The Administration’s North Korea Strategy: Pop Smoke

[Update: A friend just sent me John O’Sullivan’s must-read criticism of the deal on National Review Online (thanks!), and it’s an absolute direct hit. O’Sullivan actually attributed Bush’s new policy to Jimmy Carter (ouch!). Safe to say, conservatives pretty much all want this deal euthanized. I could swear I’d seen the Kipling reference before somewhere.]

[Update 2: More “Barrel of a Gun” spin from Pyongyang:

In another sense, North Korean authorities seem to be trying to re-integrate the disparity of feelings between the people on the outcome of foreign affairs. Hence, the reason to advocate that the nuclear experiment had ensured economic gain.

We can confirm these premises by observing reports by governmental broadcasting agencies such as the (North Korean) Central News Agency who are extracting phrases such as “freezing nukes” for “temporary suspension of nuclear facilities” and placing greater emphasis on economic aid such as a million tons of fuel and energy support rather than the true reality. [Daily NK] ]

Original Post: How many of you have looked at where the North Korean nuclear situation is heading and been as struck as I am by how closely life sometimes imitates parody?

There’s no longer much question that the North Koreans view the Beijing pact as a temporary freeze of their plutonium program that will let them keep their bombs, their uranium program, and of course, their chem, their bio, their missiles, and the horrors of Camp 22, which North Korea dares not open for inspection. Richard Halloran and Richardson do an excellent job of cataloguing North Korea’s statements that clarify just what this agreement means to them. Do read every word of Richardson’s post; here’s a quote from Halloran’s piece:

On that same day, however, the North Koreans, through their official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), said Pyongyang had agreed only to a “temporary suspension of the operation of its nuclear facilities.” Further, North Korea ignored most of the other provisions of the agreement, such as denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. [….]

KCNA said North Korea’s “status of a full-fledged nuclear weapons state successfully realized the long-cherished desire of the Korean nation to have matchless national power.” In another dispatch, KCNA said that “Kim Jong Il punctured the arrogance of the US imperialists with a powerful nuclear deterrent.”

On Kim Jong Il’s birthday, a national holiday on Feb. 16, a Communist Party committee lauded him: “You have turned the homeland of Juche (Self-reliance) into a power having nuclear deterrent for self-defense and made the Korean nation emerge a nuclear weapons nation which no force can ever provoke.”

At a banquet that evening, which was aired by the Korean Central Broadcasting Station, the president of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Yong Nam, toasted Kim Jong Il for, among other things, for turning North Korea into “a military power that even possesses a self-defensive nuclear deterrent.”

Halloran thinks that what North Korea tells its own people matters. I agree. Halloran acknowledges that some may feel otherwise, and I also acknowledge it. Ten years ago, when the information blockade was mostly intact, Kim Jong Il could have worried less about domestic opinion. But with the regime unable to control the flow of subversive information and probably paying a political cost for it, things are different now. Nationalism probably has stong appeal even to “wavering” and “hostile” North Koreans, although it’s uncertain how many North Koreans really think nukes have been worth their cost. It’s the old “Barrel of a Gun” concept, taken from the title of North Korea’s best-selling political novel. The idea is to sustain national pride by disguising the aid the North Korean regime needs as extortion money. Like all good propaganda, this characterization has the advantage of partial accuracy.

So what North Korea says the agreement means isn’t the same thing as what we say the agreement means. The question isn’t what the North Koreans will do; it’s what we will do. They will keep lying about the uranium. Will the Administration try to bury that difference, even with skepticism rising and the base holding its nose? I think so.

My optimistic side clings to the frail straw that this deal is really a cunning Rovian conspiracy to trap the North Koreans in an obvious lie, to better show the futility of dealing with them. This is not very rational if you look at what’s really happening, however. The Administration is doing exactly what you would expect it to do if its intention is to pass this problem along to the next one: it’s outsourcing the show-stopper differences to “working groups” and the IAEA, which will have little power, will attract little media attention as they hit a wall of North Korean intransigence, and which are unlikely to declare North Korea noncompliant in the next 18 months. They are left to sift through unresolved issues that two decades of diplomacy failed to resolve (uranium) and such details as verification, inspection, and compliance. On one level, this is brilliant. The “working groups” are a perfect formula for the concealment of gridlock. If I guess right, the members will be low- to mid-level officials from six different nations that have given them strict orders not to deviate from a narrow range of positions. So while the groups would seem unlikely to resolve much, the press may not even notice if the members are of sufficiently low-level, since most of them prefer to stalk the rock stars. (Hence “pop smoke,” a military term for using smoke grenades to hide you from snipers, cover your retreat, and mark your position for the helicopters.)

I can see why Kim Jong Il welcomes the participation of the IAEA. The U.N. has become a household parody, and good parody, like good propaganda, also requires a degree of accuracy. Our recent experiences with Iran are all the encouragement Kim Jong Il needs.

The International Atomic Energy Agency hopes to announce its broad plan to begin inspecting North Korea’s nuclear facilities this week. There is just one thing unclear, government officials said: how much Pyongyang will cooperate. Among other steps, the recent agreement in Beijing calls for Pyongyang to “discuss” within the next two months a list of “all” its nuclear programs as its first steps toward implementing an accord reached in September of 2005. In particular, Washington wants to know about the North’s clandestine program to enrich uranium, a key component of nuclear weapons. [….]

Officially, the North has denied the existence of such a program. However, Chun Young-woo, South Korea’s chief negotiator to the talks, said last week in Seoul that Pyongyang has been clearly told full disclosure of its programs includes the uranium-based ones. [Joongang Ilbo]

In this story, filed yesterday, Chris Hill says that North Korea still denies having a uranium program. He reassures us that the working groups will question the North closely on the issue. I wish them better luck finding North Korea’s hidden WMD programs than they had with the ones every intelligence agency and most members of Congress once agreed Saddam Hussein had. At best, I predict that those working groups will give us a definitive answer in December 2008. At worst, we’ll never really know for sure, not even when it’s too late. Richardson and I laid out the uranium evidence just yesterday. I would take that evidence to a jury with reasonable confidence that I’d get a conviction. Continuing with the story quoted above:

In the past, officials from the IAEA have stressed that any declaration by Pyongyang would have to be matched by unimpeded access for inspectors.

Letting foreigners roam around in their country is a foreign idea to North Korea and, even if granted, how they can search a country riddled with underground tunnels and facilities like a subway system remains to be seen.

Experts say the process of full verification will take two to three years because the inspectors are faced with the immense task of verifying Pyongyang’s past, present and future nuclear capabilities.

It all depends on just how desperate this Administration is to have a deal — even a bad one. I see that even Mitt Romney is putting his skepticism on his campaign site. This is good news, because it’s another sign that the Administration is on the defensive defending this deal to his base.

White House Spokesman Tony Snow underlined last week that concrete measures are needed to move forward in the whole process, “How can you trust them, we’re asked. And the answer is, you’ve got to take small steps. You’ve got to lay out benchmarks. Shut down Yongbyon, declare all your nuclear facilities, all your nuclear materials, and so on. That’s step number one,” he said, according to a transcript of a press conference in Washington. [link]

And Dick Cheney said this,

Cheney said the North Korea deal represented “a first hopeful step” that would “bring us closer” to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula — but he also sounded a note of caution.

“We go into this deal with our eyes open,” he said. “In light of North Korea’s missile test last July, its nuclear test in October and its record of proliferation and human rights abuses, the regime in Pyongyang has much to prove.”

As I said before, we’ll know a lot more in seven weeks. I think I see what the Administration is trying to do, but the real question is whether it will get away with it, or whether this deal will go the way of Harriet Myers.