Dear President Bush: You had eight years.

The George W. Bush center has released a call for “a new approach” to improve human rights in North Korea, complete with a video of the former President, looking a little older than the man we once knew.

It’s hard to disagree with anything in the Bush Center’s call. For example, it calls for raising global awareness of the situation, citing polls showing that just half of Americans have heard of North Korea’s political prison camps. (This polling, of course, was done before Seth Rogen likely reached many of those among our great, silent idiocracy on the left side of the bell curve. But still ….)

The Bush Center also calls for the empowerment of refugees, of whom just a few dozen were admitted into the United States during Bush’s presidency, and whom the Chinese freely dragged across the border to the waiting arms of the North Korean Ministry of Public Security with nary a peep from President Bush himself.

It calls on governments to make human rights a priority, although the Bush administration itself effectively sidelined human rights in its dealing with Pyongyang, sought to establish full diplomatic relations with it in spite of its crimes against humanity, and pulled punches in describing those crimes in order to appease those who would continue to commit them.

Finally, the Bush Center calls on the U.S. and non-governmental organizations to step up their information operations in North Korea. This yields its most useful proposal:

Both government and the technology industry have a role to play in developing and funding new content dissemination methods that cannot be blocked by the North Korean government, including broadcasting systems. Content going into and coming out of the country should also be improved, focusing on the condition of people in North Korea.

But there are also some important things missing from that call. How, for example, will we put direct pressure on the regime responsible for these crimes without war? How will we even up the imbalance of power between the people and the state? Is there any way to achieve such a balance without destabilizing the state itself? And wouldn’t equalizing that imbalance of power to a degree require us to begin by reversing many of Bush’s own ill-advised decisions?

More broadly, what’s missing from this call is anything remotely controversial. Compare it, for example, to the specificity and thoughtfulness of calls by The Robert F. Kennedy Center and The Asan Institute. By comparison, the Bush Center’s proposals could just as well have been ghostwritten for Angelina Jolie. Not only would Jolie have attracted more media interest, she would also have the advantage of not having been President of the United States from 2001 to 2009.

By saying all of this, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. It is better than nothing at all, although I wonder how much effect Mr. Bush’s call will have, aside from pulling a thin protective cover over his own legacy. I concede that Bush’s call today is probably more in line with the former president’s personal beliefs than many of the decisions he made at the nadir of his political power. But all of these calls by President Bush would carry far more weight and credibility if he would begin them with a forthright acknowledgement of his own errors.

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Update: OK, I have to admit that Victor Cha’s accompanying report contains many more detailed proposals, although I still wished for more depth and specificity. In its small intestine, for example, is a passage where Cha suggests returning North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism, reversing the decision his President made in 2008.