We are up in the air on North Korea. A good analysis of what has happened. From "New Republic"
WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Nuclear Test
by Ryan Lizza
When the White House revealed last week that North Korea had admitted to operating a secret program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, Democrats had two responses. The first was that the revelation was an October Surprise meant to shift voters' attention back to national security issues now that the Iraq vote was over. "The Bush administration has no shame when it comes to the use of foreign policy and national security to influence domestic elections," a top Democratic operative said the day after the news broke. Bush is "distracting the American people with threats from abroad."
But it wasn't politics that spurred the White House to make the announcement on October 16, twelve days after Assistant Secretary James Kelly confronted the North Koreans in Pyongyang. It was journalism. Last Wednesday the news was about to leak, so the White House decided to strike preemptively and make the announcement itself. Chris Nelson, a trade analyst in Washington who writes a daily e-mail newsletter that is widely read by Asia policy insiders, had the story. His Korean and Japanese sources tipped him off in the morning. He sent an e-mail to some administration and Capitol Hill contacts for confirmation. "Kelly accused the North of violating the agreement," he wrote. "Said they had built new facilities and showed them the intelligence. They ... admitted they were cheating." By that afternoon some of his State Department sources had written back, warning him darkly about threats to the "national interest" if he went with the story. He reluctantly decided not to publish The Nelson Report that evening.
Meanwhile, that afternoon over at USA Today, Barbara Slavin, who has covered North Korea for years and has been to the hermit kingdom three times, independently heard details of the Kelly meeting from Washington sources outside the State Department. She too had the story nailed down by Wednesday afternoon. By then the White House had realized they couldn't control the information any longer. They beeped a select group of reporters, not including Slavin or Nelson, and briefed them on Kelly's North Korea trip in a conference call at 7 p.m that evening.
While the Democrats' October-Surprise suspicions turned out to be wrong, their second response was absolutely correct. Why, they asked, didn't the administration brief Congress about North Korea's nuclear disclosure before members voted on the Iraq resolution? When trying to judge how grave a threat Saddam Hussein is, they argued, surely Congress should have the latest intelligence about other hostile states. The Bushies' answer is that they had indeed briefed Congress. "When Jim Kelly came back from North Korea," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday on CNN, "several briefings were in fact offered and others, taken up by a number of key people on the Hill, to talk about what Kelly had found." On the same day, Secretary of State Colin Powell added, "[A]fter Assistant Secretary Kelly went to North Korea and came back with the information that they admitted it, we began another round of briefings, not only from the State Department but the CIA, to pass on this new information." But that's misleading. Kelly had his confrontational encounter with the North Koreans on October 4. The House passed its resolution on the afternoon of October 10, and the Senate did the same just after midnight. So, how many congressional briefings did the CIA and the State Department hold between the fourth and the tenth, according to their own data? Zero.
The only briefings that took place were on the tenth, the day of the vote. On that day Senator Dick Lugar and Representatives Jim Kolbe and Jim Leach--all Republicans--were the only members briefed. And Lugar and Kolbe's briefings were done at their own request, not the State Department's. In those briefings Kelly was forthright about what he had learned. "He was shockingly blunt about North Korea," says one official who attended. Kelly read verbatim what the North Koreans told him in Pyongyang. "It was very nasty," says this official. Nonetheless, out of the 532 members currently in Congress, exactly three were briefed by the administration about North Korea's belligerent disclosure before the war resolution passed.
[S] o who leaked the story to Slavin and Nelson in the first place? For once it was not the administration hawks--usually the most aggressive about pushing their views in the press. "The story was leaked by people who are opposed to the administration's North Korea policy," says Slavin about her sources, who were concerned that vital information regarding North Korea policy not be secret. "Even though it might hurt U.S.-North Korea policy, they thought it would have a sobering impact on the policy toward the `axis of evil.'"
It has put the hawks in a tight spot. Instead of the schadenfreude you'd expect from some of Bush's hard-line advisers, who have long wanted to abandon Clinton-style engagement with North Korea and move toward a more aggressive posture, the announcement has put them on the defensive. Indeed, some of their most cherished goals and principles are suddenly in doubt. Start with Iraq, their first priority. They fear that a crisis at this moment with North Korea could jeopardize their goal of overthrowing Saddam. In the past, Pyongyang has said that even sanctions, which the administration seems to be considering, would be an act of war. That kind of confrontation could halt the momentum for dealing with Iraq. "The hard-liners think there is a sequential approach," says an administration official. "You deal with one problem at a time." Adds another, "This kind of overloads the system."
That fear has meant that the administration has had to back away from another hard-line principle: that North Korea is a member in equal standing of the axis of evil. Indeed, in order to keep the spotlight on Saddam, and to make sure Kim Jong Il doesn't feel backed into a corner, the administration has stopped speaking honestly about the repressive nature of the North Korean regime. Bush's first public comment was that the nuclear disclosure was "a bit of troubling news." "I view this as an opportunity to work with our friends in the region ... to convince Kim Jong Il that he must disarm," he added. He had no harsh words for a regime that systematically starves its people while feeding its massive military. And there's an obvious reason for that. "Despite all the tough guys, the fact is there are eleven thousand long-range artillery pieces right across the DMZ [demilitarized zone] line from Seoul," one administration official points out. "If you are looking for moral clarity you are in trouble."
Unlike Iraq, there is also no unilateral option, another tenet of the hawks' strategy. The United States must act in concert with Japan and South Korea, essentially subordinating some of our interests to theirs. The greater compromise, however, will come with China. Since September 11 the United States has been moving away from the hard-liners' view of China, most recently by acceding to its request to brand an obscure group of Western China rebels as terrorists. The North Korea crisis will accelerate this trend because Bush must now rely on Beijing, North Korea's only real ally, to pressure Kim Jong Il. The Chinese have many reasons to cooperate. They fear a nuclear North Korea will eventually mean a nuclear Japan, and they worry about which direction the peninsula's nuclear weapons would be pointed if the Koreas are one day unified. The Chinese also fear two other developments that would accompany a nuclear North Korea: They know it will hasten American plans for missile defense and that it will lead to a buildup of U.S. forces in the region. For all these reasons, China has an interest in persuading North Korea to disarm. And, as one of Kim Jong Il's main suppliers of food and oil, they have carrots that they can take away. But the hawks still worry about what the Chinese will want in return. "There are a lot of things they could do if they wanted to," says one official. "This is a test of China."
It's also a test for Bush. Eleven days went by after the Kelly mission before he was even briefed by his senior advisers on what to do about North Korea. It took five days after the news broke for Bush to mention North Korea publicly. On Friday, Bush will interrupt his campaigning for a summit with Jiang Zemin in Crawford, Texas, where he will offer the first real glimpse of his post-revelation policy. What Bush thinks about North Korea is still a bit of a mystery. Hawks point to the axis-of-evil speech. Moderates say he has changed his approach since then. "People in the embassy told me that the [hostile] reaction from the Koreans during his trip to Korea after the axis-of-evil speech changed him," says one State Department official. But the remarkable thing is that for once, perhaps because the policy options are so limited, a schism between the hard-liners and the multilateralists hasn't surfaced. "I haven't seen a split yet," says one administration hawk. He pauses and adds, "Yet." |
