North Korea’s Moment of Untruth, and Chris Hill’s

Secretary Rice, embrace your legacy. Agreed Framework 2.0 has stalled, and probably for good.

Last month, we thought we were approaching North Korea’s moment of truth. Last week, with the matter of that overdue declaration, it was still possible (though gullible) to believe they’d still offer it in due course. Certainly that was the impression the White House was feeding us when it said on January 3rd that it was “going to keep hammering away” at getting the declaration and spinning that it didn’t have “any indication that [North Korea] will not provide” it.

The very next day, employing its tested skill at humiliating its friends and vindicating its enemies, North Korea announced that it had already given us its declaration — back in November — and that was that.

A dispute over whether North Korea has given the U.S. details of its nuclear programs has become the latest hurdle in efforts to rid the North of its atomic arsenal. The United States rejects North Korea’s claim that it handed over the list in November — ahead of a Dec. 31 deadline that the U.S. says the North missed — and “has done what it should do” on the declaration. [AP, Foster Klug]

Moment of untruth arrived, period, exclamation point. North Korea is now back to talking about increasing its “deterrent.”

Just to show how low we’ve sunk, when I first read this, my reaction was to believe that North Korea wasn’t the only one fibbing to us, and that the North Koreans might very well have turned over their idea of a declaration. Sure, North Korea usually is lying when the lips of its mouthpieces move, but for North Korea to insist that it had tendered its declaration when it had done no such thing? Too brazen, even for them. State’s weasel words were the first hint:

Spokesman Sean McCormack said, however, that North Korea has not yet provided a complete nuclear declaration, a key part of a February aid-for-disarmament deal worked out in six-nation talks. “The North Koreans need to get about the business of completing this declaration,” he told reporters. [AP, Foster Klug, emphasis mine]

And then we come a step closer to the truth:

“They were prepared to give a declaration which wasn’t going to be complete and correct and we felt that it was better for them to give us a complete one even if it’s going to be a late one,” Washington’s top envoy to nuclear talks with North Korea, Christopher Hill, told reporters. [Reuters, Teruaki Ueno with John Herskovitz]

Compare that to State’s transcript of what Chris Hill said when he returned from Pyongyang on December 5th:

QUESTION: And did, while you were up there, you get a chance to talk about what is in the declaration, or did you get a chance to see a draft copy?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: No. We discussed what they plan to have in the declaration, and we wanted to make sure that they would also include all the facilities, materials, and programs that the DPRK has had in the nuclear era in these many years that it has had these nuclear ambitions. [Excerpt from a State Department press release, emphasis mine]

Here’s our second moment of untruth. As it became clear that North Korea’s declaration would be neither full nor complete, State must have anticipated the finality of that declaration in much the same way that an NBA player anticipates a paternity test result. Finality is where mendacity becomes non-negotiable, and without negotiation, there is nothing to protract or stall; there is only deciding.

We can now infer that we’ve been renegotiating the terms of North Korea’s declaration for a month or more. Hence Hill’s visit to Pyongyang, President Bush’s letter, and the follow-on vists by Chinese and American diplomats. We either had or could have had North Korea’s declaration, but the Bush Administration hid North Korea’s lie so that, to paraphrase Hill, we could pretend that North Korea was disarming. Kim Jong Il has plenty of rope, but everyone’s dangling but him.

State is now putting its best face on these stark facts, offering the excuse that “[t]his is a very closed society that has had a secret program that’s been ongoing.” So North Korea didn’t decide to tell the truth when it signed this deal? Apparently not. “Sometimes it moves in what some might consider tectonic or glacial fashion,” McCormack said. “But it does ““ it does move forward.” But it isn’t, of course. It hasn’t in two decades of talks. Hill and his boss, John Negroponte, are now preparing to visit the region, to lean on some of the other four parties and perhaps kowtow to others. Already, the Chinese are telling us to expect no help from them:

China, host of six-party talks aimed at reining in North Korea’s nuclear program, on Thursday described North Korea’s failure to meet a deadline to account for its nuclear activities as a natural delay. . . . ” The pace is faster in some areas and slower in some areas. This is natural,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference, urging all sides to fulfill their respective pledges. “We believe the comprehensive implementation of actions will open broader prospects for the six-party talks.” Reuters, Lindsay Beck and Paul Eckert (emphasis mine)

Translation: we haven’t paid enough. On the “disablement” of the already used-up Yongbyon reactor, there seem to be legitimate technical reasons why disablement has slowed down, but North Korea is also deliberately slowing things down.

All of this means, among other things, that North Korea has probably just kept itself on the terror-sponsor list for at least another year. For one thing, Chris Hill himself told Congress that he believes North Korea had a uranium enrichment program. We’ve since caught them lying or cheating on enriched uranium and on proliferation to Syria. Congress is increasingly skeptical, conservative opposition is growing, and Bush could yet find himself defending against the attacks of candidates of his own party, especially those seeking to establish their bona fides as conservatives in a wide-open Republican primary. One member of Bush’s own administration has even left it over this deal:

It’s well known that most of the administration’s nonproliferation experts were unhappy with the agreement reached with North Korea last February. Nonproliferation analysts and experts throughout the administration have been marginalized on national security issues for years. The nuclear agreement with India was negotiated largely absent senior participation from our ranks; the dialogue with allies regarding Iran’s nuclear program has been conducted almost exclusively on a political level.

Given that history, few were surprised that the North Korea deal was reached so easily by political and regional officials. But we were assured that President Bush had a personal desire to seek, through the six-party process, an end to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

To support the president, we labored to define nebulous terminology — “nuclear programs,” say, and “disablement” — crafted by the negotiators. Nonproliferation experts and verification specialists endured accusations of disloyalty to the administration and of political and international naivete. Our expertise was faulted. Yet we continued to try to strengthen the hand dealt to the president by the State Department and to close the glaring loopholes in the agreement.

Ultimately, it became clear that honest assessments of intelligence on North Korea’s nuclear program were not of interest to the administration’s “regional specialists.” They wanted a deal. They continue to keep the deal afloat even as North Korean intransigence continues. [Carolyn Leddy in the Washington Post]

Here is Claudia Rosett on North Korea’s failure to meet the December 31st deadline:

Take North Korea’s failure to meet the Dec. 31 deadline to come clean on the full extent of its nuclear programs. “Unfortunate” was the bland term with which State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey acknowledged this failure – as if it were an accident of fate, not a deliberate dodge by Pyongyang. Casey added, “The important thing is not whether we have the declaration by today,” but that whenever it finally appears, it is “full and complete.”

Actually, in the wheeling and dealing with Pyongyang, it matters quite a lot whether Kim Jong Il’s regime makes the deadlines. North Korea has long experience making deals in which it promises better behavior in exchange for aid, then takes the largesse and cheats on the deal. That’s exactly how the 1994 nuclear freeze deal went down the tubes during President Bill Clinton’s second term: Kim raked in tribute from the West, and fed and fueled his military while an estimated one million to two million North Koreans starved to death. Now, following a North Korean nuclear test, the Bush administration is going down the same road. With every missed deadline shrugged off as “unfortunate,” Washington sends the signal that we are not serious in our demands. [Claudia Rosett in the Philadelphia Enquirer]

What a shame that this scene from “Team America” (language alert) became such a tired bloggers’ cliche two U.N. resolutions ago. Any analogy that brilliantly perfect can’t have as long a shelf life as the absurd reality it parodies, but life has has gotten so much better at imitating “Team America” in the last 12 months. Chwis Hill, we’ve been through this a dozen times. I have no enwiched uwanium pwogwam. We’ve already tried sending letters; I suppose we could always send an angrier one. Now that Kim Jong Il has dropped Hill into the metaphorical shark tank, America needs to display is an answer to the question, “Or else, what?”

What we need is a Plan B.