaces, the cutting of steel pipe cooling loops outside the reactor building, and the removal of the drive mechanism for the trolley that moves spent reactor fuel into the reprocessing facility.

At this point it would take at least six to 18 months for North Korea to repair and reconstitute its plutonium complex, according to Hecker's report.

Once all fuel rods remaining in the Yongbyon reactor are removed, one of the most important of the disablement steps – the removal of control rod drive mechanisms – is scheduled to occur.

«My overall assessment is that the disablement actions are significant . . . However, they have retained a hedge to be able to restart the facilities if the agreement falls through,» wrote Hecker.

The fox is not in the bag.

Nukes of Hazard's Eli Lewine summarizes the week in DPRK nukes with depressing undertones.

Confidence in the Six Party Process continues to be lost each passing day. Once the important question of what to do with the spent fuel from the disabled reactor at Yongbyon is answered, there will be very little left to point to as representing continuing cooperation. Taking up the plutonium issue at this juncture, and designing and implementing an initial verification process, would kill two birds with one stone. North Korea would have an avenue by which it could continue to show it is cooperating with the Six Parties and we could begin to get answers to the most important questions we have about the North Korean nuclear program.

This all seems even more vital given the dismal state of planning towards how we are going to verify the North Korean declaration.

Yet, Lewine leaves out some of the background events, that together lead me (again) to debate, why even bother? It happens to the best of us.

There's the DPRK-Syria missile pipeline. This football has been kicked around for months now, and even Paul Richter at the LA Times can't bring home a conclusion.

Western governments have concluded that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear weapons program at a mysterious site in the Syrian desert that was bombed by Israel last year, a senior European diplomat said Wednesday in a rare comment about the episode by a high-ranking official.

>The diplomat said that after a review of available intelligence, Western governments have reached "some sort of common ground . . . that there seems to have been cooperation between Syria and North Korea" at the site. The official's remarks were made on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject

If I could have argued something so weak, and not put my name to it, college and grad school would have been a breeze. I hope this guy was elected, and not a lifer in some ministry. Oh well, move on!

Nothing amuses more than the continuing antics (politely called a 'debate') within the Bush administration.

In a public departure from administration policy, Jay Lefkowitz, a conservative lawyer who is Bush's envoy on North Korean human rights, said this week the North would likely "remain in its present nuclear status" when the next president took over in January 2009.

"North Korea is not serious about disarming in a timely manner," Lefkowitz told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "We should consider a new approach to North Korea."

At issue is a declaration that North Korea was supposed to make by the end of last year formally stating everything in its nuclear inventory. When the North missed that deadline, administration officials initially sought to minimize the significance of the lapse, but they have expressed increasing concern in the wake of a North Korean statement on Jan. 4, in which the North insisted that it had already disclosed everything that it needed to.

The North has cited a list of nuclear programs that it provided in November, but the United States has rejected the list as incomplete.

"Some people make the argument that we're just pursuing a policy of talks that go nowhere," said one administration official with knowledge of the debate within the administration.

That last part might be the administration's epitaph: "policies that go nowhere". Arthur Waldron has a good grasp on the significance of policy drift.

In the fifteen years wasted by these negotiations, North Korea has presumably perfected her nuclear capability. Our close allies the Japanese have, meanwhile, been angered by the American willingness to sacrifice Japanese concerns–about their citizens who have been abducted by Pyongyang—in order not to upset imaginary progress being made in the talks. What are the lessons? First, you cannot negotiate away nuclear capabilities. Second, military options do not really exist. Finally, and most worryingly, the very process of negotiation gives us a stake in the survival of the regime with which we are engaging. We're becoming ever more committed to the survival of the regime that we originally identified as the problem.

Soon I expect we will be hearing calls for the U.S. to help stabilize North Korea after Kim Jong Il, even in the absence of that country's abandonment of nuclear weapons.

Proliferation and developing both plutonium and enriched uranium programs are hallmarks of the strategy Pakistan patented in the 70s and 80s. At that time it was Iran and Iraq which received Pakistani help. Now, Pyongyang is just riffing on that old tune.