Maybe He Should Have Called It a ‘Slam Dunk’

[Update: John Bolton weighs in at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Bolton reads Joseph DiTrani’s remarks similarly to how I read them, although those of an “Anonymous Senior Official” are much more nefarious. Do not miss. Bolton continues to do great public service as a private citizen by focusing on the essential issues of inspection and verification, and then nails why all pieces of this framework join at that point, with pneumatic strength and precision:

[I]t is precisely this extensive verification system that the North cannot accept, because the transparency we must require would threaten the very rock of domestic oppression on which the North Korean regime rests. North Korea’s negotiators understand this contradiction. So do ours.

Gawd, how I hope the 2008 candidates are listening, because this man gets it. Those who helped sideline Bolton must wish he were still in government, where he’d be far easier to control. With a growing following of his own among conservatives (ht Michelle Malkin) and a record of demonstrable excellence, Bolton is now in a strong position to undermine the Administration’s appeasement-based exit strategy. That strategy, as Bolton notes, may be the greatest temptation to politicize intelligence today. Bolton calls this both bad intelligence and bad politics. He asks,

Where exactly is the administration headed? …. President Bush himself must speak, and sooner rather than later, to tell us what he thinks of the [uranium] intelligence, and the direction of his own policy. Recent polls show his approval rating near 30%, with support among Republicans falling precipitously. If the president’s conservative base erodes further, where will his support come from? From liberal editorialists enthusing about his newfound foreign policy “pragmatism”? Based on my personal experience, the president will not have both.

President Bush lost me, and that was no easy thing to do, given the absence of alternatives.]

Original Post: The Headline, from the Chosun Ilbo:

U.S. Admits Doubts Over N.Korean Uranium Program

Read further, and you’ll see that the report expresses “high confidence” that North Korea has obtained centrifuges, which have no other purpose than for making nuclear weapons, and “moderate confidence” that the program continues, or about how much uranium, if any, has actually been enriched. Contrary to the headline’s implication, these aren’t second thoughts. They are, at worst, a somewhat gun-shy interpretation of things we’ve known for some time. And the point of raising this now, when North Korea is re-denying the uranium program it once admitted to having? The point is to force the United States to drop its insistence that North Korea fully disclose the extent of this program, to remove the most likely deal-breaker from the picture. Because, after all, it’s not a slam dunk that they have one.

There have been a lot of dumb things said about pre-war intelligence about Iraq, but the criticism that has always made sense to me is that we should have been more up-front about the limits of our intelligence about secretive regimes — that we should not speak in certain terms about things we really have no way of being certain about.

It seems, however, more accurate to say that you just can’t win by trying to be right or honest. You have to be lucky. Express certainty and take action, and you’re going before an Iraq Study Group. Express uncertainty and abstain from action, and you’ll find yourself before a 9-11 Commission. Express uncertainty and declare the risk of ignoring the evidence unacceptable, and you’ll face calls to abstain, ignore, deny, and appease. Those calls will reliably be based on the most superficial of analyses, and will disregard most of the case on which your concerns, no matter how legitimate, are based. This effectively rewards the most secretive despots, those who create the doubts of which some would then reflexively give the despot the benefit. I’ve spoken with Joe DiTrani just enough to know that there are plenty of areas where I fundamentally disagree with him, but here is one where I will defend his conclusions, as opposed to how some are choosing to interpret them.

And after all, this isn’t softwood lumber we’re debating here. The importance of resolving our doubts is grave, and no one is arguing that war is an alternative.

The Wall Street Journal, I think, does a good job of laying out the evidence for which our concerns about uranium are based in this editorial. I was in general agreement with it until its conclusion:

White House officials say President Bush has earned the benefit of the doubt on North Korea and that he’ll insist on dismantling all of its nuclear facilities. We hope he’s not relying on the U.S. intelligence community to tell him when that’s happened.

How sad if our intelligence community isn’t giving that evidence its own most honest appraisal, for fear of getting things disastrously wrong again, but I don’t yet see a basis to conclude that. And in any event, Presidents who don’t trust their intelligence are venturing into exceptionally perilous territory. You go to the talks with the intelligence you have. If we can’t pretend to have conclusive evidence about what’s buried somewhere under North Korea, then we can at least agree that North Korea owes us full disclosure and unimpeded access to the end of each trail of evidence, including some evidence that is, as I’ve called it, “compelling.” Anything less suggests that the North Koreans remain committed to obfuscation, a conclusion in which I already have “high confidence.”

Appendix: More “Peace in Our Time” Updates

* Say What? Does anyone else sense some cognitive dissonance between the statement, by North Korean negotiator Kwon Ho Ung that “a nuclear-free Korea was the ‘dying wish’ of … Kim Il Sung,” and KCNA’s celebration that Kim Jong Il had achieved the “status of a full-fledged nuclear weapons state” and “successfully realized the long-cherished desire of the Korean nation to have matchless national power. Not that we’ve ever seen North Korea as a paragon of logic, but some consistency would be a sign of sincerity. Oh, right.

* The Best-Fed Room in North Korea. Kim Jong Il stopped by for a visit at the ChiCom Embassy in Pyongyang. No transcript is available, but I suspect that the main message was “thanks for helping us keep our nukes.”

* What UniFiction and Weather Have in Common. I was tempted to write something about the story, reported a few days ago, that South Korea was finally ready to demand denuclearization before giving more aid, but I concluded that in a few days, we’d learn that it was probably disinformation. And sure enough ….

* Truth in Unlikely Places: The Chosun Ilbo runs down what everyone wanted, and got, from the Great Beijing Sellout, and who the biggest losers will be:

It is the North Korean people who suffer in the face of this international political farce. No country cares about the North Korean people, who live in hunger, poverty, fear and without human rights — including the progressive government in South Korea, for all that it is shouting slogans of the nation. Completely ignoring the suffering of the North Korean people, representatives from the two Koreas will soon gather to sing the end of the Cold-War system and the building of a peace regime. Can such a pseudo-peace be built on the sufferings of the North Koreans be valuable and sustainable? What would it be for?

The Chosun calls for improving the lives of North Koreans to be the new paradigm in North Korea policy, and while I strongly agree, I also predict that the failure to accomplish that will, in the eyes of South Koreans, all be America’s fault in less than a decade.

* The UNDP has suspended its waste-ridden “development” program in North Korea.