"Think, thank, thunk" piece from the "Times."
To-Do List: 1) What Not to Tolerate. 2) What That Means.
By DAVID E. SANGER
CRAWFORD, Tex.- As President Bush ended a monthlong stay at his ranch here this weekend to return to a world of foreign policy headaches, a question hung in the air: How will he define the word "tolerate"?
Last spring, Mr. Bush declared that he would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea. As summer approached, he said he would not tolerate an Iran with nuclear capability. For the better part of the past eight months, he and his aides have said they would not tolerate outside interference in Iraq, nor challenges to the American objective of bringing democracy to the country.
So it was notable that during the president's last week here, all three vows were being tested. But he took no time from his vacation to respond publicly to North Korea's explicit threat to conduct a nuclear test, or to the International Atomic Energy Agency's discovery of traces of weapons-grade uranium near an Iranian nuclear facility. (Iran blamed it on imported uranium, the way other countries blame diseases on imported beef.) Nor, as the weekend started, had he enunciated a clear strategy for closing Iraq's borders to meddling mullahs and terrorists in search of a new way to strike at American interests.
"It's not that he hasn't spent the summer discussing all this, almost every day," said one senior aide. "But they all require subtle solutions, the stuff you guys all say we are incapable of." At the same time, Mr. Bush has told visitors that he suspects he is "in for a rough fall."
The most immediate challenge came on Thursday, when North Korea startled a six-nation conference in Beijing by openly threatening to make a formal declaration that it is now a nuclear-armed power, and to conduct a nuclear test that would put to rest any notions that it is bluffing. In public, the White House dismissed the statements as another unsubtle North Korean attempt at blackmail, with a spokesman noting the country's "long history of making inflammatory comments."
In private, Mr. Bush's national security aides were not so sanguine. While the North Koreans alternately blow hot and cold ? threatening to shoot off missiles and nukes one moment, then hinting at disarmament deals if the price is right ? they have backed up almost every public threat they have made in the past 12 months. They promised to throw international inspectors out of the country, then did it; they threatened to withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and then withdrew; they said they would make bomb-grade plutonium, and American intelligence agencies now believe they are producing it, if slowly.
So despite the administration's public line that there is no crisis afoot, almost everyone in the administration, which is deeply divided on North Korea strategy, says this is a race against time. "If they blow off a nuke test, this whole process of negotiation is over," one senior national security aide said on Friday. American officials have also told their allies that if talks drag fruitlessly past October, they will be ended for fear that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, is playing for time in which to reprocess plutonium.
The informal October deadline may offer a hint about what Mr. Bush means when he says he will not "tolerate" a North Korea gone nuclear. By then, the hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, who have never believed a negotiated solution is possible with the North, will be able to say that Mr. Bush tried diplomacy and that it failed. In fact, those arguing for a patient diplomatic approach appear to be losing ground: one of the State Department's more moderate North Korea hands, Charles Pritchard, resigned last week, after months of behind-the-scenes battling to get the administration to put serious incentives on the table for the North to think about.
In a lengthy article this summer, Jonathan D. Pollack, an expert on proliferation at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., described in the Naval War College Review how those battles kept Mr. Bush from developing a coherent approach to North Korea for the first two years of his administration, and how administration hawks believe they might bring down the North Korean regime without firing a shot. They believe, he wrote, that "a policy of international ostracism, containment and reinforced defense (including missile defense) would deny Pyongyang any presumed political gains from its nuclear and missile programs and might even lead to the ultimate collapse of the North Korean system."
That may be why Mr. Bush, who prided himself on the clarity of his warnings to Iraq last autumn, now favors some strategic ambiguity in defining "tolerate." He says he reserves the right to execute Iraq-like pre-emptive military action, but thinks that a slow squeeze, including intercepting North Korean ships at sea, may well do the trick.
Iran is a more complex calculation. Unlike North Korea, it has oil revenue and lots of friends. And it has chosen not to go the North Korean route of open defiance of the West, allowing limited inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (presuming, of course, that inspectors won't get too close to some vital facilities).
In both cases, the administration seems increasingly inclined to go to the United Nations to obtain resolutions that would make it clear that the world is not about to allow either government to obtain a nuclear weapon. But as the Iraq case proved, rallying the world to make such declarations is very different from rallying the world to enforce them. And after the disputes over whether Mr. Bush and Tony Blair, the British prime minister, embellished the case against Iraq, there is bound to be skepticism. Convincing the world that this time he's talking about the real thing ? imminent nuclear capability, with the capacity to upend both Asia and the Mideast ? may be Mr. Bush's biggest autumn challenge.
nytimes.com |
