I Know a Dead Parrot When I See One

This  parrot is no more.  It has ceased to be.  It has expired and gone to meet its maker.  This … is a late parrot.  It’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, it rests in peace.  If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies.  It’s  run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  This … is an ex-parrot!

— John Cleese, Monty Python’s “The Dead Parrot Sketch“

I confess to being less interested in static  diplomacy with Kim Jong Il than in the increasingly fluid events that will decide  how long we’ll have to bother with him at all.  For  some time  now, but certainly  since Geneva, we’d arrived at the point where our finest diplomatic minds could not  defend Agreed Framework 2.0 as a viable and productive process without the customer pointing  out where  the parrot’s  feet were nailed to  the perch.

“The basic problem … is that the DPRK is not yet prepared to provide the complete and correct declaration,” Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill said, referring to the nation by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  [Reuters, Arshad Mohammed and Paul Eckert]

State admits to being dissatisfied, but Chris Hill still  insists that the North Koreans will  give us  a declaration … eventually.   

I question the basis for Hill’s assurance.  The North Koreans still  deny having a uranium enrichment program despite A.Q. Khan’s admission  that he gave the North Koreans centrifuges and centrifuge plans (since confirmed by the North Koreans), and despite having previously admitted to U.S. diplomats  James Kelly and Jack Pritchard, in front of  three translators, that  they had a uranium enrichment program.  They  still deny that they had anything to do with nuclear proliferation to Syria,  although they have  admitted to  sending engineers  to some kind of military facility  there.  Yet Kim Gye Gwan’s answer to these questions leaves little room for interpretation: 

“We did not have, we don’t have and we will not have.”  [AP]

Amazingly, the North Koreans wouldn’t even go for the idea of chopping the declaration into pieces:

Hill said that the timing of such steps was not a problem. “The really problematic element is that we don’t have a commitment from the DPRK to provide a complete and correct declaration,” he said. “They would rather have one that misses a few elements — that is rather incomplete.”  [Reuters]

I  just don’t get  the North Koreans.  They always get their way, yet you can’t deny the tactical stupidity of this.  Had they  taken up Hill’s suggestion and given a partial  declaration,  they could have revealed only  those things they know we know, bought more time,  and brought home another  round of  concessions.  They  must realize by now that Bush wants to  play along.   They could have  stalled the  uranium and proliferation declarations through October and then rolled us again.   It would have been as easy as falling off a circus unicycle.   It’s only our own ineptitude that  causes some people to confuse the North Koreans with geniuses.

Chris Hill has said that  he expects this agreement  to be implemented by the end of this year.  You have to be either disingenuous, uninformed,  or stupid to believe that,  but everyone clings to the pretense  — barely —  because the alternative is admitting that it won’t be implemented at all:

“Looking at the schedule of U.S. domestic politics, (Washington) would virtually take its hands off (the issue) once the vacation season starts in early August,” Yu told South Korean reporters at the end of his three-day visit to Beijing. Yu’s office confirmed his comments.  “We have to start negotiations anew from scratch if a new administration comes in the United States.  Therefore, we have to make progress in the declaration issue so as to prepare momentum” for further negotiations, Yu said.  [AP, via IHT]  

(It’s too bad the same thing didn’t occur to Yu when Roh Moo Hyun was bargaining the  free trade agreement hard  just as  President Bush’s party was about to lose control of the Congress.)   But of course,  Kim Jong Il  wants to deal with the Democrats just as badly as the  Democrats would prefer to let Bush  deal with him.   

Even Hill concedes that  getting the declaration(s) won’t be the hardest part; getting the North Koreans to actually give up their nukes will be.  Hill always seems to forget the problem of verifying the  disarmament  of the world’s most closed society.  He also forgot this  when he wrote  an agreement that’s hopelessly vague  about verification, inspection, sequencing, scope, deadlines,  and in its failure to  define such basic terms as “nuclear programs.” 

The lesson being:  it’s  easy  to bring home  an agreement if a  meeting of the minds isn’t an object.  Could we have expected the North Koreans not to interpret these amorphous terms  in  their own unique way?   Just look  how they redefined “democratic peoples’ republic.”

If even the New York Times recognizes that Pyongyang has stalled  this “process,” it’s time  to get a grip.  If we’re actually prepared to overlook flagrant lying or possible nuclear  proliferation between two listed state sponsors of terrorism, one can sensibly question the value of this entire  agreement.  To say that North Korea is  “not yet prepared” for full disclosure isn’t many degrees of silliness  away  from “he’s pining for the fjords.”

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Victor Cha, who at least concedes that the talks “appear to be in trouble,” writes a piece in the Chosun Ilbo that is well worth reading in its entirety,  because Cha is  perceived as speaking for the Administration, only more frankly than the Administration itself can.  Cha admits that the talks will stay  stuck  until North Korea provides a “correct and complete” declaration.  (Which, of course,  it never will.)  

Cha  helpfully clarifies what Hill’s deal did not —  that the benefits North Korea is now  demanding up front were understood by all to be “contingent on a complete declaration:” 

There is clear understanding among the six parties that this declaration — which would constitute a strategic decision by the North to come clean — should include weapons, fissile material, facilities, North Korea’s covert uranium-based bomb efforts, and past proliferation activities. In this regard, what Pyongyang may have claimed to be a declaration submitted in November 2007 did not meet this standard.  [Victor Cha in the Chosun Ilbo]

Cha signals that the  Administration has no more room for flexibility:   

Further flexibility by the U.S. at this point is hardly imaginable. President Bush has already given his negotiator Christopher Hill more room than the conservative base likes. Moreover, behind closed doors at six-party talks, Japan, China, South Korea and Russia all acknowledge that we have only gotten as far as we have because of U.S. patience and flexibility and in spite of North Korean intransigence.  [Id.]

Cha’s discussion of the shifting interaction among the  Asian powers is especially  interesting.  He  first  contrasts Lee Myung Bak with Roh Moo Hyun,  whose policies  were “so badly exploited” by the North Koreans.  He then  suggests that China is overplaying Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, whom Cha claims has “loosened the tight link” between Japanese abductees and North Korea’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. 

[T]he larger cause for the complacency may be the leadership change in Japan. When conservatives like Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro were holding the reigns in Tokyo, China saw a direct link between North Korea’s actions and the growth of a more military-oriented Japan. In the aftermath of the missile and nuclear tests in 2006, China was contending with an Abe government that turned the defense agency into a full-fledged ministry, led the first UN Security Council resolution on North Korea, expressed interest in next-generation fighter-jets, and had some of its hardliners intimating the potential for a nuclear Japan. Fukuda does not have the same agenda; he is oriented towards improving Japan’s relations with Asia and with China.  [Id.]

Cha also calls  for the Chinese to push the North Koreans harder, saying that “at difficult times in the talks, as we face today, it has always been incumbent on China  … to  use its vast material influence on the North to get the regime to behave more responsibly.”  Without offering much support for this, Cha credits the Chinese for having done just that after North Korea’s nuclear test. 

(Contrast this  with  the words of  one leading Chinese academic, written just  days before North Korea’s nuclear test, saying that China has no interest in pressuring the North and besides,  the North is a useful diversion of  U.S. power and influence  away from  Taiwan.   Read it  and decide for yourself, but it  sure looks like China green-lighted the test.)

Foreign Minister Yu is  also  asking the Chinese to help  “encourage” the the North Koreans, and there’s little doubt that President  Lee will have to  ask again when he visits China in May.  This is what everyone does after getting rolled by North Korea — they  fall back on the tender mercies of the ChiComs.  But with North Korea now unable to feed  even  government officials in  Pyongyang, China isn’t going to do anything that could  risk toppling  Kim Jong Il and unleasing a horde of haggard, starving, and  diseased refugees  right before the Olympics.   That would harm China’s interests a lot more than it would harm ours.

Besides, if it’s a dose of  “material influence,” that’s needed, we don’t need China to do that for us.