North Korea's Nukes

Bush, not Clinton, encouraged North Korea's production of nukes.

A long digest:

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993 he inherited a ton of unresolved messes from Poppy Bush. Somalia got most of the headlines, but North Korea was a mess, also. In 1992 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had conducted some inspections in North Korea, but chief inspector Hans Blix suspected the North Koreans were hiding some stuff and fibbing about other stuff.

In 1994, western intelligence sources realized that a reprocessing complex being built at Yongbyon included a gas graphite reactor designed specifically for separating plutonium from nuclear waste. This scared the stuffing out of lots of people. The IAEA believed North Korea was hiding more plutonium somewhere. And then North Korea announced it was restricting IAEA inspections. Matters came to a head in June 1994, when North Korea relinquished its IAEA membership and all the inspectors cleared out of the country.

But then along came Jimmy. In June 1994, former President Carter went to North Korea to negotiate with Kim Il Sung, president of North Korea. These negotiations were a great success. North Korea committed to freezing its plutonium weapons program in exchange for two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors and other aid. As President Carter explained,

Responding to a standing invitation from North Korean President Kim Il Sung and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and helped to secure an agreement that North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit I.A.E.A. inspectors to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed. In return, the United States and our allies subsequently assured the North Koreans that there would be no nuclear threat to them, that a supply of fuel oil would be provided to replace the power lost by terminating the Yongbyon nuclear program and that two modern nuclear plants would also be provided, with their fuel supplies to be monitored by international inspectors. [Carter, "Engaging North Korea," The New York Times, October 27, 2002]

And, in spite of what the righties will tell you, the North Koreans kept this agreement. The plutonium processing at Yongbyon and elsewhere stopped, and IAEA inspectors were allowed back into North Korea. The plutonium processors were sealed with IAEA seals.

So here's where we stood when Bush II became President: Kim Jong Il was (and remains) a genuinely horrible leader whose people were starving, and western intelligence agencies at least suspected he was processing uranium. But relations with South Korea were improving, the IAEA was still inspecting, and the plutonium processors were still sealed.

But then there was Bush.

Kim Dae Jung came to Washington in March 2001 to pay respects to the new U.S. President Bush and ask for his support for the Sunshine Policy. And what happened?

Bush dissed him, that's what. The arrogant little twerp snubbed a Nobel Prize winner and friend to America. And when word of the snub reached North Korea, the "Sunshine Policy" died.

Republicans mostly hated this agreement and thought the Clintons were saps for paying millions of dollars to North Korea to not process plutonium. $500 million over seven or so years is a lot cheaper than war, however.

Another commenter, Tom "The Editor" Sumner, writes,

When D. Rumsfeld was on the board there, didn't ABB sell some key nuke-building material to North Korea?

Rummy's old outfit ABB won a $200 million contract to design and supply key components for the two light-water reactors that were part of the 1994 agreement. The deal was announced in 1999 and made official in 2000. Rummy was sitting on the Board of Directors at this time.

In June 2001 (see timeline), the Bushies sent signals that they were prepared to engage in bilateral talks with the North Koreans. Some meetings were held to work out the details of these talks. Through the remainder of 2001 the North Koreans appeared to have settled down a bit, and in any event after September 11 the Bushies were focused elsewhere.

Still, Kim Jung Il let it be known that he wasn't going to make diplomacy easy. On January 1, 2002, he announced a military build-up to meet the threat of U.S. aggression.

Bush responded to this by pouring fuel on the fire. On January 29, 2002, he made his famous "axis of evil" remark in the SOTU speech, and also criticized North Korea for ?"arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.?" Two days later, the North Koreans declared Bush'speechec was "little short of a declaration of war."

Just a week later, on February Colin Powell restated the Bush Administration's willingness to engage in bilateral talks with North Korea at "any time, any place, or anywhere without any preconditions."

A pattern is established -- Colin Powell at least puts on a good act of being diplomatic and smoothing things out, and then Georgie Boy stomps into the room and throws his toys around and makes a mess.

In March 2002, Bush refused to certify North Korea's compliance with the 1994 Agreed Framework, but said the U.S. would continue dlivering oil for energy to North Korea anyway.

In September 2002, the North Koreans announced they would behave and extend their long-range missile moratorium. They also made some ambiguous noises about keeping their nuclear weapons commitments. This was the result of meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Before crashing ahead to what happened in 2003, I want to go back to the Foreign Affairs article mentioned yesterday -- "Did North Korea Cheat?" by Selig S. Harrison, from Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005.

This article was an eye-opener for me, and I thought I had caught on to the Bushies' nefariousness in North Korea already. But it's worse than I had imagined. Harrison says the Bushies are pulling an Iraq in North Korea -- presenting a worse-case scenario based on half-assed intelligence. They are unnecessarily provoking an international crisis and bringing us closer to war -- nuclear war, this time.

So the next question is, what were the Bushies up to in 2002? Did they have some purpose behind stirring up trouble, or are they just stupid? And the answer seems to be, both.

What seems to have set the Bushies off (and I've seen this in other sources, not just from Harrison) is that South Korea and Japan were working diplomatically toward better relations with North Korea. And they were not waiting for signals from Washington to do this; they were doing this entirely independently of the Bush Administration. North and South Korea are building railroad lines through the DMZ and plan to build an industrial park in North Korea in which South Korean firms would set up business. The Pentagon tried its best to put the brakes on this enterprise, but eventually gave in to it.

You'll remember that the Bushies got some immediate political perks from the North Korean crisis it had stirred up -- which was, let us note, on the eve of the 2002 elections. Immediately after Mr. Kelly started his bomb-throwing act, the rightie punditocracy was unleashed throughout news media to inflame public opinion against the evil Clinton-Carter 1994 agreement and, by extension, Democrats. Funny how that worked out.

Harrison doesn't make the election connection, however. He is more charitable than I am, and attributes the Bushies' North Korean strategy to a penchant for getting worked up over worse-case scenarios, however farfetched.

The North Koreans have enough plutonium to make lots of nukes.

Weirdly, and typically, the Bushies don't seem to be all that bothered by the plutonium nukes. According to Charles Pritchard, after having instigated international hysteria over alleged uranium bombs, the Bushies dismissed intelligence that said North Korea might make plutonium bombs.

Now the U.S. is demanding that North Korea give up all nuclear enrichment facilities, whether LEU or HEU, in spite of the fact that LEU facilities can't make bombs and are supposed to be permissible. And it cannot be forgot that Kim Jong Il is deranged enough to use nuclear weapons if he perceives a big enough threat.

In December 2002, oil shipments to North Korea were stopped. Just over two years later, North Korea announced it has nuclear weapons. See how well Condi's plan worked?

Also in December 2002, the people of South Korea elected a new President, Roh Moo Hyun, who favors continuation of the Sunshine Policy and greater autonomy from the United States. For a good analysis of this election and Korean-U.S. relations in general at the end of 2002, please see "Korea: Another Big Election Defeat for Bush" by Jim Lobe, TomPaine.com, December 20, 2002.

Also in December 2002, Bush was handed a clue that the world does not neatly sort itself into good guys and bad guys:

In early December, the U.S. National Security Agency tracked the movement of 15 Scud missiles and 85 drums of chemicals from a factory in North Korea to the freighter So San. Then the NSA monitored the unflagged ship around the world to the Arabian Sea.

Were these missiles going to Iraq? The U.S. asked the Spanish Navy to stop and board the So San. But the dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, claimed the cargo, thereby putting the Bush Administration into a nice ideological pickle. Saleh is an ally against Iraq, part of Bush's beloved "coalition of the willing"; therefore, Saleh is a "good" guy.

The most critical thing that happened in December 2002 was that North Korea announced it was going back into the plutonium production biz. Years of careful multinational diplomacy were thereby flushed, thanks to Bush and his foreign policy team.

We ended 2002 with a pissed off Kim Jong Il, who ordered plutonium production to be resumed. The IAEA seals on nuclear facilities and materials, in place since 1994, were cut, and the IAEA inspectors were kicked out of North Korea.

According to this Arms Control Association timeline, in January 2003 North Korea announced its withdrawal from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and in February U.S. officials confirmed that North Korea had restarted the five-megawatt nuclear reactor that had been frozen by the Agreed Framework. North Korea was also making noises about restarting long-range missile testing.

The most important point here is that the world has very few options. The fault for this mess lies with both Washington and Pyongyang, two nuclear powers who refuse to act like grownups.

I hope this has been helpful. There's so much noise being generated by the righties and their media lapdogs it's hard to keep the stories straight.

This has been a long digest from much longer posts at Mahablog.

Why such a long digest? Partly this has been done because on the basis of North Korea and several other foreign policy errors I explained to my moderate libertarian friend that Bush policies were encouraging the spread of WMDs. I also let him know that Bush was in my opinion and in the opinion of many others the worst ever President. For my efforts some time ago I was the subject of his long, illogical, and misguided, article on irrational scapegoating by the left. For this and his seemingly uncritical acceptance that the call and duty of the United States at this time is for a crusade against the dirty "Islamofascists who hate us for our freedoms", someone must have copyrighted that phrase, I gave up communicating with him.

I have been wanting to start up again but first want to see if I have any new evidence, new thoughts, or new opinions. The only one that is really relevant so far is that Bush isn't worth it. Even his own party is abandoning the lame duck. His policies are seen by the more intelligent in his own party as almost unmitigated failures.

If we can go back to only discussing the radical takeover of the GOP by Christian extremists we are on common ground.