Did I Just Hear North Korea Renege Again?

A Japanese newspaper on Saturday said North Korea insisted in disarmament talks this month that it would only declare and disable three nuclear facilities — none of them with atomic weapons.

All three sites are in the immediate vicinity of the nearly used-up Yongbyon reactor, which North Korea finally shut down (but never disabled) last month, several months after  the date it  had agreed to do so.   You can see  Google Earth images of some of those facilities  here.

But in the next stage of the six-nation disarmament deal, the North has committed to declaring and disabling all its nuclear facilities.  In a story datelined from China, where talks on the so-called “declare and disable” stage were held earlier this month, the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper said North Korea had announced it would only list three sites.  All three are at the Yongbyon facility, the paper said, citing sources close to the negotiations.   [Channel News Asia]

For your convenence, here’s the full text of the agreement again, in which North Korea agreed to permanently disable all of its nuclear programs. 

Back already?  No doubt, you noticed that it’s pretty vague  in some important  places, such as what programs North Korea has to dismantle, when it has to dismantle them, and how we’ll ever know that.   Relax.  Chris Hill went to Congress last February and  assured  our elected representatives that  all  programs  means all programs, including the existing nuclear weapons and the uranium enrichment program the North Koreans are still lying about.

I should mention that this report (which Kyodo also picked up)  is unsourced, although Japanese diplomats, who are not fans of this deal either,  seem  like the most  obvious “sources close to the negotiations.”  If the North Koreans didn’t say that, you’d expect  someone to  make the  record very  clear about that.  If the North Koreans really  did say  that and the implications could  cost you  your senior fellowship  at the Council on Foreign Relations,  you could  always downplay it and tell everyone the talks were “businesslike” or some such.  After all, what the  North Koreans  say about  their arms control agreements changes from  hour to hour.  Last week, they said they would  declare all of their programs transparently.  I didn’t care, and neither should you.

Extending that concept,  you could  dismiss just about everything the  North Koreans say about their nuke programs.  I do.  Been doing it for years.   Even the statements they put their signatures  on?    Especially the statements they put their signatures  on.  The North Koreans  lie and cheat so much that  our greatest diplomatic minds — just stick with me here —  can’t tell when they’re  lying about their  cheating, when they’re  telling the truth  about their  cheating, and when they’re lying about  lying about their  cheating  as part of  some reverse-pyschology mind-frigg.  Five years later, we still can’t agree which of those things they were doing when they told James Kelly and Jack Pritchard they were, indeedy, enriching  uranium, as they  sat there smugly  and dared us to do a damned thing about it.   

What  did we do about it?  Not much of anything  calculated to  speed up the rot at the problem’s source.  Instead, we pulled out of the first Agreed Framework and temporarily stopped paying the North Koreans for lying to us.  And yet, here we are again.  Today, North Korea is back to denying that it has a uranium program, we still don’t believe them, we’re still  prepared to pay anyway, and we  have another deal that (for no small price) freezes their plutonium program until Kim Jong Il decides to flip the switch back  to “reprocess.”  The only difference is that then, we figured that they had semi-functioning nukes and had possibly tested one.  Today, we think we  know they’ve tested a  semi-functioning nuke.  Also, they’ve produced heaps of  corpses,  but let’s keep this discussion on topic: preserving what passes for peace and security in Korea. 

I’ve found that there’s  much more predictive accuracy in not  listening to what the North Korean  say at all.  I’ve found that if I just always presume that they’re cheating, not only will I always be proven  right eventually,  I’ll have more time for a life, which at the moment  means figuring out how to put all this crap together.  What does  the latest North Korean  statement really mean?  Will we all say “never mind” or pretend it was all  an unfortunate mistranslation  by Tuesday?  Who knows?  It probably means  just as much as everything else the North Koreans say, and it  will probably amount to just about as much as  a South Korean prostitution crackdown.  There is exactly  one reason to listen to what the  North Koreans say:   to excrete  ridicule on anyone stupid enough to believe it. 

Regardless of what the North Koreans actually  said in Beijing —  now that  we’ve established just how much that matters —  what they will actually do  is somewhat  predictable.  They’ll shut down Yongbyon until sometime between  August 2008 and March 2009, when America hits its  quadrennial political paralysis.  Then,  assuming that  the reactor hasn’t  collapsed from wear and overuse, they’ll do everything up to and including starting a bonfire under the smokestack to crank it up again, while restarting  construction on a much larger reactor nearby.  They’ll also continue their work perfecting the nuclear delivery systems that this agreement never mentions.  But give up their nuclear weapons or nuclear secrets for any price?  As if.

See also:

*   Deutsche Welle ups previous estimates of the percentage of North Korea’s crop damage from recent floods  to 20%.  The Daily NK, quoting North Korea sources, put the figure at 14%.  It does look like the North has suffered severe crop damage, and that without significant aid — which will be given with few conditions —  there will be severe shortages, and possibly more outbreaks of disease.  Without conditions, however, it’s likely that famine will be averted around Pyongyang but that conditions in other areas, such as in South Hamgyeong, will be severe.

*   “A young woman was asking a favor, ‘Please take my baby first. I can’t get into the train holding the baby.’ The young soldier, unconsciously, took the baby and waited the woman to ride the train. However, she did not appear until the train left the station….  Then the poor young man found a letter inside the baby’s quilt.  The letter said ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t had food for three days. I can’t let my child to starve. Please raise her as a good daughter of the Dear Leader. Her name is Kim Myong Shim.'”  [Daily NK]

*   When I see Charles Krauthammer and Michael O’Hanlon saying pretty much the same things about Iraq, we see the makings of a mature consensus.  Good.  If part of that consensus is that the first few years of the war were badly managed and that Iraq’s jouney to democracy will be extended at best, the other, emerging part is just how disastrous simply leaving would be. 

*   When the surge created progress on the battlefield, opponents of the war were forced to  “recalibrate” their focus toward Iraq’s political problems.  If this political accord makes it through the Iraqi parliament, there may not be time to recalibrate it again before Petraeus and Crocker report to Congress.  I’m not a fan of Nouri Maliki myself, but I don’t disagree with this:

Maliki hit back on Sunday, saying: “There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin.”

“This is severe interference in our domestic affairs. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton are from the Democratic Party and they must demonstrate democracy,” he said. “I ask them to come to their senses and to talk in a respectful way about Iraq.”

In retrospect, knocking off Ngo Dinh Diem was one of our worst early mistakes in Viet Nam.  A bad elected leader is almost aways  less bad  than  one or more  bad unelected leaders.  I wonder if it’s occurred to Clinton or Levin that their  reckless campaign  talk could inspire a coup.  We have earned the right to expect certain behavior of Iraq’s leaders, but we don’t  have  a  right to select them.