Bush administration rooting for North Korea nuclear test

This is just insane. I found this through Think Progress, then went back to the Washington Post story regarding Secretary of State Condi Rice's view that the North Korean nuclear test allowed China to engage in the debate and crisis. This little paragraph was buried deep in the WaPost story:

Before North Korea announced it had detonated a nuclear device, some senior officials even said they were quietly rooting for a test, believing that would finally clarify the debate within the administration.

This is just insane! Bush administration officials rooting for this North Korean nuclear test? This little paragraph brings up a whole host of questions regarding the Bush administration's policy on North Korea. What is the Bush administration's policy on North Korean nukes? From what I can gather, the administration has been extremely confrontational regarding North Korea, both in refusing to negotiate directly with the North Koreans and in pushing the idea of overthrowing the North Korean government. It is no wonder the North Koreans went ahead with their bomb production and the subsequently failed test. My second question would be where the division is within the Bush administration on this policy? Who sided with the neocon views of non-negotiating with the North Koreans, and who sided with a more moderating stance--perhaps similar to the Clinton administration's approach toward the North Koreans? And finally, who exactly were rooting for these North Korean tests? I'd be curious to hear the names of these senior administration officials rooting for North Korean nukes.

But there is more here. This little paragraph shows the complete failure of the Bush administration's policy on North Korea. The Bush administration rejected any sort of negotiations with North Korea, rejected the Clinton administration's Agreed Framework program, for a fantasy idea of isolating North Korea and hopefully prompting an overthrow of Kim Jong II. The Bush administration decided to invade Iraq on the premise of fantasy Iraqi WMDs, while ignoring the real threat of North Korean WMDs. In a sense this little paragraph shows a complete division within the Bush administration between officials who may have wanted to embark on a policy of real politics with North Korea to obtain measurable results in limiting North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and the neocons who dreamed an ideology of extreme American imperialism. This debate between the real politics and ideologues never went away.

Bush Faults Clinton Policy, But the Debate is Complex

Here we go again--Let's blame Bill Clinton! This is from The Washington Post:

President Bush asserted yesterday that the administration's strategy on North Korea is superior to the one pursued by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, because Clinton reached a bilateral agreement that failed, while the current administration is trying to end North Korea's nuclear programs through multi-nation talks.

"In order to solve this diplomatically, the United States and our partners must have a strong diplomatic hand," Bush said at a news conference. "And you have a better diplomatic hand with others, sending the message, than you do when you're alone."

I guess Bill Clinton is to be blamed for North Korea's testing of its nuclear weapon. And the Bush administration had nothing to do with this. But now look at what else the WaPost reports:

Bush's current policy, in fact, envisions direct, bilateral negotiations with North Korea on certain issues in the six-nation talks, such as missile proliferation and normalizing relations. That commitment to direct talks is enshrined in the agreement of principles guiding future negotiations that was reached in Beijing in September 2005. Indeed, Rice was prepared to authorize her chief negotiator to travel to Pyongyang in November 2005, provided that North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor as a sign of good faith. It refused that condition, and the trip was scrubbed.

By the same token, it is not fully accurate to describe the negotiations that led to a 1994 agreement between the United States and North Korea as purely the result of one-on-one negotiations. During talks that produced the Agreed Framework, in which North Korea said it would freeze its nuclear program, U.S. negotiators briefed Japanese and South Korean officials every day. South Korea and Japan agreed to bankroll much of the cost of the light-water reactors that were to be provided to North Korea under the deal.

Robert L. Gallucci, the chief negotiator of the accord and now dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, said it is a "ludicrous thing" to say that the Clinton agreement failed. For eight years, the Agreed Framework kept North Korea's five-megawatt plutonium reactor frozen and under international inspection, while North Korea did not build planned 50- and 200-megawatt reactors. If those reactors had been built and running, he said, North Korea would now have enough plutonium for more than 100 nuclear weapons.

By Gallucci's account, North Korea may have produced a small amount of plutonium for one or two weapons before Clinton came into office -- during the administration of Bush's father -- but "no more material was created on his watch." When Clinton left office, officials saw signs that North Korea may have been attempting to create a clandestine uranium enrichment program, but nothing was definitive.

Such a program would violate the Agreed Framework. When the Bush administration decided it had conclusive proof of that enrichment in July 2002, it confronted North Korea and terminated fuel oil deliveries promised under the Agreed Framework. In response, North Korea evicted the inspectors, restarted the reactor and retrieved weapons-grade plutonium from 8,000 fuel rods that had been kept in a cooling pond. Intelligence analysts now think that, before Monday's apparent nuclear test, North Korea had enough plutonium for as many as a dozen weapons.

So Clinton's Agreed Framework had kept North Korea's plutonium program pretty much frozen for eight years. And while there were reports of North Korea cheating on the framework by enriching uranium, there was no conclusive proof. The program worked. Now the Bush administration comes into office and what do they do? They confront the North Koreans, terminating fuel oil deliveries as promised under the Agreed Framework. The North Koreans kick out the inspectors and restart their nuclear weapons production program. And for four years they have been happily producing plutonium for their new weapons stockpile.

The Bush administration calls former President Clinton's Agreed Framework agreement a failure? President Bush calls his own confrontational policy on North Korea a success?

But now check this little bit of information from the Post:

Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell pressed China to host three-way discussions because it was clear that Bush was opposed to direct talks, according to the new book "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell," by Washington Post Associate Editor Karen DeYoung. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld adamantly opposed any dialogue, arguing in a series of memos that the goal should be the collapse of North Korea's government, the book says.

Now this is interesting. Rumsfeld opposed any dialogue because he believes that the Bush administration's goal should be the collapse of North Korea's government. I wonder if this type of thinking is prevalent throughout the Bush administration.

Of course, the tie-in between Rumsfeld’s desire to force a collapse of the North Korean government and the Bush administration’s confrontational-style policies against North Korea fits nicely together. If you want to force the North Korean government to fall, the last thing you would want is to provide North Korea with economic aid in exchange for the North Koreans promise not to continue their plutonium production program. You force a confrontation, break the Agreed Framework, and impose your worthless economic embargo against the North Koreans—who, of course, go back to building their bomb.

When will the neocons learn? We've tried to isolate and economically blockade both North Korea and Cuba for decades, hoping to cause both of these nations' governments to collapse. I don't see either government falling for a long while.

This is a complete mess.

North Korea's Nuclear Test

This annotated commercial satellite image released by The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington on October 10, 2006 shows the suspected nuclear test site near the town of Chik-tong in North Korea as seen in a satellite image acquired from Digital Globe. The image, made by a Digital Globe satellite on September 17, 2006, depicts the suspected suspected tunnel entrance and support buildings as well as a VIP helipad and housing around what is believed to be the North Korean test site. REUTERS/Digital Globe-ISIS/Handout

Well, the North Koreans have done it--they have finally conducted their own underground test of a nuclear weapon. This is off The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Monday, Oct. 9 — North Korea said Sunday night that it had set off its first nuclear test, becoming the eighth country in history, and arguably the most unstable and most dangerous, to proclaim that it has joined the club of nuclear weapons states.

The test came just two days after the country was warned by the United Nations Security Council that the action could lead to severe consequences.

What is especially interesting here is the explosion was the equivalent of 550 tons of TNT:

North Korea's nuclear test was equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, a state-run South Korean geological institute said. That is relatively small compared to the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, which was equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT.

The real issue here isn't whether or not the North Koreans have successfully tested a nuclear device--we've known for years that the North Koreans have been actively building a nuclear bomb. The real problem here is that for six years, the North Koreans have been given what amounts to a free pass in their nuclear weapons research. Instead of a North Korean successful test of a nuclear weapon, what we really have here is a Bush administration's failure to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This is a Bush administration failure in ignoring North Korea's real nuclear ambitions for the fantasy Iraqi WMDs and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This has been a failure of the Bush administration for ignoring the stockpile of Russian nuclear weapons material and for cutting the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program's budget. The Cooperative Threat Reduction was a simple concept which allowed the United States to purchase Russia's nuclear weapons material, then safely secure it either in Russia or the U.S. However, the Bush administration will cut the Cooperative Threat Reduction by 10 percent--$372.1 million from a fiscal 2006 funding of $415.5 million. Even the funding for diverting Russian nuclear scientists away from weapons programs into more useful programs is being cut:

The budget request includes $28.5 million for the Global Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program, which seeks to redirect the expertise of former weapons scientists in Iraq, Libya, and the former Soviet Union toward civilian pursuits. The request is 29 percent below current spending of $39.6 mil lion. NNSA says the lower total reflects diminished program activity in the Russian cities of Sarov and Snezhinsk.

The budget request for the International Nuclear Materials Protection, Control and Accounting (MPC&A) program, which seeks to secure vulnerable nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials, is $413.2 million, a 3.3 percent reduction from the 2006 appropriation of $427 million.

The Bush administration has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, so that President Bush can create his own flawed missile defense system. The Bush administration has ignored the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, in favor of developing and testing a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons. And while the United States is still a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Bush administration has pretty much ignored the NPT--they've ignored nuclear disarmament, and they have ignored the pledge of not using nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear country--namely Iran.
In one sense, this has been a PNAC neocon's systematic long-term approach towards destroying international nuclear non-proliferation commitments and disarmaments in favor of a U.S. arms race for a new generation of nuclear weapons. The problem here is that the destruction of these international agreements on nuclear proliferation and the next generation of American nuclear weapons will not make the U.S. any safer--it will not stop a possible terrorist organization for acquiring weapons-grade uranium or plutonium from Russia, or the Russian scientific expertise for sale to North Korea, Iran, Libya, or any other country that wishes to possess nukes. This will not stop the North Koreans from conducting further nuclear tests to refine their bomb-making abilities, nor will it stop South Korea or Japan from embarking on their own nuclear weapons development. President Bush's vaunted Missile Defense System will not stop a terrorist organization, or a country, from smuggling a nuclear weapon into the United States--all it would take is to place the nuclear bomb on a cargo ship heading towards an American port. Once the ship reaches port, you then set off the nuke.

There is a hypocrisy in this Bush administration—a hypocrisy of saying one thing, while doing another. The Bush administration demands that North Korea gives up its nuclear development while at the same time the administration has been embarking on designing and testing a new generation of nuclear warheads. This Bush administration demands that North Korea enter into negotiations with not just the U.S., but also with China and Russia at the table in a multi-national session, rather than the bilateral session that North Korea favors with the U.S. And yet in Iraq, the Middle East, and pretty much the rest of the world, the U.S. has embarked on their own unilateral foreign policy—rejecting multinational negotiations and agreements. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has certainly prompted Iran to quicken their own pace of nuclear weapons development. The other nations of the world view this hypocrisy of “Do as I say, and not as I do,” and have concluded that they too can behave as irrational and hypocritical as the U.S. is currently behaving.

These are the real failures of this Bush administration.