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July 8, 2008

Exclusive: Bush’s Bleak Legacy on North Korea - What Is Pyongyang Hiding?

Joel Himelfarb

It is difficult to reconcile the substance of the U.S.-North Korean nuclear agreement deal (or at least, the limited details that have been made public about it) with the glowing reviews that have come from some hawkish-minded quarters. The outline of the deal is this: Less than two years after it tested a nuclear weapon in violation of the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Stalinist regime (responsible for starving many thousands of its own citizens to death) is rehabilitating itself with help from the United States government.

Late last month, Pyongyang disclosed information about its nuclear program and televised the destruction of its plutonium processing facility at Yongbyon. In exchange, the Bush Administration announced that it would remove North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and end sanctions imposed under the Trading With The Enemy Act (the latter move eases licensing requirements for American companies seeking to import goods from North Korea and provisions affecting Americans shipping goods from other countries into North Korea.) At the same time, in an effort to illustrate that the administration was not completely giving away the store, President Bush signed an executive order keeping in place sanctions on certain North Korean assets. The Treasury Department said sanctions against North Korean money-laundering and weapons proliferation would remain in effect, and the DPRK regime would not have its access to the international banking system restored.

The agreement has won bipartisan praise, with Sen. John Kerry endorsing it, as well as prominent Left-wing bloggers like Matthew Yglesias, whose writings appear at TheAtlantic.com. Yglesias has depicted the deal as a victory for the State Department, in particular Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Christopher Hill, the Foggy Bottom careerist who negotiated it with Pyongyang, and a defeat for former UN Ambassador John Bolton and Sen. John McCain (who Yglesias depicts as a warmonger uninterested in compromise with North Korea.) On the right, Fox News commentators Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes think the agreement, while flawed, has a significant upside for U.S. national security - in particular, the fact that North Korea is providing Washington with information about its plutonium-production efforts. The hawkish Investor's Business Daily was positively triumphal, hailing the North Korea deal as a triumph for "tough diplomacy" and dismissing the U.S. concessions to the DPRK as "largely symbolic."

Such statements indicate profound misunderstanding of what Washington is giving Pyongyang. With a regime like the one in North Korea that craves legitimacy and seeks a route out of isolation, "symbolism" (ital.) is (end ital.) substance. Congratulations to the Bush Administration for having had the good judgment to keep many of the existing sanctions on Pyongyang for now. But it's clear that events are moving in a particular direction: towards lifting sanctions and paving the way for North Korea to obtain development assistance and other forms of international aid in the future. Such concessions might make sense if North Korea was adhering to the agreements it has made with the United States. But the agreements themselves have been ridden with loopholes and Pyongyang's compliance has ranged from inadequate to nonexistent.

In the February 13, 2007, agreement it signed with the United States, for example, North Korea agreed to provide "a complete declaration of all nuclear programs" within 60 days. That declaration is now more than 14 months overdue and has not yet been made public. But Bush Administration officials have acknowledged that it will contain glaring omissions. For example, it apparently says nothing about the number of North Korean nuclear weapons in existence. It omits information about Pyongyang's involvement in proliferation activities, including collaboration with Libya and what former UN Ambassador John Bolton describes as "cloning" the Yongbyon reactor in Syria (Israel destroyed the clone in a September 6, 2007, airstrike.) Nor does it give an accounting of North Korean involvement in the activities of the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network operating out of Pakistan. It also says nothing about a suspected covert North Korean program to enrich uranium.

In making the case for the agreement, the State Department touts the fact that North Korea turned over 18,000 pages of documentation about Yongbyon. But those documents include significant gaps in information about the reactor's early years, making it impossible to calculate its aggregate production of plutonium.

"This is essentially the same problem that the International Atomic Energy Agency faced during its years of monitoring Yongbyon under the failed 1994 Agreed Framework [negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter on behalf of the Clinton Administration], showing that the North is nothing if not consistent in its cover-up strategy," Bolton wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "Ironically, the documents themselves are contaminated with highly enriched uranium, probably from that enrichment program North Korea still denies. This program's extent is crucial, because if it is production scope, the North will still have a route to fissile material no matter what Yongbyon's ultimate fate, proving yet again that leveling those aged facilities was a nonconcession."

Although the Bush Administration says it will demand "strict" verification requirements from North Korea, it has yet to explain what this means. Will the government permit U.S. and/or International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to go anywhere at any time inside North Korea unescorted by the army to search for suspected covert facilities? Don't bet on it. Were Pyongyang to permit this, it would undermine the very foundation of the regime itself.

Finally, there is the question of removing North Korea from the terrorism list. The last major act of terrorism Pyongyang was involved in was the Nov. 29, 1987, bombing of Korean Air Lines Flight 858 near Burma, which killed 115 people. The bomb was planted by agents of Pyongyang and the plot was masterminded by current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, then director of national security. But more than 400 South Koreans abducted by North Korea remain missing along with 12 Japanese victims. In the short term, the Bush Administration's decision to remove Pyongyang from the terrorism list threatens to create a diplomatic crisis with Tokyo - which in recent years has taken a firmer stance against North Korea than has Seoul. But there is yet another question that has yet to be answered with regard to the terrorism list: Given all the evidence of North Korean nuclear and ballistic-missile collaboration with terror list members Iran and North Korea, how can Washington take Pyongyang off the list and maintain the integrity of said list - especially given the Stalinist government's failure to come clean about its proliferation activities involving two of the world's most prominent supporters of terrorism?

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.

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