The Six Two One Party Talks, or Masturbatory Diplomacy

[Update: The White House accepts this stinker. Remember what Chris Hill said last year? “We cannot have a situation where (North Korea) pretends to abandon their nuclear program and we pretend to believe them.” That sure sounds like that Hill wants us to do.]

So have you heard that Kim Jong Il will celebrate his removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism … by firing off more missiles?

U.S. military authorities have been closely watching the North Korean arm since spotting signs of lively activity at a missile launch site in North Korea, CNN reported Friday. Quoting two U.S. military officers, the channel reported satellite photos recently spotted personnel, vehicles and materials moving toward the Rodong missile base in Shinori, north of Pyongyang. Rodong-1 missiles with a range of 1,300 km capable of striking most of the Japanese islands are reportedly deployed at the Shinori site. [Chosun Ilbo]

I’m at a loss for words. North Korea throws an extortionate fit, even threatens to turn Seoul to “ashes” — all of which is clearly calculated to intimidate South Korean voters just before an election — and we reward them by declaring them not to be sponsors of terror. (To be precise, the North Koreans aren’t sponsoring terrorism, they’re practicing terrorism. There should be a separate list for nations that engage in this kind of direct, retail terrorism. Naturally, our State Department overlooked that).

[Afterthought: We could always just add North Korea to this list. Logically, it’s a better fit than listing North Korea as a mere “sponsor.”]

So terrorism works, and absurdly enough, it works well at getting terrorists removed from … a list of terrorists, because our Secretary of State and our chief negotiator are either too timid, too ambitious, or too incompetent to call terrorism by its name. And we are not done.

President Bush ran for reelection in 2004 by touting the advantages of six-party diplomacy with North Korea. In practice, this worked with all of the harmonious coherence of a basket of ants, so we tried bilateral talks. These also failed when North Korea conceded just enough to stall into the election season, and then stopped conceding, period. So we are now reduced to making concessions, lifting our sanctions, giving up our remaining leverage, and writing the North Koreans’ declaration for them. The North Koreans show up, we read their declaration aloud (the one they should have made last December), and they admit nothing and say, “Whatever.” We are now the only party actively negotiating. In just a year, we’ve gone from six parties to two to one. That is known as “masturbatory diplomacy.”

Also, the North Koreans don’t actually have to disarm. They can keep stalling on giving up their existing nuclear weapons or fissile material, and it still isn’t clear whether they’ve acknowledged that they’ve agreed to disarm at all.

Some members of Congress will push back this time. The Singapore Surrender will embolden a rebellion that was gathering anyway. It will come from within the President’s own party, which makes this more a matter of embarrassing the Administration than of simple vote-counting. What I can’t say is whether it will be enough to make a difference.

Below the fold, I’ve pasted in a Condi Rice Q&A transcript in which she tries to feign toughness and skepticism. She talks about verification, something none of her diplomacy with the North Koreans have even broached yet, and a part of the process that has no chance whatsoever of advancing before the Administration ends. So read it for whatever it’s worth.

Now, as to the North Korean situation, we continue to work through the six-party process to try and achieve the goals of this second phase. In that second phase, there are obligations on both sides, and the United States is absolutely prepared to undertake its obligations should the North Koreans fulfill their obligations. But we are still in the process of trying to determine if the North Koreans are going to fulfill their obligations. We are determined to have an outcome to the second phase that would have the North Koreans account for all of their nuclear programs, and that means their HEU program, their plutonium program, which, after all, is the one that has actually produced material, and their activities in nuclear proliferation. Any document that we get, any declaration that we get, has to be verified and it has to be verifiable. And we have to make certain that we have means to assess what the North Koreans tell us, and we have to have means to verify what the North Koreans tell us.

Now, you can’t verify overnight some of these complicated programs that the North Koreans have been engaged in. But we have to be absolutely certain that we’ve got means to do it. And by the way, it’s not just the United States. It is all of the members of the six parties that have to be a part of this process of accounting for the North Korean programs and then verifying what we’ve been told and then finding ways to dismantle them.

The North Koreans, of course, also have obligations in terms of disabling the Yongbyon facilities, and so we are not yet at a point where we can make a judgment as to whether or not the North Koreans have met their obligations and we are therefore not at a point at which the United States can make a judgment as to whether or not it’s time to exercise our obligations. But when we have made that judgment, we will be prepared to exercise the obligations that we’ve undertaken. [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, April 11, 2008]