Month: October 2002

The Times predictably ran an op-ed on North Korea today that essentially ignored the question of which policies led to North Korea getting a nuke (with U.S. help). Instead, the op-ed all but defends the 1994 accords and sees them as the basis for new diplomacy. I guess this is a fair position – the notion that people who have supported a failed policy should actually explain their failure seems, in the world of Raines propaganda, hopelessly utopian. But look who they got to write the op-ed: the guy who was, in Jake Tapper’s words, “a State Department official responsible for implementing a 1994 agreement with North Korea that was to have ended the country’s processing of plutonium at a factory suspected to be manufacturing nuclear weapons.” Joel S. Wit. Here’s his CSIS bio:

He was most recently the coordinator for the 1994 U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework and was responsible for U.S. policy related to the implementation of that agreement. From 1993 to 1995, Mr. Wit served as senior adviser to Robert L. Gallucci, ambassador-at-large in charge of policy towards North Korea, where he worked on U.S. strategy to resolve the 1994 nuclear crisis, was in charge of the interagency sanctions working group, and led the U.S. effort to establish a new international organization, KEDO, to implement the Agreed Framework.

Again, that’s fair enough. But shouldn’t the Times have at least identified the man as such? Isn’t it relevant that the guy now defending the failed 1994 accords on the New York Times op-ed page was actually the person in the Clinton team responsible for enforcing them? Raines law says otherwise. Keep the readers in the dark, and keep spinning, spinning, spinning.

THE WESTERN DISEASE: This astonishing moment of clarity in the Independent, no less. Maybe Bali has changed minds in the world, after all:

Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – “What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?” etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel’s will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness.

Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.

SORRY, DOLLY: Whitney Houston’s hit, “I Will Always Love You,” was written by Dolly Parton. If anyone gets the royalties, it should be Parton.

Yep, her song, “I Will Always Love You,” was picked by Saddam as the theme song for his recent “referendum.” I hope she got some royalties.

“Abu Bakar Bashir is the elderly cleric Western intelligence has identified as the man most likely to have organised Saturday night’s Kuta slaughter… Asked if there was anything he wanted to say to families who lost relatives in the bomb blast, he said: ‘My message to the families is please convert to Islam as soon as possible.’ Mr Bashir offered no sympathy for those who died; just his belief that by converting to Islam, the survivors could ensure they would avoid the fate of those non-Muslims who died and went to hell.” – The Age, Australia, today.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “For many they are brute macho breathtaking reassurance that America is still fighting some sort of good fight, still kickass and badass and hoo boy watch out here come the Good Guys, that our tax-dollar trillions in bloated military expenditures can at least provide a nice afternoon air show in the park, whew. But of course these exact jets are also, for millions of others, the bringers of death. These very same aircraft are awesome machines of violent destruction sent by Cheney and Dubya and Rummy to blast already destitute and deeply oppressed foreign countries into submission so that Bush & Co. can lay some pipe and their oil crony pals can stop salivating at the prospect of a newly gutted Iraq and actually get in there and make some billions. This is the true reality.” – Mark Morford, SFGate.com.

“North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be very firm about it.” – Bill Clinton, “Meet the Press,” Nov. 7, 1993.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday’s draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North’s nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.” – The New York Times, wrong yet again, October 19, 1994. (The Von Hoffman Award is named after famed commentator Nick von Hoffman who boldly predicted the collapse of the Afghan campaign the week Kabul fell. It’s for truly bad judgment or prediction among the punditocracy.)

ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY: Now check the Times’ editorial today. Not even a hint of their previous misjudgment. Just another piece of pabulum calling for more diplomacy. No criticism whatsoever of those who negotiated this deal and helped bring another nuclear rogue state into being. They even say this gives some ammunition to the Iraq “doves,” who “will say this gives the lie to the administration’s argument that Iraq is uniquely dangerous.” Please. Don’t the Times’ editorialists owe their readers some kind of argument as to why they were wrong when this deal was originally signed? Hey, guys. We have Nexis now.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: Here’s what the Clinton administration’s top negotiator with North Korea told Jim Lehrer last January about president Bush’s policy toward North Korea:

JIM LEHRER: What about the idea that the President laying the law down to them, calling them and putting them in the same league with Iraq and Iran and calling them part of this axis of evil helps the situation or hurts it? Do you feel like it helps?

WENDY SHERMAN: I don’t think it was particularly helpful.

JIM LEHRER: Why not?

WENDY SHERMAN: It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It’s not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.

“They do and can follow through.” Says it all, doesn’t it?

ON THE OTHER HAND: There were some people who clearly saw the scam that was the Carter-engineered, Clinton-signed group-hug with the North Koreans. Here’s John McCain, the same day the Times came out hailing the Clinton deal:

On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang’s almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee. …I suspect that the Administration’s willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime’s collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

Hmmm. And what does McCain say about Iraq today?

“DANGEROUSLY WEAK”: This is clearly a suck-up to my friend Charles Krauthammer. But, hey, he deserves it. This is what he said about Clinton’s North Korea deal at the time:

(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility – not very high after Clinton’s about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti – sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, “It’s one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down.” Better though, said another, than “falling on our own sword over phony principle.” If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president’s real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation “very good news.” For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

Man, was he right. And what is his position today on Iraq?

You’d think something as innocuous as Bartlett’s quotations wouldn’t be spoiled by leftist bias. But it has been. Is this my paranoid reading – just because president Reagan wasn’t included until now? Nope. Finally, the editor, Justin Kaplan has come clean. According to USA Today:

After the last edition, Kaplan was criticized for ignoring President Reagan. “I admit I was carried away by prejudice. Mischievously, I did him dirt,” he says. He has added six Reagan quotes, including “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” which Kaplan calls “one of the greatest moments in Western history.”

I wonder if, in a few years’ time, Howell Raines will admit the same about Bush.

The Washington Capitals hockey team no less are currently flogging a new piece of merchandise. They should come up with a better idea than a sniper fitted cap.

Frank Foer has a devastating piece in the latest New Republic. I never knew that most major Western journalists work in the same building as Saddam’s Ministry of Information. Then there’s this:

“There’s a quid pro quo for being there,” says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. “You go in and they control what you do. … So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq.” In other words, the Western media’s presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.

Must-read.

Dan Savage produces another scorcher against the peacenik left. Here’s the key point:

These developments–a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq–are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory for the American left, which has long argued that our support for “friendly” dictators around the world was immoral. (Saddam used to be one of those “friendly” dictators.) After 9/11, the left argued that our support for brutal dictatorships in the Middle East helped create anti-American hatred. Apparently the Bush administration now agrees–so why isn’t the American left claiming this victory?

Because, Dan, these people hate Bush more than they care about the fate of the oppressed people they pretend to care about. Or because they have deeper suspicions about the U.S. than about Saddam’s Iraq. Yep, they’re that depraved and out of it.

Geitner Simmons compares Ellen Goodman’s sincere, if misguided liberalism, with Mike Kinsley’s anti-anti-anti-anti-war forensics. I think Geitner is onto something. What does Mike think we should do about Iraq? Funny that I still don’t have a clue. Except that if Bill Bennett is for it, Mike’s against it.