The Counterfeiting Issue: Why Now?

If you can’t actually defend Kim Jong Il’s counterfeiting of the dollar, and you can’t deny that the evidence is strong enough to convince even the Chinese, what’s a dedicated appeaser to say?

The talking point appears to be “Why now?” Meaning, why did the United States cruelly dash our high hopes of progress in the nuclear talks with North Korea now, as opposed to cruelly dashing similar hopes at any other time during the last decade or so of ultra-high hopes? I suppose if you accept the premises for those statements, I’ll never convince you of anything, but here’s what proliferation expert David Asher says about it:

David L. Asher, a former State Department official who oversaw the investigation into North Korean counterfeiting, offered a different explanation. He said the Bush administration ordered the inquiry soon after taking power in 2001, and it took 150 federal officials four years of sleuthing to assemble the evidence, much of which has not been made public.

“The timing is just a coincidence,” said Mr. Asher, who was coordinator of the department’s North Korea working group until last year. “The administration wanted us to prove this. They didn’t want this to end up like Iraqi W.M.D.s,” referring to the so-called weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration never found in Iraq.

In particular, Mr. Asher said, the administration waited until September to give the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies time to finish two elaborate undercover operations focusing on members of China’s notorious Triad criminal syndicates. The operations, which ended in August, netted $4 million worth of supernotes with narcotics and counterfeit versions of name brand cigarettes.

The operations, called Royal Charm and Smoking Dragon, arrested 59 people suspected of being gang members, including some lured into the United States when federal agents posing as organized crime figures invited them to a staged wedding. Before they were arrested, some of the suspects even offered to sell federal agents shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, Mr. Asher said.

He said he did not know if the missiles had been made in North Korea.

What I’ve read in other press reports actually suggests that the missiles were made in China, but if the North Koreans were trying to smuggle SAMs into the country, it’s yet another restraint removed from the position I advocate, which is to summarily extend the Second Amendment to the North Korean people.

Asher’s version does make sense on this basic level, however: there was simply no time that would be convenient for appeasement crowd when the North Koreans have successfully dragged out talks for more than a decade. In fact, it could be argued more convincingly that the North Koreans’ behavior has never been more recalcitrant and bellicose, and that even without this investigation, hopes had not been lower for years.