Because if it’s counterintuitive and groundless, it must be true!

I think the headline of this New York Times story by Choe Sang Hun ought to give you the idea:

“Latest Threats May Mean North Korea Wants to Talk”

Right. North Korea is serially flicking all of switches on the Sunshine machine to the “off” position, snipping the hotlines, storming out of talks, typing up eviction notices for the fools and scoundrels who inhabit Kaesong, and shooting the occasional housewife. Yet “experts” are found to conclude that this means that the North Korean just want to talk … to be loved, really:

But longtime North Korea watchers see it much differently, saying that the moves fit a familiar and consistent pattern, and that they may even signal an upturn in relations with the United States.

Over the years, they say, North Korea has divided its negotiations with the outside world into what analysts call “salami pieces,” maximizing its gains at each stage. If the opponent balks, it uses brinkmanship.

“North Korea got what it could from Bush. Now it is signaling to President-elect Barack Obama, “˜O.K., let’s negotiate again over nuclear sampling,’ “ said Lee Sang-hyun, an analyst at Sejong Institute, a research organization. “To Lee Myung-bak, its message is that it means action if he doesn’t reconsider his policy. [NY Times, Choe Sang Hun]

If he’s saying that North Korea is perpetually breaking the last deal to get more benefits and give fewer concessions, granted. If he’s saying that North Korea is going to try the same crap with Obama that worked so well with Bush, I grant that, too. If he’s saying that we are to join him in interpreting belligerency, terrorism, and cold-blooded murder as invitations to constructive dialogue, I posit that I could find analysis of equal merit in any soju tent. Once you’ve learned the term “tongmi bongnam,” you’ve extracted the full value from this baseless bit of static that happens to have been published in the New York Times.

Victor Cha has a somewhat more rational perspective here.

In any event, Team Bush is leaving Team Obama blessed little to negotiate with. Here’s my other favorite headline of the day, this one from the Washington Times:

“U.S. takes N. Korea’s word on nukes pact”

So we’ve conceded verification, along with the uranium, the plutonium, the 50-MW reactor, the 200-MW reactor, the actual nuclear weapons, proliferation, counterfeiting, dope, and human rights violations on a scale rivaling anything seen since Russian tanks rolled up to Auschwitz. Other than that, Assistant Secretary Hill, you’ve achieved quite a masterstroke of complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament frequent flying!

Privately, you can already hear some of Obama’s people saying the same thing I am: Bush, Hill, and Rice are giving away so much on disarmament, sanctions, and verification that their successors will be going into this process with the dimmest of odds to ever fully denuclearize North Korea (despite the fact that we have a whole kit bag of legal and financial tools that could force North Korea to comply).

Once again, Chris Hill throws away our interests in some private, unwritten agreement that the North Koreans can easily repudiate:

Most recently, the administration has taken as sufficient an oral commitment by North Korea to allow sampling and other scientific activities to verify its nuclear history – a pledge the North says it never made.

The only written account of that promise – which the officials say was given privately to chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill by his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-gwan, in Pyongyang last month – is in a “memorandum of conversation” written by Mr. Hill to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

North Korea, however, insists that it never agreed to sampling and other measures to verify a nuclear declaration it submitted in June to six-nation disarmament talks. In a statement earlier this month, the North said it accepted a document with no specific enforcement measures.

Miss Rice told reporters Sunday that leaders of the United States, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan agreed during a weekend economic summit in Peru to meet in China Dec. 8 to try to clarify the situation.

The State Department says it has not released Mr. Hill’s memorandum to Miss Rice because it is an internal document.

Mr. Hill told other members of the administration that the North Koreans were blustering, according to a former senior official who still maintains regular contact with his ex-colleagues. He requested anonymity because he was discussing private conversations. [Washington Times]

So once again, we have nothing to go on but the word of the no-longer-anonymous Chris Hill, a man whose character for truthfulness we have ample reason to question. If nothing is written and we can’t trust Hill, are we to take the word of the North Koreans, as Hill did? There is no statesmanship in putting such a selfish pursuit of an agreement — any agreement — before the national interest:

“It’s the worst possible scenario that the U.S. failed to achieve progress on the verification issue despite having removed North Korea from its blacklist of countries supporting terrorism,” a South Korean government official said. “The Bush administration wants to be seen as having managed to lay at least a bridgehead for the third phase of the denuclearization issue by gaining an accord on verification.” Early December may well be the last chance for the Bush administration as his successor Barack Obama is sworn in in January. [Chosun Ilbo]

Lacking any basis in fact to think that the North Koreans are remotely interested in disarming, some of America’s most prominent diplomats and journalists have resorted to blind faith in the imaginary and the contrived. But if faith-based diplomacy didn’t work before, why should it work during the last days of Bush’s term?