Category: Diplomacy

I heard the rumor yesterday afternoon, but now I see the AP is reporting it.  According to the Financial Times, the only thing holding up the announcement is notifying / strong-arming the Japanese, and perhaps the South Koreans.  You can see Condi and her mouthpiece not answer questions about this below the fold, if you’re interested. There’s nothing quite like giving right in to extortion.  Somewhere on the troposphere of Kim Jong Il’s clot-riddled, misshapen, hideously coiffed cranium, a drooly...

I took a few days off from blogging and figured by today I’d know if Chris Hill had succeeded in giving away the store to the North Koreans, but the reporting today is ambiguous.    The New York Times says that Hill left Pyongyang with the main “issues unresolved” but quotes or cites no  hard authority  to substantiate this.   The Chosun Ilbo quotes “observers” who  see “signs” that Hill’s visit  “produced some results,” and also quotes or cites no hard authority to...

[Update: I guessed right. Have a barf bag ready for this one, particularly when you get to the part where David Albright says that our proposed verification plan would have infringed on North Korea’s “sovereignty.” Remember Albright? He’s the guy who was accusing the Bush Administration of trumping up charges that the North Koreans were enriching uranium … until we found enriched uranium all over the same documents and aluminum samples North Korea submitted, in part, to prove that it...

[Update:   Now they’re asking the IAEA to remove the seals and cameras.  More here.] There are some who can look back on decades of failure and learn nothing, while some of us looked into the future two years ago and foresaw everything.  One Agreed Framework should have been enough for any observer possessed of an average ration of common sense.  Crediting myself with that much, in March of 2007, I wrote a post in the form of news reports...

Why, all we need is one more set of promises: THE United States will take North Korea off its terrorism list “immediately” if it can agree on a way to verify its nuclear facilities, America’s top nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said today. The renewed pledge followed a flurry of meetings here after North Korea said it had stopped dismantling its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and started taking equipment back to the site. “I want to stress that we’re not looking to...

THE FULL TEXT OF KCNA’S PENULTIMATE TANTRUM is at the link after this money quote: The U.S., however, raised all of a sudden an issue of applying an “international standard” to the verification of the nuclear declaration, abusing this agreed point. It pressurized the DPRK to accept such inspection as scouring any place of the DPRK as it pleases to collect samples and measure them. The “international standard” touted by the U.S. is nothing but “special inspection” which the IAEA...