Rice: Lift Sanctions Now, Disarm and Verify Someday

[Scroll down for a highly significant update.]  

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that verifying any North Korean nuclear declaration would take time and suggested Washington may drop some sanctions on Pyongyang before this is complete.

Separately, a senior U.S. official said an American team would visit North Korea next week to discuss how to verify the “complete and correct” accounting of its nuclear programs that Pyongyang was due to deliver by Dec. 31.  [Reuters, Arshad Mohammed]

Not only do I not believe that the disarmament of North Korea is a possibility this year, privately, proponents of Agreed Framework 2.0 acknowledge that.  So let’s just be clear about this:  no one believes that the Bush Administration is going to disarm North Korea during the remainder of its term, and few people believe that any U.S. president is going to disarm North  Korea, ever.  When  someone induces  you by  promising something they know damn well they can’t deliver, it’s called lying.

Now listen to Condi  make excuses for  why the North Koreans  may not be ready to verifiably disarm after all:

“Verification takes some time because these are complex programs, this is a nontransparent society, there is a history here of surprises and so it will take some time — even past the second phase — for verification to completely play out,” Rice told reporters at a news conference.

“Just because we … believe obligations may have been met in the second phase, if there is evidence as we are into the third phase that something was not true … there is always the ability and the absolute intention to react,” she added.

In other words — they sign agreements, but we don’t really expect them to  abide by them because, after all, they’re assholes.  Hey, we have to respect their Kim Jong Il’s inalienable right to “a nontransparent society” and hold back some “surprises.”  And if we find any, no doubt President Obama’s White House spokeswoman will read a statement of “concern.”  That’ll show ’em.

So much for expecting Kim Jong Il to make that “strategic decision” to disarm.   Another goalpost  completely, verifiably, and (don’t kid yourself) irreversably dismantled.  But not to worry, says Condi:

The administration is arguing that although it has scaled back its demands about what the North must admit about its nuclear past, it will still get the information it wants, along with new ways to make sure Pyongyang isn’t cheating.

“No one has let them off the hook,” said Dennis Wilder, special assistant to the president and senior director for East Asian affairs.  [AP, Anne Gearan]

I should cut a break to someone who’s paid to spout pablum he doesn’t believe, but here’s the reality of it — without sanctions, we’ll have no leverage except appeals to Kim Jong Il’s tender mercies.  And if anyone tells you that sanctions can easily be restored once lifted, they’re lying.  Finally, remember that State  is talking about submerging  the verification function into another Rube Goldberg working group jointly controlled by all six parties, meaning that we play Gulliver to the North Koreans, the  Russians,  our friends the  ChiComs, and whatever whim overtakes South Korea in any given year.

And we can see how effective those working groups have been in making progress on human rights, haven’t we?   So please quit pretending that any of this is about taking away Little Fat Boy’s nukes.

The next question is what drives the blind, unilateral, and unrequited  pursuit of full diplomatic relations with this abhorrent regime.  Disarmament that no one believes in anymore can’t be it.  It’s clear enough what the goal here isn’t.  Rather, I think the goal  must be the  mere privilege of posting diplomats in that dull, underfed, oversurveilled Potempkin village known as Pyongyang, even if it means trashing relations with the governments of Japan and South Korea and racking up a deep resentment by the North Korean people that will outlast Kim Jong Il by many decades.  And for what?  To cash in on their riches of vinalon, corn-stalk noodles, and slave-mined coal? 

The only good thing that can be said of any of this is that the few people who are actually paying attention to this are pretty alarmed, and that Chris Hill must not have  had complete success at acceding to all of North Korea’s demands in Singapore, or else we  probably wouldn’t still be sending diplomats to Pyongyang.  And although  this deal seems to grow  worse with each passing day, resistance to  it may prove insufficient to do much more than chip away at its edges.  Absent  a full congressional rebellion or vocal denunciation from  McCain, all that stands between Kim Jong Il and his financial salvation is his own intransigence.

Update:

OK, you expected this from John Bolton, and you expected this from me, but you probably did not expect this from the Washington Post:

If the United States were able to reach its goal of having North Korea surrender its plutonium, substantial concessions would be justified. But senior administration officials say they don’t expect that the Kim regime will turn over its plutonium in the coming nine months. That raises the question of why President Bush would allow North Korea to evade full disclosure. Mr. Hill’s deal would preserve the negotiating process — but what does the Bush administration stand to gain from it? All along the risk has been that North Korea would repeatedly extract economic and political favors from the United States without giving up its nuclear arsenal. The latest deal would seem to greatly increase the chance that that will be the legacy of Mr. Bush’s diplomacy.  [Editorial, Washington Post]

By now, you’ve no doubt noticed something highly familiar in this logic.  If Glenn Kessler’s employers are accusing Bush of appeasement, the time is ripe for Republicans (and not a few Democrats) to denounce this cave-in.