Deceptive Headline Watch: Yonhap
You don’t get self-fisking journalism very often, but here’s one that just falls off the bone like an overcooked roast (mmm, roooast). Here’s the headline:
U.S. must choose between sanctioning N.K. and compromising for denuclearization: report
Well, what are we supposed to take from that, I wonder? It could only be that inexplicable American obsession with people counterfeiting its currency that’s preventing us from denuclearizing North Korea.Until you read the actual quote, which says:
“Currently the (George W.) Bush administration and Congress face a dilemma,” said the report, authored by Raphael Perl and Dick Nanto.
….“The trade-off seems to be between imposing a current real financial burden on the DPRK but making no progress in halting that country’s nuclear weapons program, or lifting the financial sanctions in exchange for a verifiable halt to North Korea’s alleged counterfeiting activities and a dim prospect that progress might be made in the six-party talks,” said the report dated Jan. 17 but yet to be posted on the CRS website for public view.
You’d suspect that something was lost in translation … except that there was no translation. So once you get to the money quote, the odds of actually denuclearizing anything is somewhere between “dim” and “no.” The choices that remain are (1) a freeze, which would never last through the New Hampshire primary, and (2) the “current real financial burden.”
Well, if they’re still not willing to denuclearize, the choice ought to be pretty damn obvious, unless you view the security interests of the United States as an inconvenience. And believe me, there are plenty of things we could do to increase that pressure dramatically, and very quickly.