North Korea Wants Attention

With all of the attention that the Iranian nuclear crisis has drawn, its fellow member of the Axis of Evil has apparently gotten jealous. North Korea reminded the world that it has claims on the title of Most Insane Regime by firing a couple of short-range missiles in Japan’s general direction:

North Korea launched a pair of short-range missiles Wednesday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Japan’s Kyodo News Agency, which quoted “sources knowledgeable about the matter,” said the surface-to-air missiles were launched near North Korea’s border with China.
“Indications are that North Korea launched two short-range missiles,” McClellan said. “The regime has conducted similar tests in the past.”
According to Kyodo, there was some confusion over whether the missiles were test-fired or launched by mistake.
The agency quoted a Western military source as saying they were short-range missiles fired to the east from the eastern coast.
At least one of the missiles landed in the sea about 100 kilometers (62 miles) northeast of the launch site, Kyodo said, citing a Japanese defense official.

The Kim regime is irritated that the US has accused it of counterfeiting operations and suspended its participation in the six-nation disarmament talks. Kim must be getting annoyed that the mullahcracy gets so much attention, taking the spotlight off of Pyongyang, which the world considers more of a lost cause. Kim needs to remind everyone that North Korea still hasn’t finished playing with fire yet, either. Unfortunately for Kim, all this tells the rest of the nations trying to negotiate an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear program is that they don’t have much else to test. Kim would surely have used the biggest bang in his stockpile short of causing real damage in order to regain his position as the center of the disarmament universe.

NoKos Restarting Construction On New Reactor

The North Koreans appear to have started working on their once-abandoned reactor site, and have said that they could complete the 50-megawatt reactor within two years. This new development belies the agreement reached two months ago, when Pyongyang announced its intention to stop all pursuit of plutonium development:

North Korea has said it plans to finish building a 50-megawatt nuclear reactor in as little as two years, allowing it to produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for 10 weapons annually, according to the first public report of an unofficial U.S. delegation that visited Pyongyang in August.
The new reactor would represent a tenfold leap in North Korea’s ability to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, which could give it significant leverage in talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear programs. North Korea tentatively agreed in September to “abandon” its programs, but the talks — which resume today in Beijing — must still resolve how quickly Pyongyang gives up its weapons and what types of incentives it will receive. …
North Korea has said it has an urgent need for electric power, and Ri told Hecker the electricity generated by the 50-megawatt reactor would go into North Korea’s electrical grid. Hecker said Ri acknowledged that such graphite-moderated reactors are not very efficient for electricity, but make very good weapons-grade plutonium.
The Institute for Science and International Security said that in June 2005, commercial satellite imagery did not show significant construction activity at the 50-megawatt site. But a more recent photograph from Sept. 11 indicated preparation for construction, including restoring a building near the reactor.

Rather than an overt act in defying the previous agreement, the North Koreans probably want the rest of the six-nation panel to give Pyonyang further concessions to stop construction — likely hard currency, as the Kim regime has its insatiable appetites. It still should give pause to the negotiators who worked with Pyongyang to get the interim agreement, as well as China as a neighbor to the unstable Kims. The move underscores the necessity and the difficulty of wrapping up the details of an agreement quickly, and to start the verification process immediately afterwards.

Gray Lady Gives Grudging Credit On North Korea

On the week where the Paper of Record hid its editorial columnists behind the $50 firewall that virtually ensures they will go unread, its editorial board also admits to victory for the Bush administration for its insistence on their policy for North Korea:

For years now, foreign policy insiders have pointed to North Korea as the ultimate nightmare, the ongoing worst-case scenario for an international crisis: a closed, hostile and paranoid dictatorship with an aggressive nuclear weapons program. Very few people could envision a successful outcome. And yet North Korea agreed this week to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, return to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, abide by the treaty’s safeguards and admit international inspectors.
Diplomacy, it seems, does work after all.
The agreement signed yesterday, if faithfully carried out, is a huge win for the United States as well as a fair deal for North Korea. Its achievement became possible when Washington abandoned the confrontational tactics and name-calling associated with its former top antiproliferation official, John Bolton, and gave serious negotiation a chance. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deserves most of the credit for that switch, which was made with exceptional skill by America’s top negotiator at the talks, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill.

Diplomacy, it seems, works after all — especially when the other side understands that the US has the will to go outside of diplomacy if necessary to secure its national interests. If the New York Times wants to pretend it doesn’t understand the purpose of our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Kim regime does not have that luxury. They understood that the Bush administration would not send Rice to Pyongyang to dance cheek to cheek with Kim, a la Madeline Albright, but to deliver an ultimatum that would result in his destruction. After testing the Bush administration several times and finding it unwilling to waver, even after a number of Bush’s political opponents (such as John Kerry) fell for his tricks, Kim knows that Bush has him diplomatically isolated and left with no choice but compliance or war.
Diplomacy works, after all, but only when your enemy understands that you have not limited your options to diplomacy. The Gray Lady kids herself in thinking that John Bolton was part of the problem. Bolton provided a key part of the solution, and did so well that the Bush administration wanted to make sure Bolton could get the widest possible application in foreign policy. Going from non-proliferation specialist to UN Ambassador isn’t a demotion, after all, as even the Times should be able to figure out.
The Times should be commended for giving credit where due, even grudgingly and incompletely. Unfortunately, they still don’t demonstrate that they have learned anything from the results.

North Korea Tosses In Late Demand

The path will never go easy with the Kim regime in Pyongyang. The US already knows this, but now the Chinese have had a taste of it after making the official announcement of an agreement on disarmament with the North Koreans, only to have Kim Jong-Il publicly add a demand for a nuclear reactor afterwards:

North Korea insisted Tuesday it won’t dismantle its nuclear weapons program until the U.S. gives it civilian nuclear reactors, casting doubt on a disarmament agreement reached a day earlier during international talks.
Washington reiterated its rejection of the reactor demand and joined China in urging North Korea to stick to the agreement announced Monday in which it pledged to abandon all its nuclear programs in exchange for economic aid and security assurances.
North Korea’s new demands underlined its unpredictable nature and deflated some optimism from the Beijing agreement, the first since negotiations began in August 2003 among the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia. …
China, North Korea’s closest ally in the talks, urged Pyongyang to join the other negotiating partners in implementing the commitments in “a serious manner.” … Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang was asked in Beijing whether North Korea might have misunderstood the order of commitments laid out in the statement Monday.
“The common statement was adopted by all six parties and I don’t think North Korea has any misunderstanding,” Qin said.

Again we see the wisdom of the six-party negotiations and why bilateral talks would do no good with the Kim regime. In this case, even the Chinese sound embarrassed by Kim’s prevarications and would like him to politely shut the hell up. If this had happened in bilateral talks, Kim would face no pressure to meet his signed obligations. Now, with the Chinese risking their diplomatic prestige to an even greater degree than the US, they will not likely put up with much nonsense from Pyongyang, giving Bush more leverage in enforcing some compliance from North Korea.
None of the other nations believe that Kim actually takes this seriously, and that the November meetings to plan for the reintroduction of the IAEA and verifiable compliance will still take place.

North Korea Gives Up Its Nuclear Program

In a stunning foreign-policy victory for the Bush administration, North Korea has publicly agreed to forego its nuclear weapons program entirely without getting a nuclear reactor from the West in return. The six-nation talks just released its first-ever joint statement announcing the agreement:

North Korea pledged to drop its nuclear weapons development and rejoin international arms treaties in a unanimous agreement Monday at six-party arms talks. The agreement was the first-ever joint statement after more than two years of negotiations.
The North “promised to drop all nuclear weapons and current nuclear programs and to get back to the (Nuclear) Nonproliferation Treaty as soon as possible and to accept inspections” by the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to the agreement by the six countries at the talks.
“All six parties emphasized that to realize the inspectable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the target of the six-party talks,” the statement said.

George Bush needed a big win on the international stage, and this surely qualifies. He has stuck to his strategy of using multilateral negotiations instead of bilateral talks with Pyongyang, the strategy that produced the last failed agreement. The only concession made by the US was an affirmation that we had no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and no plans to attack North Korea.
The agreement should allow the US to focus much more attention on Iran, once a compliance team gets on the ground in North Korea. We will also find out how good our intelligence on Kim’s nukes have been, and that might give us an idea about how we can improve it for Iran. More importantly, it gives the Bush administration a boost in credibility for negotiating for non-proliferation, just when the EU-3 has utterly failed with Iran to get an agreement. Look for the Bush administration to leverage this win to take over the Iranian stalemate and push it towards the UN.

Musharraf: Khan Supplied NoKos With Centrifuges, Designs

Confirming the suspicions of many in the West, Pakistan’s leader Pervez Musharraf stated for the record that Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan gave centrifuges and their designs to the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il, according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo:

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has confirmed that disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan provided North Korea with centrifuge machines and their designs, Kyodo news agency said on Wednesday.
Khan, revered in Pakistan as the man who gave his country the weapons capability to balance that of nuclear-armed neighbour and rival India, admitted last year to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. …
Asked about reports that Pakistan told Japanese government officials that Khan had given North Korea about 20 centrifuges, Musharraf was quoted as saying: “Yes, he passed centrifuges — parts and complete. I do not exactly remember the number.”

The leap in development of Pyongyang’s nuclear work surprised the Bush administration during its first term, when the Kim regime first revealed that it had created nuclear weapons. At the time, people made an assumption that Kim had bargained for the technology. Musharraf has confirmed that Khan admitted to the transactions with North Korea’s dictator in his first public statements about the Khan network. Khan’s admission came last year, but it hardly comes as a shock. Khan made himself a popular man in the tyrant market, supplying such luminaries as Moammar Gaddafi, the Iranian mullahs, and perhaps others less bound by state boundaries; we may never know for certain how many people wound up with Khan centrifuges.
The Pakistani president tried to minimize the issue by arguing that Khan didn’t transmit instructions for nuclear-weapons engineering, but just to enrich the uranium that could constitute the fissile material. However, that part causes the greatest difficulty. Most of the knowledge necessary to engineer a weapon can be found in libraries and readily-available books, even on the Internet as long as one knows where to look. Getting fissile material in sufficient quantities was the greater obstacle, and Khan helped Kim leap over it much sooner than expected.
Musharraf can’t possibly believe his own rhetoric on this point, and indications show he doesn’t. Despite his current status as a “hero” in Pakistan, Dr. Khan is not permitted to leave his house in the Pakistani capital. Musharraf apparently wants to keep a close eye on this “hero”, to make sure that Khan doesn’t get generous with his heroics towards the wrong people.

The Left Ignores North Korean Tyranny

Nicholas Kristof discovers today that the Right actually gets it right regarding North Korean tyranny and says so in the New York Times. Unfortunately, the advice he gives the Left to address the problem gets it all wrong.
Kristof starts out by scolding the Left for ignoring the problem altogether:

Liberals took the lead in championing human rights abroad in the 1970’s, while conservatives mocked the idea. But these days liberals should be embarrassed that it’s the Christian Right that is taking the lead in spotlighting repression in North Korea. …
“The biggest scandal in progressive politics,” Tony Blair told The New Yorker this year, “is that you do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, 23 million of them, and no one protests!”
Actually, some people do protest. Conservative Christians have aggressively taken up the cause of North Korean human rights in the last few years, and the movement is gathering steam. A U.S.-government-financed conference on North Korean human rights convened in Washington last week, and President Bush is expected shortly to appoint Jay Lefkowitz to the new position of special envoy for North Korean human rights.

He then ignores decades of results from appeasement strategies by advising massive American investment in the North Korean economy:

So can anything be done to help North Koreans? Yes, if liberals stop ceding the issue to conservative Christians. Ultimately, the solution to the nuclear standoff is the same as the solution to human rights abuses: dragging North Korea into the family of nations, as we did with Maoist China and Communist Vietnam. …
[W]e should welcome North Korea’s economic integration with the rest of the world. For example, we should stop blocking Pyongyang’s entry into the Asian Development Bank and encourage visits to North Korea by overweight American bankers. In a country where much of the population is hungry, our most effective propaganda is our paunchiness. …
[W]e should continue feeding starving North Koreans, while also pushing for increased monitoring. The food is delivered through the U.N. World Food Program in sacks that say, in Korean as well as English, that the food is from America. Nobody has done more to bring about change in North Korea than the World Food Program, which now has 45 foreigners traveling around the country.

In other words, we should prop up the Kim regime by removing the political pressures caused by his oppressive policies. People starving en masse because Kim reroutes all of his resources to his military? No problem, Dear Leader: we’ll feed them instead, but we’ll mark the food Made in USA. Can’t find anyone to invest in your nationalized economy? We’ll guarantee the investments with government money so that our taxpayers foot the bill when you confiscate their assets. Gee, and we hope that in thirty years, you can have progressed in human rights — to the level of Viet Nam and China.
Nothing sums up the earnest but clueless liberal approach to foreign affairs better than that.
After watching how this approach worked in Africa (and Iraq) over the past forty years, where the West spent hundreds of billions in aid, one would presume that lessons had been learned by the liberals who ran the programs. All this does is make despots very rich while prolonging the starvation cycles that their own politics cause. The solution may involve aid and investment, but only as a fulcrum to force and follow political reform. Even Bob Geldof learned that, and it only took him twenty years to figure it out.
Kristof sells the Left short, I believe. Perhaps the Left has learned this lesson. They just don’t want to get North Korea to reform itself. The sheen of communism makes Kim, along with Castro in Cuba, something of a guiding light to their fringe. Addressing the desperate situation of the North Korean people requires them to acknowledge Kim’s oppression and brutality. They’d much rather protest the United States and George Bush; there’s less cognitive dissonance in it for them.

North Korea Returns To The Table

North Korea has agreed to return to the six-nation negotiations that George Bush insists on using to address the nuclear expansion of the Kim regime. After a year of alternately threatening and flirting with the West, Kim Jong-Il has apparently decided that his economic situation has degraded to the point where he needs to engage the US on its terms, rather than his:

The agreement to restart the talks was reached at a rare dinner meeting here between a senior U.S. envoy and his North Korean counterpart, held shortly before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived Saturday night for talks with Chinese officials on the North Korean issue.
During the meal, Kim Gye Gwan, the North Korean deputy foreign minister, told Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill that North Korea was willing to attend talks in Beijing the week of July 25, according to a senior U.S. official traveling with Rice. In what U.S. officials took as an encouraging sign, they reported that Kim said the purpose of the talks was the “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” and that North Korea intended to make progress at the negotiations.

Kim declared victory in the impasse between his despotic government and the US, claiming that North Korea had forced a “change in tone” from the United States. Bush did start calling the dictator Mr. Kim when referring to him, but neither he nor Condoleezza Rice ever retracted their characterization of North Korea as an “outpost of tyranny”, the phrase Kim found most objectionable. Despite Kim’s assertions, the likeliest proximate cause of his reversal was the suggestions that verifiable cooperation could result in significant amounts of aid — an unfortunate but probably necessary carrot to rid North Korea of its nuclear program.
Rice made sure that everyone understands that this represents just another step, and that real progress still has yet to be seen:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cautioned Sunday that
North Korea’s decision to resume nuclear disarmament talks does not mean the United States is any closer to its long-standing goal of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
“It’s only a start,” Rice said at a news conference. “It is the goal of the talks to have progress.”>/blockquote>
One reason to keep expectations low is that we have been here before. Kim may yet find another reason to pull out before the meetings, hyping whatever real or perceived diplomatic slight into a rationalization into an excuse to abandon the talks. Given his fragile grasp on food and cash, it’s less likely than before that he will renege, but it’s not inconceivable. Rice is smart to play it safe in setting a low threshold prior to the meetings. It also reminds the North Koreans that talks aren’t enough. We will insist on verifiable disarmament before we start giving any energy or financial assistance — a position we should have insisted on, and were insisting on, before Jimmy Carter jumped in front of Bill Clinton and screwed things up in the 1990s.

CU Escapes The Peter Principle

After generating months of controversy from his remarks about 9/11 victims being “little Eichmanns” to disputes over his alleged Native American heritage and claims that he falsified key parts of his curriculum vitae, Ward Churchill has embarrassed University of Colorado innumerable times. However, it hasn’t kept CU from giving Churchill a merit increase for his performance (via LGF):

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was awarded a 2.28 percent merit pay increase this week for work performed in 2004, a little less than his department’s average recommended salary increase for professors.
A statement released by CU said pay increases for Boulder campus faculty are approved by interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano and based on reviews and recommendations by committees at the department, school or college, and administrative levels.
Churchill’s increase was finalized Thursday. The average recommended increase for ethnic studies department faculty was 3.21 percent, according to the CU statement.
“In 2004, Professor Churchill taught a higher number of courses than required, received A’s and A-pluses on his student evaluations, completed numerous publications and served as administrative chair of the department,” the statement said.

Let me get this straight. An employee of CU currently under investigation for employment fraud, plagiarism, and fabrication still remains eligible for annual merit increases? In the private sector, one would have to wait for the end of the investigation before anyone would dare put that request through to Human Resources. Since CU runs on state money, that means that Colorado taxpayers not only continue to fund Churchill’s lunacies — but now they have to pay more for them as well.
Obviously tenure doesn’t explain the entire problem with Churchill’s continued employment in academia.
UPDATE: Okay, okay, University of Colorado. I got ya, Momo.

Will Famine Destabilize The Korean Peninsula?

Nicole Winfield reports in the Associated Press that the Kim regime has begun a mass relocation effort, driving millions of citydwellers to the countryside in what looks to be a desperate effort to fend off a catastrophic famine. Food-distribution NGOs report that despite the lack of significant weather or agricultural incidents, what little production Pyongyang gets out of its farms may drop so precipitously that millions may face starvation:

North Korea is sending millions of people from its cities to work on farms each weekend — another indication that the risk of famine is particularly high this year, a U.N. official said yesterday.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) is the only aid organization that has a presence outside the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and its officials have reported the movements of the North’s people from cities to farms, said Anthea Webb, spokeswoman for the Rome-based agency. …
The WFP recently launched a new appeal for food donations, saying the supplies that let it feed 6.5 million North Koreans were dwindling and forcing it to cut off aid to children and the elderly. That followed a WFP request to governments for 500,000 tons of food for North Korea this year.
Of the $202 million that the agency appealed for this year, it has received about $72 million — and practically all of it has been consumed, Miss Webb said.
“Unless something happens very soon, by the end of August, the only people we’ll be feeding are 12,000 children in hospitals,” she said.
She said a combination of factors was making 2005 particularly at risk for famine. Although the harvest was not any worse than expected this year, it is combined with declining WFP food aid, government reforms that have driven up prices and cuts in government rations, she said.

According to that description, it appears that the famine has been artificially induced, to an even greater extent than Stalinist agricultural systems naturally produce them. At a point in time where rumors have flown for months about the stability of the Kim regime, such an artifical result has to beg the question: is Kim deliberately touching off a famine?
What would Kim gain by doing so? First, he could use the impending catastrophe to squeeze more aid out of Western countries. Already, donor nations suspect that, like dictators before, Kim reroutes the aid to his military and political leadership while leaving the peasants to starve. Aid donations have tailed off significantly over the past year because of the lack of verification on their use, and that may be causing Kim some problems with his military.
Even more sinister, reports coming from Pyongyang noted that Kim faced unprecedented criticism in the streets of the capital, although it remained mostly anonymous. A series of incidents, including a massive explosion at a train station, has analysts wondering if Kim may be facing significantly organized opposition for the first time in his life. Emptying the cities may not have anything to do with a bad harvest or food shortages, but may be a defensive measure designed to keep his enemies from banding together to topple his regime.
If the famine is legitimate, it still means serious trouble for security in the Korean Peninsula region, as well as an obvious humanitarian disaster. Whether or not the North Koreans starve in the cities or in the countryside, famines cause irrational behavior on the part of the starving and the dictatorships that preside over it. In order to distract his people from their misery, Kim could decide to launch an attack on South Korea or on American or Japanese assets in the region, if events get desperate enough in North Korea.
What to do? Donating food and resources that only go to bolstering the regime are counterproductive in the extreme, but the Western world can’t sit back and let millions starve, either. Kim may be bluffing, but if so, he knows what stakes get the most results from the West. The best solution will be to insist on on-the-ground verification that increased aid will go to the millions that Kim has used as pawns, instead of blank checks that his army and Politburo will greedily cash.