A Volunteer on a Fool’s Errand: Leon Sigal Defends North Korea from Barack Obama

Let us bow our heads and give thanks for the levity we receive from Leon V. Sigal, whom I first draped in clownish heraldry when he denied the very possibility of North Korean nuclear assistance to Syria … until he didn’t. I can see how a professional apologist for North Korea — there’s a booth for that at career day, you know — might be in a contrite mood, but then, we often make the mistake of imputing reasonable behavior on those who hold unreasonable views. Not content to slink away quietly and husband some hidden thimbleful of credibility, Sigal instead attempts to address some stubborn and unwanted truths, but in much the way that a trapped housefly addresses the existence of a window pane.

Today, Leon Sigal wants you to know that Barack Obama is a hegemonist neocon who provoked North Korea’s missile and nuke tests:

Despite the promise of change, the Obama administration has started to address North Korea just as the Clinton and Bush administrations did–accusing it of wrongdoing and trying to punish it for its transgressions. As Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test demonstrates, the crime-and-punishment approach has never worked in the past and it won’t work now. Instead, sustained diplomatic give-and-take is the only way to stop future North Korean nuclear and missile tests and convince it to halt its nuclear program. Pyongyang was not alone in failing to keep its agreements. Unfortunately, Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul didn’t manage to keep theirs either. [Leon Sigal, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists]

That’s the closest Sigal ever gets to holding Kim Jong Il responsible for any of his own behavior. Seeing Sigal’s expectations go so unmet leaves me feeling strangely amused, gratified, and quite frankly, genuinely safer. But Sigal’s is an argument that can only be made by stitching together a narrative of howling falsehoods:

The current crisis truly began last June when North Korea handed China a written declaration of its plutonium program, as it was obliged to do under the October 3, 2007 Six-Party joint statement on second-phase actions.

Leave aside Sigal’s unusual placement of goal posts and starting lines. Sigal tells a half-truth here at best, referring to North Korea’s long-delayed, materially false, and incomplete declaration that, contrary at least to Chris Hill’s understanding of it (“all means all“), did not declare any nuclear weapons, nuclear material, proliferation activities, North Korea’s other reactors, or the uranium enrichment program that Sigal has just as dogmatically denied, only to be made a fool of by the North Koreans repeatedly.

In a side agreement with Washington, Pyongyang committed to disclose its uranium enrichment and proliferation activities, including the help it had provided for Syria’s nuclear reactor.

Also false. Pyongyang deferred both disclosures in that side agreement. It had, of course, agreed to disclose “all means all” of its nuclear programs in the original February 2007 agreement. And we can always revisit the overwhelming evidence that North Korea did have a clandestine uranium program (of which, the denials seems to have fallen silent). But by October — surprise! — Kim Jong Il had reneged on its commitment to disclose it, and much more, and he’d been caught proliferating a nuclear capability to Syria, a fellow terror sponsor, in flagrant violation of the NPT and UNSCR 1718. By October, the Bush Administration knew that North Korea wouldn’t keep its obligations, and that many were now wisely questioning the value of a deal that wasn’t stopping the North Koreans from proliferating a nuclear program to a terrorist-backing Middle Eastern tyranny, so Chris Hill renegotiated the disclosure to allow North Korea to merely “acknowledge” U.S. concerns about uranium and proliferation, while deferring the disclosure indefinitely.

Many in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul were quick to question whether the declaration was “complete and correct,” prompting the Bush administration to demand arrangements to verify the declaration before completing disabling and moving on to permanent dismantlement of North Korea’s plutonium facilities. However, the October 2007 accord had no provision for verification.

This is breathtakingly dishonest. Sigal parses his words to avoid the language of the February 2007 deal (“The six parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the six-party talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.”) or the incorporated-by-reference September 2005 deal (“The six parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the six-party talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.”). Certainly President Bush, on announcing the February 2007 deal, told the American people that verification was an essential element of it, and Chris Hill told Congress the same thing. If there were any misunderstandings about that, they seem to have gone unnoticed over the course of two years of Chris Hill’s shuttle diplomacy to Pyongyang, Beijing, and Singapore.

The day Pyongyang turned over its declaration, the White House announced its intention to relax sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act and to delist North Korea as a “state sponsor of terrorism”–but with an important proviso.

What? Like … actually disarming?

As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Heritage Foundation on June 18, “[B]efore those actions go into effect, we would continue to assess the level of North Korean cooperation in helping to verify the accuracy and completeness of its declaration. And if that cooperation is insufficient, we will respond accordingly.” She acknowledged Washington was moving the goal posts: “What we’ve done, in a sense, is move up issues that were to be taken up in phase three, like verification, like access to the reactor, into phase two.”

Which Rice did for the very reason that North Korea had failed to perform meaningfully in any way at all, as its current reconstitution of the “disabled” Yongbyon establishes. She had nothing of any enduring value to show for all she’d given up on counterfeiting and money laundering, the enforcement of UNSCR 1718 (which her successor now must regret), terror de-listing (ditto), fuel oil, or food aid. The re-sequencing was a ploy to make the deal look like it was give-and-take, when it was all give.

Next: George W. Bush, dirty multilateralist!

In bilateral talks with the United States, North Korea agreed to establish a Six-Party verification mechanism and allow visits to declared nuclear facilities, a review of documents, and interviews with technical personnel–commitments later codified in a July 12 Six-Party communiquÃ©. Pyongyang also committed to cooperate on verification in the dismantlement phase.

But Tokyo and Seoul demanded more, and President George W. Bush tried to change the terms of the agreement again. The United States handed the North Koreans a draft verification protocol and on July 30 announced it had delayed delisting North Korea as a “state sponsor of terrorism” until they accepted it. Pyongyang retaliated by suspending the disabling at its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon on August 14. Not long after, North Korea began restoring equipment at its Yongbyon facilities.

Damned if you do: Sigal excoriates Bush for listening to America’s allies and considering their interests in formulating its policies. And damned if you don’t: in 2005, Sigal excoriated Bush for “unilateralism,” and for not “trying what South Korea and Japan think just might get it to stop: diplomatic give-and-take.” Reading Sigal’s rant from 2005, you’d think Roh Moo Hyun was Kissinger and Kim Dae Jung, Yoda, and that we owed these Wise Men of he East our reverent deference. But that was then. The only consistent thing in a Leon Sigal argument is his advocacy of endless, unconditional concessions to Kim Jong Il.

With disabling in jeopardy, U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill went to Pyongyang on October 1 with a less intrusive draft protocol in hand.

“Less intrusive” meaning so terse and vague, and falling so far below internationally recognized standards, as to be meaningless. The October 1 draft protocol was a mere place-holder to help Bush and Rice exit Washington without having to acknowledge that their deal had already fallen apart. That’s why they sent Chris Hill back to Pyongyang to keep trying to negotiate something remotely useful. Pyongyang would have none of it.

His North Korean interlocutor Kim Gae Gwan agreed to allow “sampling and other forensic measures” at the three declared sites at Yongbyon–the reactor, reprocessing plant, and fuel fabrication plant. The United States believed that might suffice to ascertain how much plutonium North Korea had produced. Kim also accepted “access, based on mutual consent, to undeclared sites,” according to the State Department. The oral understanding led President Bush to reverse course again on October 11 and delist North Korea as a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

This move angered the hard-line Aso government in Tokyo. Seconded by an internally divided government in Seoul, it insisted that energy aid promised under the October 2007 accord be suspended until Pyongyang accepted a written protocol with more intrusive verification, and President Bush changed his stance. On December 11, the United States, Japan, and South Korea announced the decision.

December 11th being the date that Chris Hill returned home with no deal on meaningful verification (see previous link).

In response to the renege, North Korea stopped disabling. In early February it began preparations to test-launch the Taepodong-2 in the guise of putting a satellite into orbit.

Instead of learning from the Bush administration’s mistakes, the Obama administration deferred to its allies.

Barack Obama — also a dirty multilateralist hegemon!

In Asia, on her first trip overseas, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted as if she were reading from the Rice playbook as she met with the Japanese abductees’ kin, spoke of “tyranny” in North Korea, and speculated about a “succession struggle” in Pyongyang. Her words and deeds may have been music to the ears of hardliners in Tokyo and Seoul, but they struck the wrong note in Pyongyang.

God forbid that an official of the U.S. government would dare violate KCNA’s editorial standards or expect North Korea to set free the people it kidnapped from their own home countries. Now that two of the abductees are Americans, I sense that issue is less likely than ever to disappear. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Clinton’s musings about the stability of Kim Jong Il’s tyranny were a gaffe or (so goes the alternative spin) a refreshing new candor in diplomacy.

In the run-up to the test-launch, the U.S. administration was torn between its desire to keep open the possibility of resuming negotiations with North Korea and demands from Japan and South Korea to punish Pyongyang.

There’s no evidence to support that. Within the first month after President Obama was inaugurated, he picked a dovish Special Envoy, Stephen Bosworth, put him at the head of a delegation, and sent them to Pyongyang to extend an olive branch to the North Koreans. Presumably, that delegation offered more of the same talks and favors that have consistently failed to conform North Korea to the basic rules of human civilization, or any of its past agreements, for its entire existence. Certainly the Japanese and the South Koreans wanted some conditions on U.S. concessions, but the calls to “punish” North Korea emerged after North Korea’s WMD tests.

China, which thought sanctions wouldn’t work but didn’t want to bear the opprobrium in Washington for blocking U.N. action …

China doesn’t care about opprobrium in Tienanmen Square. Since when has it shrunk in fear from the likes of Susan Rice? The fact of the U.N.’s failure to pass any binding resolution at all answers the question.

… helped temper a presidential statement by the Security Council castigating North Korea and calling for sanctions.

This slap on the wrist gave Pyongyang a pretext to enhance its nuclear leverage by reprocessing the spent fuel unloaded from the Yongbyon reactor in the disabling process. Extracting another bomb’s worth of plutonium puts it in a position to conduct another nuclear test without reducing its small nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang also is threatening to step up its uranium enrichment effort, which could take years to yield significant quantities of highly enriched uranium. Much worse, in a matter of months, it also could restart its Yongbyon reactor to generate more plutonium. A new U.N. resolution would only give Pyongyang grounds for doing just that.

See? The U.N. causes proliferation! Eerily, Sigal and I come perilously close to agreement on something: the U.N. should get out of the counterproliferation business.

Sigal goes on to close his piece with demands for more concessions, more aid, more nuclear power plants for Kim Jong Il, in short, more of the same concessions that have never induced the North Koreans to do anything but divert more of their fungible resources into building more weapons to threaten us with. One senses that by now, most of us have learned that not even the most liberal South Korean government and not even the most liberal American government can make the North Koreans stop being North Koreans. But on one extreme of the Bell Curve, there are always a few who, even if they can learn, refuse to.