Yakkety-Yakk
The NYT is reporting on the terms of a potential deal Bush will offer the NorKs, and don’t bother looking for the words “human rights”:
Under the plan, . . . the aid would begin flowing immediately after a commitment by Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, to dismantle his plutonium and uranium weapons programs. In return, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea would immediately begin sending tens of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil every month, and Washington would offer a “provisional” guarantee not to invade the country or seek to topple Mr. Kim’s government. . . . It would also begin direct talks about lifting a broad array of American economic sanctions that have been in place against North Korea for more than half a century, and providing longer-term energy aid and retraining of nuclear scientists.
But here’s the kicker:
But Mr. Kim would have only three months, what the officials call a “preparatory period of dismantlement,” to seal and shut the North Korean nuclear facilities, similar to what Libya committed to late last year. After that, Mr. Bush’s aides say, the continuation of the oil and the talks would depend on North Korea giving international inspectors access to suspected nuclear sites, and meeting a series of deadlines for disclosing the full nature of its facilities, disabling and dismantling then, and then shipping them out of the country, as Libya did.
If the success of a bad bargain is a bad thing, then I’m mostly optimistic. In fact, this deal would entrench and subsidize Kim Jong Il’s septic reign, but he’s probably too stupid to take it. North Korea’s very foundation is secrecy, and its horrible secrets are too intertwined for just one of them to be revealed. They will never allow the kind of inspections we will demand while Bush has at least three months in office. To me, this has the ring of that “one last chance” we will offer Kim Jong-Il before we pursue something a little less pointless than the next lie. Where I’m pessimistic is in the likelihood that a Kerry administration wouldn’t have the cojones to enforce the deal, or that we would negotiate three months to six, or nine. Then there’s this little gem of State Department reasoning from another, more recent NYT report:
Significantly, a senior administration official said that the new plan does not require North Korea to accept the precise formula for resolving the standoff, the “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” — known by the intials C.V.I.D. — of its nuclear program that the administration had insisted was its bottom line in any agreement. In previous rounds, the same official had suggested that North Korea would have to agree to that wording before discussions of any benefits it might receive could commence. . . . The official said C.V.I.D. was still the goal of the United States. But he said that the repetition of that demand and the suggestion that North Korea had to give up it nuclear program before it could expect benefits had “inflamed sensibilities” at earlier rounds.
Infamed sensibilities!? I honestly think that if you walked up to one of our crack diplomats at a cocktail party and planted a wet one on his wife–with tongues–he’d politely ask you if you could have her back from the cloakroom in twenty minutes or less.