Someone Has to Fact-Check Glenn Kessler’s Fact-Checking

I cringed when I saw that someone at The Washington Post let Glenn Kessler fact-check President Obama’s SOTU mention of North Korea, given how many corrections Kessler still owes his readers:

President Obama: “Because of a diplomatic effort to insist that Iran meet its obligations, the Iranian government now faces tougher and tighter sanctions than ever before. And on the Korean peninsula, we stand with our ally South Korea, and insist that North Korea keeps its commitment to abandon nuclear weapons.”

Glenn Kessler: Despite the president’s tough words, neither policy is doing very well at the moment. [….]

North Korea also has continued along a belligerent path. For much of the Obama administration, officials have practiced what they call “strategic patience.” But that appears to have only inspired North Korea to take increasingly risky steps. The administration inherited a bad hand on North Korea from the Bush administration, but the passage of two years has not brought any improvement.

Leave aside Kessler’s unrealistic diplomatic expectations for a regime that makes war on its neighbors and lies pathologically. Kessler, whose coverage of North Korea became a broadsheet for Hillary Clinton and other defenders of her husband’s failed North Korea legacy, neglects to mention the bad hand that President Bush also inherited. Throughout the Bush Administration, Kessler’s reporting selectively amplified now-discredited views questioning North Korea’s pursuit of a uranium enrichment program, despite a growing consensus in the intelligence community that North Korea was indeed pursuing one in during the 1990’s, in 2002, and probably ever since. Kessler even devoted a story to North Korea’s own ill-fated effort to refute the very charge it had admitted in 2002, and has since revealed. His (mis)characterization of the intelligence community’s consistently high confidence that North Korea had tried to assemble a uranium program prompted the intelligence community to issue this statement (quoted here by Bruce Klingner) to correct the record:

“There has been considerable misinterpretation of the IC’s view of NK’s efforts to pursue a uranium enrichment capability. The intelligence was high quality information that made possible a high confidence judgment about NK’s efforts to acquire a uranium enrichment capability. The IC had then, and continues to have, high confidence in its assessment that NK has pursued that capability. We have continued to assess efforts by NK since 2002. All IC agencies have at least moderate confidence that NK’s past efforts [snip] continue today.

In 2002, the Bush Administration raised those long-standing concerns with the North Koreans, correctly accused them of cheating on Agreed Framework I, and withheld the aid that was traded for disarmament. That was a sufficient excuse for North Korea to abandon Agreed Framework I, although Kessler’s reporting obscures this sequence of events to blame Bush for Kim Jong Il’s possession of nuclear weapons. Here’s how Kessler editorialized — sorry, reported — about this before:

The accusation about the alleged uranium program backfired, sparking a series of events that ultimately led to North Korea’s first nuclear test — using another material, plutonium — nearly five months ago.

A belated acknowledgment from Kessler that Bush was right about North Korea’s cheating — and that Bush also drew a bad hand — is compelled by fairness, if not shame. Which why it’s so hard to comprehend, especially in retrospect, why Bush signed Agreed Framework II in spite of all of this. Here, Kessler editorializes again, but this time, the charge sticks. Yet when the Bush Administration made this breathtakingly illogical shift, and even as it rushed to a woefully predictable failure (yes, I actually did predict it) Kessler’s coverage of Chris Hill was a journalistic tongue bath. Kessler writes his memoir of Rice’s failed diplomacy as a story of redemption, using Rice as a foil for his own criticism of the George W. Bush who got North Korea right the first time. That’s enough material to keep a fact checker busy for years.

I certainly don’t endorse all aspects of President Obama’s North Korea policy, but he’s taken a creditably tough-minded approach under difficult circumstances to break the cycle of extortion we’ve been trapped in for the last two decades. It’s not hard to divine that Kessler thinks we’d be better off right back where Bill Clinton stuck us in 1994.