Chris Hill: ‘[T]hose f***ers say they’re going to go right ahead and build nuclear weapons no matter what we do.’
Not a very ambassadorial thing to say, perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to justify Washington’s harder new line toward North Korea of late. Leave aside the decade-plus of North Korean cheating and defiance of any standards followed by the rest of humanity. Although evidence of a policy shift is still inconclusive, it’s arguable that several developments last fall strengthened the hand of hard-liners (me, for one) seeking the abandonment of negotiation from weakness in favor of the economic strangulation and political subversion of the North Korean regime.
First came the culmination of the unfortunately named but highly successful Operation Smoking Dragon last August. Smoking Dragon was the culmination of a lengthy investigation, resulted in the seizure of a large quantities of high-quality North Korean counterfeit $100 bills, and started a cascade of revelations and indictments related to North Korea’s counterfeiting. Second came The Living, Breathing Agreement in September, which the North Koreans repudiated in less than 24 hours from the moment of signature.
Left unreported until today is the story (via the Sunday Times) of how North Korea’s accelated nuclear cooperation with Iran in the very midst of the talks, combined with other ample evidence of North Korea’s bad faith, repelled American negotiators.
THE drab compound that houses the Iranian embassy in Pyongyang is the focus of intense scrutiny by diplomats and intelligence services who believe that North Korea is negotiating to sell the Iranians plutonium from its newly enlarged stockpile — a sale that would hand Tehran a rapid route to the atomic bomb.
Then there’s this alarming fact:
The US State Department revealed last summer that 11 shipments of nuclear materials bound for North Korea and Iran had been intercepted under the proliferation security initiative, in which 60 nations including Britain co-operate in air and sea searches. It refused to disclose any details.
How this doesn’t justify–at an absolute minimum–the sinking of the ships and the trial of the crewmembers–is simply beyond me. In my own opinion, it also justifies far more urgency in our dealings with both regimes, including the assassination of North Korean and Iranian operatives involved in the trafficking of nuclear materials. Think, for a moment, of what’s at stake here.
OK, now for the good part:
Alarm bells sounded again in Washington late last autumn after nuclear disarmament talks in China ground to an inconclusive and ill-tempered halt. Christopher Hill, the American negotiator, came out of a meeting to tell colleagues that “those f***ers say they’re going to go right ahead and build nuclear weapons no matter what we do”, according to an official who overheard the remark.
Well, duh.
The North Koreans’ diplomacy with Iran went more smoothly, it seems. North Korea agreed to provide Iran plutonium, nuclear research, and missile technology in exchange for oil and natural gas.
There is no time to waste. If it’s not enough that they’re killing millions of their own people, it should suffice that they’re conspiring to kill millions of ours, without the slightest sincere interest in disarmament. These evil men must be stopped.