I Know a Dead Parrot When I See One
This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. This … is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This … is an ex-parrot!
— John Cleese, Monty Python’s “The Dead Parrot Sketch“
I confess to being less interested in static diplomacy with Kim Jong Il than in the increasingly fluid events that will decide how long we’ll have to bother with him at all. For some time now, but certainly since Geneva, we’d arrived at the point where our finest diplomatic minds could not defend Agreed Framework 2.0 as a viable and productive process without the customer pointing out where the parrot’s feet were nailed to the perch.
“The basic problem … is that the DPRK is not yet prepared to provide the complete and correct declaration,” Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill said, referring to the nation by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. [Reuters, Arshad Mohammed and Paul Eckert]
State admits to being dissatisfied, but Chris Hill still insists that the North Koreans will give us a declaration … eventually.
I question the basis for Hill’s assurance. The North Koreans still deny having a uranium enrichment program despite A.Q. Khan’s admission that he gave the North Koreans centrifuges and centrifuge plans (since confirmed by the North Koreans), and despite having previously admitted to U.S. diplomats James Kelly and Jack Pritchard, in front of three translators, that they had a uranium enrichment program. They still deny that they had anything to do with nuclear proliferation to Syria, although they have admitted to sending engineers to some kind of military facility there. Yet Kim Gye Gwan’s answer to these questions leaves little room for interpretation:
“We did not have, we don’t have and we will not have.” [AP]
Amazingly, the North Koreans wouldn’t even go for the idea of chopping the declaration into pieces:
Hill said that the timing of such steps was not a problem. “The really problematic element is that we don’t have a commitment from the DPRK to provide a complete and correct declaration,” he said. “They would rather have one that misses a few elements — that is rather incomplete.” [Reuters]
I just don’t get the North Koreans. They always get their way, yet you can’t deny the tactical stupidity of this. Had they taken up Hill’s suggestion and given a partial declaration, they could have revealed only those things they know we know, bought more time, and brought home another round of concessions. They must realize by now that Bush wants to play along. They could have stalled the uranium and proliferation declarations through October and then rolled us again. It would have been as easy as falling off a circus unicycle. It’s only our own ineptitude that causes some people to confuse the North Koreans with geniuses.
Chris Hill has said that he expects this agreement to be implemented by the end of this year. You have to be either disingenuous, uninformed, or stupid to believe that, but everyone clings to the pretense — barely — because the alternative is admitting that it won’t be implemented at all:
“Looking at the schedule of U.S. domestic politics, (Washington) would virtually take its hands off (the issue) once the vacation season starts in early August,” Yu told South Korean reporters at the end of his three-day visit to Beijing. Yu’s office confirmed his comments. “We have to start negotiations anew from scratch if a new administration comes in the United States. Therefore, we have to make progress in the declaration issue so as to prepare momentum” for further negotiations, Yu said. [AP, via IHT]
(It’s too bad the same thing didn’t occur to Yu when Roh Moo Hyun was bargaining the free trade agreement hard just as President Bush’s party was about to lose control of the Congress.) But of course, Kim Jong Il wants to deal with the Democrats just as badly as the Democrats would prefer to let Bush deal with him.
Even Hill concedes that getting the declaration(s) won’t be the hardest part; getting the North Koreans to actually give up their nukes will be. Hill always seems to forget the problem of verifying the disarmament of the world’s most closed society. He also forgot this when he wrote an agreement that’s hopelessly vague about verification, inspection, sequencing, scope, deadlines, and in its failure to define such basic terms as “nuclear programs.”
The lesson being: it’s easy to bring home an agreement if a meeting of the minds isn’t an object. Could we have expected the North Koreans not to interpret these amorphous terms in their own unique way? Just look how they redefined “democratic peoples’ republic.”
If even the New York Times recognizes that Pyongyang has stalled this “process,” it’s time to get a grip. If we’re actually prepared to overlook flagrant lying or possible nuclear proliferation between two listed state sponsors of terrorism, one can sensibly question the value of this entire agreement. To say that North Korea is “not yet prepared” for full disclosure isn’t many degrees of silliness away from “he’s pining for the fjords.”
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Victor Cha, who at least concedes that the talks “appear to be in trouble,” writes a piece in the Chosun Ilbo that is well worth reading in its entirety, because Cha is perceived as speaking for the Administration, only more frankly than the Administration itself can. Cha admits that the talks will stay stuck until North Korea provides a “correct and complete” declaration. (Which, of course, it never will.)
Cha helpfully clarifies what Hill’s deal did not — that the benefits North Korea is now demanding up front were understood by all to be “contingent on a complete declaration:”
There is clear understanding among the six parties that this declaration — which would constitute a strategic decision by the North to come clean — should include weapons, fissile material, facilities, North Korea’s covert uranium-based bomb efforts, and past proliferation activities. In this regard, what Pyongyang may have claimed to be a declaration submitted in November 2007 did not meet this standard. [Victor Cha in the Chosun Ilbo]
Cha signals that the Administration has no more room for flexibility:
Further flexibility by the U.S. at this point is hardly imaginable. President Bush has already given his negotiator Christopher Hill more room than the conservative base likes. Moreover, behind closed doors at six-party talks, Japan, China, South Korea and Russia all acknowledge that we have only gotten as far as we have because of U.S. patience and flexibility and in spite of North Korean intransigence. [Id.]
Cha’s discussion of the shifting interaction among the Asian powers is especially interesting. He first contrasts Lee Myung Bak with Roh Moo Hyun, whose policies were “so badly exploited” by the North Koreans. He then suggests that China is overplaying Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, whom Cha claims has “loosened the tight link” between Japanese abductees and North Korea’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
[T]he larger cause for the complacency may be the leadership change in Japan. When conservatives like Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro were holding the reigns in Tokyo, China saw a direct link between North Korea’s actions and the growth of a more military-oriented Japan. In the aftermath of the missile and nuclear tests in 2006, China was contending with an Abe government that turned the defense agency into a full-fledged ministry, led the first UN Security Council resolution on North Korea, expressed interest in next-generation fighter-jets, and had some of its hardliners intimating the potential for a nuclear Japan. Fukuda does not have the same agenda; he is oriented towards improving Japan’s relations with Asia and with China. [Id.]
Cha also calls for the Chinese to push the North Koreans harder, saying that “at difficult times in the talks, as we face today, it has always been incumbent on China … to use its vast material influence on the North to get the regime to behave more responsibly.” Without offering much support for this, Cha credits the Chinese for having done just that after North Korea’s nuclear test.
(Contrast this with the words of one leading Chinese academic, written just days before North Korea’s nuclear test, saying that China has no interest in pressuring the North and besides, the North is a useful diversion of U.S. power and influence away from Taiwan. Read it and decide for yourself, but it sure looks like China green-lighted the test.)
Foreign Minister Yu is also asking the Chinese to help “encourage” the the North Koreans, and there’s little doubt that President Lee will have to ask again when he visits China in May. This is what everyone does after getting rolled by North Korea — they fall back on the tender mercies of the ChiComs. But with North Korea now unable to feed even government officials in Pyongyang, China isn’t going to do anything that could risk toppling Kim Jong Il and unleasing a horde of haggard, starving, and diseased refugees right before the Olympics. That would harm China’s interests a lot more than it would harm ours.
Besides, if it’s a dose of “material influence,” that’s needed, we don’t need China to do that for us.