Bushco's "Hill" Of A Fix For One Of Its Own (updt.)

(The reason for this pic will be apparent later in the post.)

I thought this story of North Korea’s alleged involvement with the suspected Syrian nuclear reactor (gee, could I qualify this any more?) that the Israelis destroyed last September written by New York Times reporter David E. Sanger was really interesting.

I mean, the suspected reactor is now gone and the Syrians have built over it and refused to allow nuclear inspectors to visit the location, as the story tells us.

So what’s the point of releasing this information now alleging that North Korea may have been involved? Shouldn’t we be targeting them while they assist other states you could call questionable when it comes to nukes before the fact other than after?

As the story tells us…

The timing of the administration’s decision to declassify information about the Syrian project has raised widespread suspicions, especially in the State Department, that Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration hawks were hoping that releasing the information might undermine a potential deal with North Korea that would take it off an American list of state sponsors of terrorism.

“Making public the pictures is likely to inflame the North Koreans,” said one senior administration official who would not speak on the record because the White House and the State Department have declared there would be no public comment until the evidence is released. “And that’s just what opponents of this whole arrangement want, because they think the North Koreans will stalk off.”

But another senior official said it was possible that the revelations would force the North Koreans to describe their actions in Syria more fully when they issued a long delayed declaration of their nuclear activities.

Anyone who seriously believes that, after all this time, North Korea will respond to our coercion is truly delusional.

And the story tells us that the deal in question is one in which North Korea would tell us more about how much plutonium it has, which is what really matters when it comes to that backwards nation, something acknowledged by Christopher R. Hill, the person at State responsible for the deal. However…

Mr. Hill was put in charge of the talks more than three years ago in the hope of finding a new way to deal with the North Koreans. But support for him has wavered, and President Bush has repeatedly warned aides not to agree to anything that “makes me look weak,” according to former officials who sat in on meetings with him on North Korea.

At least Dubya didn’t tell Hill not to come up with an agreement that would make Dubya look stupid (or lazy), because that would be impossible. Further…

It is not clear what has changed, apart from the politics of the moment. Mr. Hill’s boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has not voiced strong support for Mr. Hill’s effort to coax the North Koreans along, granting them rewards for steps along the way to compliance with a deal that calls, ultimately, for the country to give up its weapons.

Ms. Rice has been a strong critic of the 1994 agreement between North Korea and the Clinton administration, complaining that it was “front loaded” with rewards for the North.

That is exactly what critics say she and Mr. Hill have done in the most recent agreement. But Mr. Hill has argued in private that the Syrian episode and the uranium enrichment are side shows, and that the critical issue is stopping North Korea from producing more plutonium and giving up what it has. But his State Department colleagues say that he has been told not to defend the deal, or even explain it.

This tells me that Hill’s deal may not be so hot after all (in which case Rice should have told Hill to “go back to the drawing board” – this story is another example of her ineffectiveness and/or incompetence and/or spinelessness for not standing up to Cheney, whose fingerprints are all over this…actually, if Rice truly had any fortitude, she would have bailed long ago over stuff like this), or, more likely, too much like what Clinton’s people came up with to be palatable to Bushco, as the story says.

However, it also shows that this administration has treated our State Department as a doormat once again, disregarding anything approximating diplomacy and subtlety for bluster and force (this mentality is all over the place in “State of Denial,” for example, with Rummy and the Pentagon rolling roughshod over State and Colin Powell/Richard Armitage at every opportunity).

So North Korea allegedly buys uranium enrichment equipment from Pakistan and provides this to the Syrians to help them build what appeared to be a reactor, which is eventually destroyed by the Israelis.

This is what happens when a president ignores diplomacy until his administration is almost three-quarters finished (even more dangerous since we're talking about nukes, of course).

In the Times story, one of Hill’s unnamed colleagues states that “he’s feeling pretty abandoned by Rice and Bush.” That goes for the rest of this country as well.

Update 1: I should have read this follow-up today from Sanger and added the following…

…inside the administration, the battle over whether to try to strike a deal with North Korea or keep it under sanctions in hopes of setting off the collapse of its government continues into the last months of Mr. Bush’s term. Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, expressed annoyance on Thursday that the administration waited seven months to brief Congress.

“I think many people believe that we were used today by the administration,” he said.

Yep, you know all about using people, don’t you, Pete? Also…

At the C.I.A., Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the agency’s director, told employees on Thursday that they should “take heart because our team effort on the Al Kibar reactor is a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection, and close collaboration.”

BUT YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! What the hell are you talking about??!! The Israelis were the ones who blew up the “reactor,” acting totally independent of our government as the story tells us (and though the story doesn't say so explicitly, they probably took the photos too).

Moreover, even some senior officials of the administration acknowledge that they are likely to leave Mr. Bush’s successor with a North Korea with roughly 10 nuclear weapons or fuel for weapons, up from the one or two weapons it had when Mr. Bush took office in 2001.

“I’d say the score is Kim Jong-il eight, and Bush zero,” said Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and author of “Nuclear Terrorism,” who was in Washington on Thursday to testify about Iran’s nuclear program. “And if you can build a reactor in Syria without being detected for eight years, how hard can it be to sell a little plutonium to Osama bin Laden?”

And the story today also tells us that “two senior intelligence officials” say there was “no sign that Syria had built an operation to convert the spent fuel from the plant into weapons-grade plutonium,” and “it would have been years before it could have produced weapons fuel.”

I’ll admit that that’s not an excuse to do nothing, but it IS an excuse to press for U.N. inspections at the very least (of course, that would have been the path to follow had the "reactor" not been destroyed).

Update 2: And I'm sure "no one could have predicted" this either.