Left Flank

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.

Rovin: «Of course, this all falls under the category of diplomacy, which (according to the left) the Bush Administration has no interest in pursuing.»

What else could all this be? Is it the past repeating itself?

On May 23, 1997, Mohammad Khatami's unexpected election as Iran's president sparked hopes within the Clinton administration of Iran-US rapprochement. Khatami stoked these hopes even further when he sat down on January 7, 1998 with CNN's Christiane Amanpour for an interview, in which he said all the right things to facilitate dialogue. What ensued was years of carefully crafted secret messages and gestures initiated by both states, as all the while events threatened to derail any progress towards reconciliation.

The Clinton administration used a variety of tools to express its wishes. In October, 1997, it removed Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) from the official list of terrorist groups.  In 1998, Vice-President Al Gore, Jr. sent a message to Iran through the Saudis. In May, 1998, the US granted waivers to the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act to European companies. In December, 1998, President Clinton removed Iran from the list of terrorist states exporting narcotics. On April 12, 1999, President Clinton made remarks at a formal White House dinner about seeking an «accommodation» with Iran. Even when the Saudis gave the Clinton administration proof of Iranian complicity in the bombing of the Khobar Towers, the Clinton administration refused to announce its findings.These diplomatic maneuvers are just a sampling of the many tactics the Clinton administration, which early in its first term had put Iran on the official list of terrorist states.

it seems the Bush administration is traveling the same road with Syria, from «Axis of Evil» now to conferences, that the Clinton administration pursued with Iran in the late 1990s. The Clinton administration tried «Dual Containment», and on numerous occasions considered military strikes. The tactics don't change, only the players.

What got me thinking about this was Ed Morrissey's conjectural piece (and Ken Pollack's book on Iran):

It seems odd to include Syria in this conference, given current circumstances. The US just green-lighted an attack on a rogue nuclear facility in Syria, and Syria just assassinated another Lebanese politician in a car-bomb attack. Bashar Assad doesn't seem particularly interested in getting along with his neighbors, even the Muslim nations on his border. After the Israeli raid, Assad could get motivated by self-preservation, but his support for Hamas and Hezbollah doesn't give much confidence that Syria will add any productive energy to this effort.

Of course, too, the analogy to the Clinton administration and Iran might turn into template for a conference with Iran and Iraq in the wake of this conference.

What exactly happened at Dayr az-Zwar, regardless of «what» was recovered or not, becomes even more interesting, but possibly little more than prologue. It all also makes the Six-Party talks timeline seem wholly normal by comparison. The only palpable difference is the public disagreements between administration hawks and State department diplomats played out on the world stage.

Yes, this is diplomacy! Finally, in the eleventh hour the Bush administration is getting serious.

(Oh, and the comments sections at CQ have some choice speculation.)