Selig Harrison’s Best-Case Assumption

Mr. Harrison published this bitter little diatribe today:

Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on North Korea (much as it did in Iraq), seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly making uranium-based nuclear weapons.

I have to stop for a moment to wonder how far the name “Selig Harrison” got this guy. If my name were, say, Allistair J. Cockburn III, I’d probably be Undersecretary of something by now. That, and better grades, maybe. And from a better school. And better posture.

Still, I’m underwhelmed every day by the correlation between academic intelligence and good judgement. A world view with a blind spot for base ruthlessness is a particular weakness of the academic class, but missing the key facts usually isn’t, so someone needs to put a friendly hand on Selig’s shoulder and quietly inform him that North Korea has repeatedly admitted that it’s building nukes, including an admission to U.S. diplomats that it had a secret uranium enrichment program. What’s to overstate? Why not do what we should have done before the Iraq war and simply admit that North Korea has made the whole truth unknowable, but is undeserving of the benefit of the doubt because of its past mendacity?

What Selig Harrison really expects of us is proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we protect our safety against secretive, shadowy, and completely ruthless pathological liars. Our intel on goverments like North Korea’s is never going to be an exact science. The point of demanding mathematical certainty before we act is really to forestall the possibility of any action at all, unless you consider counterproductive talks to be action. And if a danger that almost all serious observers (both Bush and Kerry, to name just two) consider very real continues to worsen while you waste time talking about buying an even bigger lie, those talks are counterproductive.

Of course, Harrison is no more certain of the real facts about North Korean nukes than President Bush; he just assigns the risks differently. Harrison says, and fairly I believe, that President Bush assumes the worst about North Korea. Would Harrison admit that he is assuming the least-worst case, or that he would assign the grave risks of error to Seattle rather than Pyongyang?

Harrison’s prescription? Deal with the plutonium problem only and work toward a “relaxation of tensions” (I want to remind readers that there will be absolutely no snickering. This is a serious discussion for mature adults, understand?). What’s off the table? The uranium program, conventional forces, chemical weapons, and presumably, human rights . . . leaving us with little more than the question of how big a check we will write.