Behind the scenes, a deepening crisis for Agreed Framework 2.0

Maybe the Dear Leader will save us all yet. From ourselves, that is.

If he does, it will be because he’s overplayed his hand again. A reader forwards a scan of a letter sent by three Republican U.S. Senators — Brownback, Grassley, and Kyl, the new minority whip, to Chris Hill, the architect of Agreed Framework 2.0. The letter requests that State specifically respond to this Congressional Research Service report’s allegations that North Korea continued to materially support Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers recently. The letter asks why, if the reports are true, North Korea should be removed from the list of state sponsors of terror. You can read the signed version here:

kyl-grassley-brownback-letter.pdf

Kyl’s signature is significant and ought to worry State, given that he’s now the number two Republican in the Senate. Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who co-sponsored [proposed] legislation setting conditions for removing North Korea from the terror list, did not sign. North Korea’s state news agency, KCNA, takes exception and does not leave us wanting for levity:

Pyongyang, December 19 (KCNA) — U.S. Senator Brownback was recently reported to have presented to the Administration a bill urging it to put a brake on the process to implement the DPRK-U.S. agreement.
In the bill he was adamant in insisting that the U.S. should not delist the DPRK as a “sponsor of terrorism” and lift the application of the “Trading with the Enemy Act,” the commitments to be fulfilled by the U.S. under the agreement between the DPRK and the U.S.

This is ridiculous, indeed. Back is a diehard anti-communist element as he took the lead in fabricating the “North Korean Human Rights Act” based on sheer lies in 2004. He collected a huge amount of fund on the strength of the act but as it turned out to be futile and infeasible, he was not in a position to make an effective use of the fund only to be jeered and censured by the international community.

This is well known a fact.

Anything you say.

This guy again busied himself with the presentation of the bill, as if he had nothing else to do, a foolish bid to stop the administration from lifting sanctions against the DPRK. He seems not to know what the DPRK-U.S. agreement means and what the U.S. strategic interests are. Irony is that such political imbecile as Mr. Back claims to be a senator although he does not know even where he stands. It is not hard to guess what the level of the U.S. politics is.

Mr. Back?

Explicitly speaking, the DPRK has remained unfazed despite the anti-DPRK sanctions applied by the U.S. for several decades. The U.S. lifting of the sanctions is, therefore, not what the DPRK has craved for. There would be no change for it whether the U.S. persisted in the sanctions against it or not.

Such conservative hardliners as Back calculate they can throw a hurdle in the way of the process of the six-party talks and the DPRK-U.S. relations through such “sanctions”. Nothing is, however, more foolish than this. With no desperate effort can the U.S. conservative hardliners stem the trend of the times towards detente over the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. [KCNA]

What seems to be taking shape is an alignment between the Bush Administration and Democrats, over Republican opposition. In fact, when Congress passed an omnibus spending bill this week, it contained a $53 million appropriation for “disablement” and fuel oil for North Korea, without conditions I’m told (no link there; this comes directly from a House staffer, and if you can find anything in that monster of a bill, huzzah for you). And when Chris Hill goes hunting for support in the Senate, it’s noticeable that it’s one of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats (and shallowest thinkers, Babs Boxer) who poses for photographs with him.

Conservative opposition to the Administration’s new policy continues to gather steam:

Worse, Ms. Rice has now signed on to a new “Mark II” version of the agreed framework, which has considerably fewer benchmarks for the North Koreans than the Clinton administration deal did.

Ostensibly a commitment by North Korea to disclose and abandon all nuclear programs — including a secret highly enriched uranium program — the deal’s vague, open-ended nature promises endless renegotiation. As to why an administration that once insisted upon “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” is now O.K. with nebulous “abandonment,” the record is silent. [Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute in the N.Y. Times]

As it stands now, however, that opposition would probably not be enough to frustrate the Administration’s policy. That’s why we’re all counting on Kim Jong Il’s help. And thankfully, the Dear Leader never disappoints. Not only is h still denying the existence of his uranium enrichment program, he’s now refusing to disclose information about his nuclear weapons:

“Washington wants the nuclear devices for which the plutonium was used to be listed along with the amount of plutonium produced,” the official said, explaining that the North feared doing so as it could reveal the level of sophistication of their nuclear technology.

“Pyongyang only wants to own up to the total amount of plutonium produced. That gives them leeway to be ambiguous on what happened to everything produced so far,” the official said. “Without knowing for sure their technological level, any discrepancies on the total amount of plutonium produced can be explained and blamed on the technology level. [Joongang Ilbo]

Recall that the original deal requires the disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear “programs;” its failure to mention “weapons” or “devices” was just one of many loopholes for which this deal was criticized at the time. Chris Hill insisted that “all programs” meant weapons, too, but now, that vagueness is returning to haunt us.

China is sufficiently concerned about this that it has even dispatched its nuclear negotiator and Vice Foreign Minister, Wu Dawei, to Pyongyang to lean on the North Koreans, although it’s hard to be certain of the extent of China’s good faith in doing so. State is sending Sung Kim, Director of its Office of Korean Affairs. These are not things that we’d be doing if we expected a prompt and full disclosure from Kim Jong Il.

What will State do? It will probably seek to stop the North Koreans from issuing any “disclosure” that’s demonstrably incomplete, for fear of generating more domestic opposition. Instead, it will try to let the December 31st disclosure deadline slip, and slip some more, as negotiations over the scope of the disclosure drag on. Tardiness, as State knows, is easier to forgive than mendacity.

What should conservatives do? They should continue to close the jaws of the vice and force State to demand complete disclosure, even as Pyongyang tries to spread the jaws and disclose nothing we don’t already know. They should continue to marshal their evidence for North Korea’s wholesale and retail terrorism, along with their strongest arguments about why disarmament that isn’t verifiable is meaningless. Behind the happy talk, this deal looks to be in deep trouble. It’s in trouble because of North Korea’s misbehavior, and the awakening interest of conservatives in getting some very good explanations for it. State can still save Agreed Framework 2.0, but not without Kim Jong Il’s cooperation.

It will be Kim Jong Il’s loss if it can’t. The new South Korean President-Elect is already saying that he will insist on North Korea’s denuclearization before he continues South Korean aid to the North. The significance of this, if true, would be difficult to overstate. The last ten years of South Korean aid amounted to $7 billion, without conditions relating to denuclearization, disarmament, the release of South Korean abductees, or North Korea’s human rights atrocities. It was that money that allowed Kim Jong Il to choose both survival and nuclear weapons; in fact, it probably paid for those weapons. This could be Kim Jong Il’s last best chance to save himself. Pray he blows it.