In my heart of hearts, I find it impossible to believe that Bush is some kind of Manchurian President, intentionally screwing up American foreign policy and deliberately making the United States less safe.
But once in a while, one really has to wonder.
Last October, the North Koreans tested their first nuclear device, the fruition of decades of work to make a weapon out of plutonium.
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 sizable arsenal if this had been handled differently,” a senior administration official said this week.
The 2002 “revelations” about North Korea processing uranium touched off the most recent crisis, and led conservatives to scream bloody murder about how the Clinton administration’s policy and the Agreed Framework were a disaster. Indeed, when the Bush administration became convinced that Kim Jung Il was using enriched uranium as part of a nuclear weapons program, the president effectively tore up the agreements the United States had crafted with North Korea.
But the Bush gang got every possible part of this story wrong, and in the process, dramatically increased the security risk for the United States.
Clinton struck a deal that kept North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons with plutonium. Bush scrapped that deal because of North Korea’s pursuit of enriched uranium. North Korea responded by restarting the plutonium program and building nuclear weapons.
But there apparently was no enriched uranium. Bush scrapped the deal based on a mistake.
“The administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has resulted in a fourfold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea,” Senator Reed said in an interview on Wednesday. “If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea’s ambitions with their accomplishments, it’s important.”
Two administration officials, who declined to be identified, suggested that if the administration harbored the same doubts in 2002 that it harbored now, the negotiating strategy for dealing with North Korea might have been different — and the tit-for-tat actions that led to October’s nuclear test could, conceivably, have been avoided.
Josh Marshall summarized this nicely: “Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) 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.”
Has the Bush White House gotten a single foreign policy/national security challenge right the past six years? Anything?
It’s almost as if the administration were trying to undermine the United States. I know that’s unlikely, but the alternative is that we’re witnessing the most spectacularly incompetent and dangerous presidential administration in history.