North Korea: will Bush negotiate NOW?

The Bush fans on the right are scrambling to put a good lick on the fact that North Korea have now joined the nuclear club on George W's watch. No doubt soon we will hear of how Clinton is responsible for Kim Jong Il's ability to build the bomb.

For the moment, many Bush supporters are attempting to take some cover by claiming that the bomb was probably a "dud":

American intelligence has begun reviewing the seismic data and are increasingly convinced that the test was either a failure or a hoax.

This is their version of "Nothing to look at here folks, move right along."

And those that reluctantly do concede that North Korea have a bomb are at pains to point out how this outcome was always inevitable:

Stanley Kurtz at NRO argues:

Make a deal? President Clinton tried that and failed, accepting a bogus deal, with a porous inspections regime. North Korea flouted the agreement at the first opportunity. Keep negotiating? At this point, the prospect that North Korea is simply positioning itself for negotiations is dim. More likely they’ve given up on the hope of another Clinton-style bonanza (on which they would have simply cheated again), and have decided instead to defy the world, with all the attendant risks.

You'll notice the logic he is employing, any sort of "Clinton-style" deal would have been a "bonanza" for North Korea, implying that the Republicans were right not to engage in negotiations "which the regime would only have flouted at the first opportunity".

In the world of the Bush supporter North Korea was always going to get it's hands on a nuke and there was nothing that could ever have been done.

Mr. Bush and his aides contend that Iraq was the more urgent threat, in a volatile neighborhood. But the North’s reported nuclear test now raises the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on his promise that he would never let the world’s “worst dictators” obtain the world’s most dangerous weapons.

I think a nuclear test in North Korea does more than "raise the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on his promise that he would never let the world's worst dictators obtain the world's most dangerous weapons", the question has already been answered. North Korea have them and they acquired them on Bush's watch whilst he was obsessing over Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s top national security aides declined Monday to be interviewed about whether a different strategy over the past five years might have yielded different results. But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has described the administration’s approach to North Korea as the mirror image of its dealings with Iraq. “You’ll recall that we were criticized daily for being too unilateral” in dealing with Saddam Hussein, Mr. Hadley said. “So here we are, working with our allies and friends, stressing diplomacy.”

And there we have it, it's the liberals fault for saying that the Bushites were too unilateral.

The simple truth here is that the Bushites adopted a plan - if I can give their harebrained scheme such an overly complimentary description - that asked North Korea to give up it's desire for nuclear weapons in return for diddly-squat.

The North Koreans - who had already been named as part of Bush's Axis of Evil and had watched the US illegally invade Iraq - asked for a US non-aggression pact and aid in return for disarmament. In other words, prove we have no need for a nuclear weapon - by taking back your implied threat of invasion - and we will disarm. The Bushites refused to do this and we now find ourselves where we are.

Kim Jong Il is now being portrayed as a lunatic but I have to disagree with that assessment. The US will now have to do what the Bushites have always refused to do. Negotiate. US invasion is no longer an option, it actually never was, which only further undermines the basic stupidity of the neo-con "plan". So Kim Jong Il has placed himself in a much better position than he was in when Bush labelled him part of the Axis of Evil.

Now Bush's options are even more limited.

And, of course, at the centre of our outrage over Kim Jong Il's "provocative" actions lies the basic hypocrisy that we continue to condemn others for attempting to acquire weapons that we ourselves refuse to give up; despite agreeing through numerous Treaties that we would do so:

It was not supposed to be like this. At the end of the cold war, disarmament treaties were being signed, and in 1996 the big powers finally agreed to stop testing nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945. The public, the pressure groups and the media all breathed a great sigh of relief and forgot about the bomb. Everyone thought that with the Soviet Union gone, multilateral disarmament would accelerate.

But with public attention elsewhere, the Dr Strangeloves in Washington, Moscow and Paris stopped the disarmament process and invented new ideas requiring new nuclear weapons. A decade ago, Clinton's Pentagon placed "non-state actors" (ie terrorists) on the list of likely targets for US nuclear weapons. Now all the established nuclear states are building new nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration made things worse. First, it rejected the policy of controlling armaments through treaties, which had been followed by previous presidents since 1918. Second, it proposed to use military - even nuclear - force in a pre-emptive attack to prevent proliferation. This policy was used as a pretext for attacking Iraq and may now be used on either Iran or North Korea. More pre-emptive war will produce suffering and chaos, while nothing is done about India, Israel and Pakistan. So we are left with a policy of vigilante bravado for which we have sacrificed the proven methods of weapons control.

The solution to the problem lies where it has always lain: with a serious commitment from all of us to disarm.

Max Kampelman, Ronald Reagan's nuclear negotiator, has proposed that Washington's top priority should be the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction on earth, including those possessed by the US. At the ongoing disarmament meetings at the UN, the vast majority of nations argue for a phased process to achieve this goal. They can point to the success of the UN inspectors in Iraq as proof that international inspection can work, even in the toughest cases. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that removed the missiles from Greenham is an example of an agreement no one thought possible that worked completely. This, and other legacies from the cold war, can and should be applied globally.

The US, especially under President Bush, has sought to condemn others for attempting to obtain the bomb whilst simultaneously seeking a new range of "bunker busting" nuclear weapons. This was never a credible position.

Enemies will never stand still and wait to be attacked, no matter how much the neo-cons may desire this outcome.

One thing in all of this is undeniable. The Bush policy towards North Korea has been a resounding failure, no matter how the right try to spin this.

Negotiation is now the only way forward, and - if we are serious about preventing nuclear proliferation - we must surely now consider the only sane option: It is time for all of us to disarm.

Related Articles:

Going Nuclear: How we lost our way

All Nine Nuclear Powers Are Violating Non-Proliferation Treaty

tag: Bush, war on terror, Iraq war, North, Korea, nuclear, tests, bomb, containment, policy, failure, Kim Jong Il