North Korea: Anatomy of a Failure

While there's been some movement on sanctioning North Korea, with the UN agreeing on punishment language, and Japan going all unilateral and banning all trade and closing their ports to North Korean ships, I still think the history and consequences of this nuclear test are completely muddled here in the US, and it's important to get that right so we don't have hypocritical opportunists like John McCain out there claiming the entire thing was Clinton's fault on the one hand, and saying “I think this is the wrong time for us to be engaging in finger pointing when in this crucial time, we need the world and Americans united” on the other hand. So it's time to lay down some facts and myths about the North Korean situation:

• FACT: The bomb that was tested is made from plutonium fuel rods. These were the rods whose use was suspended by Pyongyang for 8 years under the Agreed Framework set up by the Clinton Administration. After 2002, Kim Jong-Il put them back to work, and the result was what you saw this week.

• FACT: As Fred Kaplan documents, the reason the North Koreans pulled out of the Agreed Framework was because Washington confronted them over uranium enrichment, which they were slowly and gradually undertaking on the sly.

After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs?

• FACT: Why did the North Koreans start enriching uranium in the first place? Well, it not-so-curiously occurred right after they were labeled part of the Axis of Evil in 2002, and they saw the saber rattling toward the other members of that club. Kim Jong-Il is loony but not dumb and like the Iranians he sought nuclear weapons as a deterrent to regime change. With Kim it's all about survival of the dictatorship.

In Kim's eyes, a nuclear weapon should prevent the United States from attempting to topple him from his post in the manner of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. And the indomitable mystique of nuclear capability could in part substitute for the charisma that Kim, unlike his late father, Kim Il Sung, is lacking.

"In the eyes of the North Korean leaders, this was very calculated and rational behavior," said Paik Hak-soon, a political scientist at South Korea's Sejong Institute. "Nobody invades a nuclear power. People respect nuclear power."

• FACT: When Kim saw that he needed nukes to maintain survival, but he knew inspectors were watching over the plutonium fuel rods he needed to create them quickly, he went to the international black market and found a willing collaborator in the form of the top scientist from our putative ally Pakistan:

...Before September 11, in those weeks just after George W. Bush took office, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel were told to “back off” certain targets of investigations begun by Bill Clinton. He said there were particular investigations that were effectively killed.

Which particular investigations? The agent was willing to risk his job to get this story out, but we had to press repeatedly for specifics on the directive to “back off.” The order, he said reluctantly, spiked at least one fateful operation. As he talked, I wrote in my notebook, “Killed off Conn. Labs investigation.” Connecticut Laboratories? I was clueless until my producer Meirion Jones, a weapons expert, gave me that “you idiot” look and said, “Khan Labs! Pakistan. The bomb.” Dr. A. Q. Khan is known as the “Father” of Pakistan’s atomic bomb.

He’s not, however, the ideal parent. To raise the cash for Pakistan’s program (and to pocket a tidy sum for himself), Khan sold off copies of his baby, his bomb, to Libya and North Korea—blueprints, material and all the fixings to blow this planet to Kingdom Come [...]

Why would Team Bush pull back our agents from nabbing North Korea’s bomb connection? The answer in two words: Saudi Arabia.

The agent on the line said, “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis.” Khan is Pakistani, not Saudi, but, nevertheless, the investigation led back to Saudi Arabia. There was no way that the Dr. Strangelove of Pakistan could have found the billions to cook up his nukes within the budget of his poor nation.

We eventually discovered that agents knew the Saudis, who had secretly funded Saddam’s nuclear weapons ambitions in the eighties, apparently moved their bomb-for-Islam money from Iraq to Dr. Khan’s lab in Pakistan after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990.

But, said the insider, our agents had to let a hot trail grow cold because he and others “were told to back off the Saudis.” If you can’t follow the money, you can’t investigate. The weapons hunt was spiked [...]

The U.S. government missed discovering Dr. Khan’s radioactive fire sale because our agents were hard at work ignoring the Saudi money trail. If the agencies had not been told to “back off” the Saudis and Dr. Khan, would the U.S. have uncovered the nuclear shipments in time to stop them? We can’t possibly know, but, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s amazing what you don’t see when you’re told not to look.

So, the US doesn't investigate A.Q. Khan's selling off nuclear secrets. The North Koreans have a need for those secrets after being labeled an enemy to the US and having their sovereignty threatened. Kim Jong-Il makes a deal for technology on how to enrich uranium that he would have otherwise not had. He starts the process, maybe wanting to be caught to have a reason to expel the UN inspectors and restart his plutonium program, which would move much quicker. The US finds out about the uranium, gets belligerent and gives Kim exactly the opening he needs. Four years later, they test a nuke. But...

• FACT: The nuke didn't work, a fact that is getting curiously less play nationwide than out in the world.

The United States believes North Korea attempted to detonate a nuclear device but that "something went wrong," and the blast was relatively small, a U.S. government official said Tuesday.

The official confirmed North Korea informed the Chinese government before the test that it would involve a four-kiloton nuclear device, a small explosion compared with the 15-kiloton nuclear tests that India and Pakistan conducted in 1998 [...]

The U.S. intelligence community is sticking by an estimate that the blast was about a half-kiloton, or even less, although it's possible the tunnel in which the test took place could have "muffled" the seismic waves, an official said.

So basically what we have here is a situation where knuckleheads in the Bush Administration practically force North Korea into the nuclear club, and the North Koreans are such knuckleheads that they can't even get it to work. Which doesn't matter, because the mere possibility of the test will likely turn South Korea and Japan nuclear and raise proliferation in Asia, making the world decidedly less safe.

You can add this to the growing sense that we're about to lose Afghanistan, the continued reports of brutality and abuse at Guantanamo, the fact that Gaza's in civil war, Iran's continued bluster and defiance, the loss of Somalia to radical Islamists, and on and on, and you have irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush's foreign policy, supposed to be his strong suit, is an unmitigated failure. And you'll notice I didn't even mention Iraq.

For a final comment, and actually a summing up in two paragraphs what took me fifteen, here's the former National Security Advisor to then-VP Bush 41, Donald Gregg:

First: Don't panic. Kim Jong Il's objective is survival and eventual change in North Korea, not suicide. The diplomatic situation in Northeast Asia will be immensely complicated by the North Korea test, which I think was a huge mistake on their part, but missiles are not about to start flying [...]

Second: Why won't the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with NK, as the Brits (and eventually the US) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country's good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hizballah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends -- a huge mistake.