If the Bush administration has a North Korea policy, the president is doing a fine job of keeping it secret. By all indications, the repressive “Axis of Evil” country seems to be a threat that’s getting much worse, not better.
The United States has long believed that Kim Jung Il, a madman who effectively runs his country as a giant prison, has been secretly developing a nuclear weapons program. We’d know more, except North Korea threw United Nations weapons inspectors out of the country once it was obvious the government was lying about its nukes.
Today, we learn that our estimates about the nuclear threat are about to paint an even bleaker picture.
The United States is preparing to significantly raise its estimate of the number of nuclear weapons held by North Korea, from “possibly two” to at least eight, according to U.S. officials involved in the preparation of the report.
The report, expected to be completed within a month, would reflect a new intelligence consensus on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities after that country’s decision last year to restart a nuclear reactor and plutonium-reprocessing facility that had been frozen under a 1994 agreement. Among the evidence used in making the assessment is a detailed analysis of plutonium byproducts found on clothing worn by members of an unofficial U.S. delegation that was allowed to visit North Korean nuclear facilities several months ago.
The increase in the estimate would underscore the strides North Korea has made in the past year as the Bush administration struggled to respond diplomatically while waging a war against Iraq in an unsuccessful effort to search for such weapons there.
Intelligence officials also have broadly concluded that a separate North Korean uranium-enrichment program will be operational by 2007, producing enough material for as many as six additional weapons a year, one U.S. official said.
With Democrat John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign planning to highlight the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the leap in Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities during President Bush’s tenure could leave the administration vulnerable to charges that it has mishandled the North Korea crisis.
Could leave Bush vulnerable? I prefer a different, less polite, phrasing: Bush deserves to lose his job for not coming up with a North Korean policy at all and allowing a madman to arm himself with the most dangerous weapons on earth.
I can appreciate that different international crises deserve different responses. But Saddam Hussein opened his doors to U.N. inspectors; Kim Jung Il threw U.N. inspectors out. Hussein was accused of having bio- and chem-weapons, which he ended up not really having, while North Korea actually has several nuclear weapons. While Bush was pushing an “All Iraq, all the time” policy throughout his administration, North Korea struggled to even get any attention at all.
If there’s a coherent reason the U.S. needed to invade Iraq at enormous cost in human lives and taxpayer dollars, while North Korea gets ignored, I can’t think of it.
A year ago, North Korea’s government probably thought it would be provocative, for example, to launch its first missile test in three years to coincide on the exact day as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s trip to China to begin discussions about how to deal with the Korean crisis. Instead, the Bush administration largely ignored the move. The next day, North Korea restarted a nuclear reactor for the first time in a decade, and again, the White House shrugged.
A week later, North Korean fighter jets aggressively approached a U.S. reconnaissance plane over international waters. A Pentagon spokesman said at the time that the jets came as “close as 50 feet” to the U.S. plane, and one North Korean jet “used its radar to identify the (U.S.) plane as a target,” but did not open fire. The same Pentagon spokesman said this was the “first such incident since April 1969 when a North Korean plane shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121 surveillance plane, killing all 31 Americans aboard.” In reaction, the Bush administration decided to…do nothing.
I’m reminded of comments from Former Defense Secretary William Perry, who not only doesn’t care for the Bush administration’s North Korea policy, but can’t even identify if it has one.
“I think we are losing control” of the situation, said Perry, who believes North Korea soon will have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists and other U.S. adversaries. “The nuclear program now underway in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities,” he said in an interview.
[…]
Only last winter Perry publicly argued that the North Korea problem was controllable. Now, he said, he has grown to doubt that. “It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things,” he said. “But we haven’t done the right things.”
He added: “I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.”
[…]
In a two-hour interview in his office at Stanford University, Perry said that after conversations with several senior administration officials from different areas of the government, he is persuaded that the Korea policy is in disarray. Showing some emotion, the usually reserved Perry said at one point, “I’m damned if I can figure out what the policy is.”(emphasis added)
When did Perry say these things? July 15, 2003 — almost a full year ago.
The problem is getting worse, but the Bush administration seems passively disinterested in the threat. I don’t mean to sound impatient, but Bush has been in office for over three years. Is it too much to ask that he have a policy in dealing with this crisis?