Thus says Josh Marshall. Specifically, he's talking about how Cheney and Bush, encouraged by foolish neoconservatives like John Bolton, spurred the North Koreans to develop nuclear weapons. Mash posted a diary on this yesterday. I want to offer a little more background - and a warning.
In 1994 President Clinton signed the Agreed Framework with North Korea. The Framework provided North Korea with assistance towards the development non-military nuclear power, as well as a pathway to normalized relations, in return for which the communist state consented to measures that would freeze its weapons-related plutonium program. By any reasonable account, this was a success. As Globalsecurity.org has described, "North Korea had kept its pledge to freeze all of its nuclear facilities, including nuclear reactors and a reprocessing plant." The Agreed Framework successfully prevented North Korea from developing plutonium nuclear weapons.
Yet in 2002 the Bush administration abandoned the Framework. Why? Because administration officials were accusing the Koreans of operating a clandestine uranium enrichment program. Freed from the Agreed Framework, North Korea was at liberty to go ahead and restart its plutonium program - and that's exactly what it did, leading to the test detonation of a warhead last fall. The Koreans are now believed to have a small number of operative plutonium weapons.
But what about that highly enriched uranium (HEU) program whose supposed existence drove the neocons in the Bush administration to successfully push for a break with the Framework? According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, the White House is now admitting that it's not really sure there ever actually was such a thing:
For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.
But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.
So what happened? Surprise! The neocons believed what they wanted to believe.
The administration was concerned about reports that North Korea had purchased a number of centrifuges which could have been used for uranium enrichment, from the A.Q. Khan network. But, says the Times, "in interviews this week, experts inside and outside the government said that since then, little or no evidence of Korean procurements had emerged to back up those fears."
There's some fogginess as to how and why various players came to accept that the uranium program was overhyped. But the pattern - of selective intelligence interpretation by the neoconservatives - is familiar:
Different players in the 2002 debate have different memories. John R. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, who headed the State Department’s proliferation office at the time of the 2002 declaration, said in an interview on Wednesday evening that "there was no dissent at the time, because in the face of the evidence the disputes evaporated." Mr. Bolton, one of the most hawkish voices in the administration and a vocal critic of its recent deal with North Korea, recalled that even the State Department’s own intelligence arm, which was the most skeptical of the Iraq evidence, "agreed with the consensus opinion."
But David A. Kay, a nuclear expert and former official who in 2003 and 2004 led the American hunt for unconventional arms in Iraq, said he had found the administration’s claims about the North Korean uranium program unpersuasive. "They were driving it way further than the evidence indicated it should go," he said in an interview. The leap of logic, Dr. Kay added, turned evidence of equipment purchases into "a significant production capability."
Yet it was this leap of logic" that that prompted the Bush administration to abandon the Agreed Framework in 2002, thus encouraging the Koreans to go ahead and build nukes with the plutonium program that the Agreed Framework had been keeping in check.
Marshall perfectly sums up the horrifying incompetence of it all:
Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.
Absolutely stunning stupidity. The neocons and their pet politicians in the Bush administration have done incalculable damage to American national security and to global stability. As Marshall points out, "In this decade there's been no stronger force for nuclear weapons proliferation than the dynamic duo of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush."
And yet the neocon wheels keep turning. Earlier this week, in the Right-Wing Think Tank Review I do at my blog, I reported on an AEI article by Nicholas Eberstadt and Christopher Griffin which called the recent six-party agreement with North Korea a "strategic blunder," largely because it 'failed to address' the issue of a North Korean uranium enrichment program, as well as the plutonium weapons the Koreans may have already built (weapons which would not have been built had the US not been chasing after an ethereal HEU program to begin with).
Eberstadt and Griffin call the agreement - which essentially represents a return to some of the terms of the Agreed Framework - a "capitulation in Beijing," and they urge the US to resist "international pressure" to keep the agreement alive when North Korea presents its list of nuclear programs in 60 days. Say the authors, "the Bush administration must be prepared to reject any document that does not include a complete accounting of the HEU program."
In other words, the neocons will be pushing the administration to make exactly the same mistake as in 2002 - sacrificing an agreement on the real and dangerous plutonium program for the sake of neocon obsessions with an HEU program that as likely as not doesn't even exist - and even if it does exist, is nowhere near the kind of threat presented by the plutonium weapons program.
All of this is part of the neoconservative obsession with the hard line. As with Iran, neocon foreign policy consists of the fantasy that Washington, if it only has the will, can discipline and punish other nations without limit. For instance:
Looking beyond the six-party framework, Washington should consider a policy that leverages U.S. strengths against North Korean weaknesses. As North Korea depends on international extortion to survive, the United States should follow Japan's lead and refuse to support the failed North Korean economy until Pyongyang delivers real progress on denuclearization and other issues. Cooperation with Tokyo to increase pressure against Pyongyang's proliferation and counterfeiting activities is a vital measure. And pushing Beijing to facilitate the flow of North Korean refugees though its border along the Yalu River would deliver both humanitarian and strategic dividends.
Some of these measures may have merit, or they may not. But we can be sure that the neocons at AEI will not be driven by an interest in policies that will actually improve American security, global stability, or even the lot of the North Korean people. They will be pushing policies that validate their fantastical hardline crusade.
As Andrew Grotto of the Center for American Progress has pointed out, these hardline tactics have done nothing but backfire:
[The neoconservative] strategy clearly failed. Proliferation problems worsened almost across the board. North Korea withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and tested a nuclear bomb; Iran continues to build uranium enrichment centrifuges; and global confidence in the nuclear nonproliferation regime is waning.
The ideologues' strategy of confrontation failed because it strengthened the determination of North Korea (and Iran) to acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter military action by the United States without offering countervailing incentives and disincentives.
But failed or not, right-wing intellectuals like Eberstadt and Griffin continue to churn out their hardline talking points, and we have no guarantee that the administration is ready to break its addiction to such ideas.
And so it is that the conservative machine, which has based much of its credibility on the idea that it does a better job than Democrats of keeping America safe, threatens once again to do terrible damage to American security.