William Perry blasts Bush White House on North Korea

With all the news about Bush’s failing policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to overlook the fact there’s a madman with nuclear weapons in North Korea. The White House, for example, seems to have forgotten about Kim Jung Il altogether.

Former Defense Secretary William Perry was unusually blunt with the Washington Post yesterday, telling the paper that the administration’s policies — or lack thereof — aren’t working and we’re on a course for war.

“I’m damned if I can figure out what the policy is,” Perry said of the administration.

He said the situation was bad earlier this year, but it was a burgeoning crisis which could still be dealt with. Unfortunately, Perry no longer believes this is the case.

“It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things,” he said. “But we haven’t done the right things…. 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.”

While Bush was eliminating a threat in Iraq that didn’t actually exist, Kim Jung Il was expanding his weapons program, which is widely believed to have already produced some nuclear weapons.

As Perry put it, “I think we are losing control” of the situation.

This isn’t a new story. We learned in October that North Korea had been lying about its supposedly dormant nuclear program. Shortly thereafter, Kim Jung Il expelled U.N. weapons inspectors from the country. Since then, the Bush administration has struggled to decide what it wants to do, focusing instead on “regime change” in Iraq.

First, the White House removed military options off the table, opting for diplomacy. Of course, diplomacy with a country with which we have no diplomatic ties is tricky.

The Bush administration said initially that its plan was to isolate North Korea in the international community. That didn’t work; North Korea is already isolated. Then the White House said it wouldn’t open discussions with North Korea, because that would be “rewarding” bad behavior. The Bush administration, in short, had no policy. Unfortunately, they still don’t.

In late February, North Korea conducted its first missile launch test in three years, a test which coincided with Colin Powell’s trip to China to begin multilateral discussions about how to deal with the North Korean crisis. How did the White House respond to the missile tests? With a yawn.

A few days later, North Korea restarted a nuclear reactor that had been shut down since 1994. The White House shrugged. If it wasn’t in Iraq, they didn’t care. (After all, Iraq had gotten uranium from Niger. Oh wait…)

A few days after that, North Korean fighter jets aggressively approached a U.S. reconnaissance plane over international waters near Japan. A Pentagon spokesman said 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. It was the first such incident since 1969. The Bush administration couldn’t be bothered. Like a parent irritated that their child is acting up just to get attention, the White House looked the other way.

Today we see that North Korea has announced they have finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to add to their already existing weapons. These, of course, could be used by the North Koreans themselves, or sold to other terrorists.

The administration, meanwhile, continues to insist that a military option will not be considered. Then they’ll turn to diplomacy? Not exactly; Bush still doesn’t want to give North Korea the satisfaction.

As Perry told the Post, “My theory is the reason we don’t have a policy on this, and we aren’t negotiating, is the president himself. I think he has come to the conclusion that Kim Jong Il is evil and loathsome and it is immoral to negotiate with him.”

That’s fine, to a certain extent, if the president had an alternative policy to pursue. He doesn’t.

I’m all for patience and deliberate action on foreign policy, but Bush’s team — supposedly foreign policy experts — has been in office now for almost three years. Is it impolite of me to wonder when they may actually come up with a policy on North Korea?