Korea, the Success

I see that George Bush is again trying to convince us to support his Iraq adventure by drawing on the Korean model. Matt Yglesias comments on the absurdity of that analogy for Iraq, but something else strikes me. Especially considering the Bush Administration's, and the neocons in general, insistence that we avoid the horrid failure of Viet Nam. The thing that strikes me is that Viet Nam is actually doing fairly well at this point, 30 years after the end of the war and while South Korea is doing very well, the North not so much. Furthermore, North Korea is on everyone's list of dangerous states what with the supporting terrorism, the isolation, the horrid state of the Korean population and the nuclear program (well now the having a nuclear bomb, thanks George). Viet Nam, on the other hand is no where near the top of anyone's list of dangerous countries. In fact it is developing fairly well to a more open society. It is certainly developing into a fairly market oriented society and one that is friendly to the west. While it is clear that much more good things are happening in Korea (the South anyway) Viet Nam can claim to have much less bad stuff going on than in Korea (the North anyway). My point is only that it is not clear to me that Viet Nam constitutes some horrible failure and Korea some fantastic success.

North Korea and Uranium

This is a bit old, but it is one of the more significant failures of this administration. The evidence is mounting that the North Korean program to enrich Uranium is, and has been, much smaller and much less advanced than the Bush Administration, or Republicans in Congress prior to 2001 have been claiming. This is important because it is yet another example of what seems to me to be the most striking characteristic of Republican and conservative positions on foreign policy and national security. Namely, wherever the major threats are that face this nation, Republicans are somewhere else. For years now, the one large danger for American security in and around Korea, has been the possibility of North Korea getting a nuclear weapon. By far and away the greatest danger of that was that the North Koreans would collect the plutonium from spent fuel rods from their graphite moderated nuclear reactors and build a bomb from that. In 1994 Clinton established the Agreed Framework with the North Koreans precisely to keep the North Korean plutonium locked up. It worked well. The Republicans, however, were outraged because the agreement left open the option for the North Koreans to develop means of enriching uranium. Now, uranium enrichment is much more difficult, takes much longer and requires much more space and so is far less of a danger than plutonium enrichment. The Republicans just knew, however, that the North was now well on its way to getting a uranium bomb and had run circles around Bill Clinton. So since 1994 the Republicans have been trying to do in the Agreed Framework to save us from the dreaded North Korean uranium program. Well, the succeded and with the Agreed Framework dead before George Bush's first term was over, the North processed the spent fuel rods (remember with the plutonium, that were locked up under the Agreed Framework that the Republicans had killed) put together and exploded a plutonium bomb. Now we learn that the dreaded North Korean uranium program that the Republicans were so concerned to protect us from, was never much of a threat. That is conservative, Republican national security in a nutshell.

No NK Uranium

This is staggering. This has to be one of the all time most idiotic foreign policy blunders in US history. More than that it is a clear demonstration of the almost total failure of conservatives' ability to handle foreign policy and national security. Conservatives have for more than a decade been beside themselves over the threat from North Korea. North Korea, they have been insisting, is well on their way to develop nuclear weapons which will then make them a massive threat to the US. Now, no one doubted that North Korea was interested in making nuclear bombs and were making efforts to acquire them. However, anyone with any sense was aware that the NK plutonium program was the major threat and that the Uranium program, even if the most grave estimates of the NK Uranium program were correct, was not as great a danger. Under this belief the Clinton administration pursued a foreign policy course which shut the NK plutonium program down, but doing nothing about the plutonium program. This has had conservatives in a lather, Clinton had betrayed the US by failing to take decisive action against the Uranium program. Since then the Bush administration, to save us from the NK Uranium program, totally abandoned the Clinton policy. The only effect so far is that the NK plutonium program has gotten underway again and they have in fact built several bombs. Now we learn that the Uranium program that the Bush administration was so intent on saving us from, didn't exist in the first place.

No try and understand this. Conservatives were deeply concerned by the threat of NK nukes. So they destroyed the US policies that were preventing NK from getting nukes by the only route open to them in order to defend us from NK getting nukes by a means that they couldn't have used anyway. This is so absolutely typical of conservative foreign policy. Defend from threats that don't exist and ignore those that do.

See also Josh Marshall on this

North Korea

This post is just for archiving a reference to this older Fred Kaplan piece about North Korea. Definitely worth a read.