Krauthammer on Korea. With a swipe at the NYT.
washingtonpost.com
A Place for Temporary Appeasement
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 7, 2003; Page A33
It's only March, but we can safely award the 2003 trophy for most risible editorial pronouncement. It goes, as usual, to the New York Times, whose Tuesday editorial calling for the Bush administration to negotiate directly with North Korea (the United States has refused to do so until North Korea stops its nuclear program) ends with the following pronunciamento: "The place for insisting that bad North Korean behavior will not be rewarded is at the negotiating table."
Read that again and savor it. This is transparently, definitionally wrong. The negotiating table is a place where you give and take. The one place where you cannot insist that bad behavior will not be rewarded is the negotiating table -- or there would be no negotiations.
The battleship Missouri was not a negotiating table. On the Missouri, we made unconditional demands. At a negotiating table, you make concessions. That's what negotiations mean. Indeed, the very act of acceding to Pyongyang's demand for bilateral talks is a major concession.
Sometimes appeasement is the only available policy. While advocating concessions, however, one mustn't pretend that nothing is being given away. The time for appeasement may indeed have arrived, but it is too dangerous and important a policy to be carried out amid fantasies.
REST AT:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54158-2003Mar6?language=printer |
