Don’t Worry, North Korea Really Means Well
01.24.2008 - 7:54 AMToday’s Washington Post carries good news about the Hermit Kingdom. David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, and Jacqueline Shire, a former State Department official, tell us there’s no reason for us to worry about the lack of North Korean progress in meeting its obligations under the various agreements it has signed. Indeed, the “finger-wagging, told-you-so naysayers in and out of the Bush administration should take a deep breath.”
To begin with, they argue, North Korea’s full declaration detailing the scope of its nuclear program, due on December 31, and now 24 days late, is not really late at all: “After some tail-chasing, it emerged that North Korea had quietly shared an initial declaration with the United States in November.” The North Koreans there admitted came clean about their plutonium stockpile but they denied having “a uranium enrichment program.”
Albright and Shire acknowledge the “ample evidence that North Korea acquired components for a centrifuge-enrichment program” but they explain that few observers now believe that it actually managed to enrich any uranium. In any case, their efforts in this area are nothing to worry about: “The success or failure of this latest agreement with North Korea must not hinge on the uranium issue,” even if the full declaration was not really full at all.
Then there is North Korean cooperation with a covert Syrian nuclear program. This is “troubling,” Albright and Shire tell us, but “must also be kept in context.” What is the context? The necessity of keeping North Korea engaged in dialogue. In the face of Pyongyong’s provision of “sensitive or dual-use equipment to Syria,” the main imperative is “keeping the deal together.” This will help bring “North Korea into the fold, bit by bit, making it harder for it to slip back into the arena of illicit deals and keeping a bright light on its activities.”
As for the nuclear facility in Syria that Israel bombed in September after a North Korean shipment of some unknown sort arrived there, this also must be kept in context, and in any case “it is gone now and whatever has replaced it is almost certainly not a reactor.” Reports that North Korea provided plutonium to Syria “are baseless.” The evidence: “The transfer of such material for weapons would be a casus belli with dire consequences for both countries, and this surely is understood by both Kim Jong Il and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”
Albright and Shire complain that the advocates of the “the six-party process” have been “unfairly maligned.” Perhaps. But perhaps they are maligning themselves. In their op-ed, these advocates of the six-party process are adducing evidence that is not really evidence to explain away every North Korean transgression, large and small. Where they have no evidence, not even the tissue-paper-thin kind, they adapt a slightly different approach: they simply tell us to close our eyes to the North Korean violations in order to keep “a laser-like focus” on the talks.
Connecting the Dots has asked readers the same question before: What is the best word to describe such an approach to the North Korean nuclear problem?
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January 24th, 2008 at 11:11 AM
It’s called the “ostrich approach.” Have you googled “David Albright?”
Here’s his resume.
In recent articles about the new Syrian building on the site that Israel attacked in September he believes that new building is not a nuclear site but seems convinced that the one destroyed by Israel may well have been (intended to be) nuclear.
Still from what I can gather, is that he is awfully trusting of tyrants.
January 24th, 2008 at 12:22 PM
What is the best word to describe such an approach to the North Korean nuclear problem?
“Blind?”
January 24th, 2008 at 1:51 PM
We might call the whole interaction Monty Python diplomacy. From Knights of Ni to killer rabbits, it’s like watching The Holy Grail movie unfold. At some point I expect Pyongyang to ask us our favorite color.
I do enjoy gems like these from the Albright-Shire piece:
“Does this quantity of separated plutonium make sense? Yes. In short, 30 kilograms is at the lower end of the range of plutonium that we have assessed North Korea could have separated. This estimate is based on what we know about how long its reactor operated to build up plutonium in the fuel rods and how much plutonium was chemically extracted from this fuel at the nearby reprocessing plant.”
Well, yes, and since anyone without a subscription to any of three dozen major newspapers can discover online, with a brief keyword search, that this is the amount of plutonium we have thought North Korea could have separated, it’s hardly a form of powerful or reassuring evidence that Pyongyang has given us this number. It’s neither a diplomatic concession nor a piece of intelligence. We probably won’t let it be an intelligence manipulation, but it’s apparent we are letting it be a diplomatic one.
But then, what is to be expected from writers who assert the following, apropos Pyongyang’s connection with the Syrian facility? — : “The best argument for holding the deal together is that it brings North Korea into the fold, bit by bit, making it harder for it to slip back into the arena of illicit deals and keeping a bright light on its activities.”
Considering that whatever North Korea did in relation to the Syrian installation was done with the six-party talks going full-bore, the measure of assigning Pyongyang homework and monitoring its attendance and social behavior does not seem to have the noticeable effect of making it harder for the North Koreans to “slip back into the arena of illicit deals.”
January 24th, 2008 at 9:48 PM
SUICIDE,only problem is ,we die too.
January 27th, 2008 at 3:19 AM
The Stupidity Defense
The only way to get beyond the old debates about DPRK’s noncompliance on its nuclear programs is to acknowledge that the US inself is to blame for many of the mistakes the North Koreans are exploiting to their advantage.
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