0-For-Infinity

When the Bush Administration first turned themselves to the North Korea question in 2001, they did so with a reflexive anti-Clintonism, one which stated that anything Bill Clinton advocated was necessarily wrong and must be reversed. The White House found their opportunity to do so with Pyongyang, by pulling out of the Agreed Framework, by claiming that North Korea was secretly developing enriched uranium in violation of the agreement. They so wanted to believe this transgression that they willed it into being as a pretext, and severed all ties to the Clinton policy. 6 years later, after North Korea acquired plutonium and built testable nuclear devices, BushCo went back to the bargaining table and essentially re-ratified the Agreed Framework, from a position of weakness, because now the North Koreans had the bomb. Funny thing, though. Turns out that North Korea may have never enriched uranium at all:

For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

“The question now is whether we would be in the position of having to get the North Koreans to give up a sizeable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.

Josh Marshall and Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings have great analyses of this story. Suffice to say that we pulled out of the Agreed Framework based on overhyped intelligence, enabling the North Koreans to build a bomb quickly and without international inspection. So we let another country join the nuclear club for no reason at all. Here's a taste of how immensely stupid this is, from Josh:

Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.

It's a screw-up that staggers the mind. And you don't even need to know this new information to know that. Even if the claims were and are true, it was always clear that the uranium program was far less advanced than the plutonium one, which would be ready to produce weapons soon after it was reopened. Now we learn the whole thing may have been a phantom. Like I said, it staggers the mind how badly this was bungled. In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

And so we put another "L" in the foreign relations ledger for these guys, who have been wrong on every major piece of international policy for the last 50 years. They overstated Russia's defense capabilities, overthrew Mossadegh leading to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, armed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, thought we would be greeted as liberators and that the Sunnis and Shiites had no history of ethnic strife, called Iran part of the Axis of Evil when they were offering us a deal, allied ourselves with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan when they're the greatest threat to our security, and now let North Korea have nuclear weapons based on a figment of their imagination.

There are probably a hundred more. It's breathtaking when you line them all up like that.