Yes, of course, we're talking about Bush's foreign policy again. Just when you think you've reached the nadir of stupidity, something else comes down the pike:
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.
Yes, that's right, it turns out that (perhaps) North Korea's nuclear program has been overstated. Long story short, North Korea bought 20 centrifuges (necessary to make highly enriched uranium for a bomb, but also necessary to make moderately enriched uranium to power a normal electricity-generating nuclear reactor) from AQ Kahn (described in the article as a "rogue" Pakistani scientist - Kahn was about as rogue as Ollie North was). The US assumed that North Korea would take apart the centrifuges in order to learn how to make them, and then mass-produce a whole bunch (you normally produce highly enriched uranium by using hundreds of centrifuges; you could do it with only 20, but it would take a very, very long time). Now, it turns out, there was no actual evidence to back up the assumption that North Korea would mass-produce the centrifuges, and five years later that evidence still doesn't exist.
In other words, the US provoked the last five years of crisis by publicly accusing the North Koreans of something they weren't doing, pulling out of the "Agreed Framework" (the 1994 agreement that put inspectors in North Korea in return for oil), and then refusing to negotiate with them over something they weren't doing. This makes the North Korean response in 2001 (throw the inspectors out, open up the reactors, harvest the plutonium and make a bomb or six) more reasonable: the US wanted them to stop doing something they weren't doing, and wouldn't talk to them until they did. Then we invaded Saddam in order to stop him from doing something he wasn't doing. If I were the North Koreans, I'd build a bomb too.
Intelligence is wrong all the time. The track record of US intelligence in the last decade or so is pretty awful, and clearly something needs to be fixed (and the whole "Office of National Intelligence" they put in place a year or so ago isn't going to fix it). However, to make strong (and irrevokable) policy decisions (war in the case of Iraq, severing relations in the case of North Korea) on intelligence is really risky.
And this administration has driven us off a cliff.
Posted by baltar at March 1, 2007 08:28 AM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs | Politics