Christopher Hitchens on the Rice-Lefkowitz Flap

Since Hitchens may have had something to do with goading Lefkowitz into making his original comments, I’ve been wondering how he would react to what resulted.

I like to imagine that my little essay stung Lefkowitz a bit. At any event, he got up on his hind legs at the American Enterprise Institute in the third week of January and made an explicit criticism of the Bush administration that he serves. The State Department’s insistence on “diplomacy,” he argued, had yielded nothing but another round of stalling and obfuscation from Pyongyang on the weapons issue. He could have added that it had yielded no improvement at all in the monstrous exploitation of the North Korean people. It was time, he concluded, that the United States “should consider a new approach” to this longstanding impasse. [Christopher Hitchens in Slate]

Hitchens then argues why the regime’s political and military aspects are inseparable from one another, and then slightly misses the truth of the matter of North Korea’s abortive November declaration, which is even worse than Hitchens seems to realize. He ends by reminding us just what our hapless diplomacy is perpetuating here:

[M]eanwhile, we are authorizing and expediting the delivery of essential fuel and food to the regime, and thus becoming co-administrators and physical guarantors of the most cruel and oppressive system of tyranny on the planet. This has been the Pyongyang blackmail racket through several administrations now: exploit strategic ambiguity to acquire the resources that it cannot generate for itself. That’s why Lefkowitz was right to speak up and right to imply that it is within the terms of his brief to do so. We could be telling the Chinese that their indulgence of North Korea’s twin evils of nuclear piracy and slave economics is no longer acceptable to us or to our allies in the region. Instead, we have a secretary of state who knows how to be silkily polite to Kim Jong-il and can only be publicly rude to her own envoy for human rights.

I’m now struggling with the question of whether Lefkowitz, by shifting the discussion to the failure of Agreed Framework 2.0, has proven wrong my assertion that he can do no more good where he is and should resign. Clearly, he can’t do much from within to influence the State Department, where he’s effectively marginalized. But it’s hard to deny that Lefkowitz gave a very compelling speech, and that its effect (thanks to Rice’s overreaction to it) had a significance far beyond Foggy Bottom. The episode ended with President Bush asking Lefkowitz not to resign. If this was a power play, it was a damn good one.