The Marmot’s Hole

Generally, in times of crisis such as these, journalists at Your Major Media Outlet of Choice have a way of not only giving you a sense of what The Powers That Be are thinking but also giving you a hunch as to where things might head in the future. As you may know, for many inside the beltway folks, WAR IS REALLY COOL!

So, with that in mind, let’s take a little educated-guess annotated walk through a recent New York Times piece about all this mess. I won’t reproduce the whole thing, just the pertinent quotes.

North Korea is more than just another nation joining the nuclear club. It has never developed a weapons system it did not ultimately sell on the world market, and it has periodically threatened to sell its nuclear technology. So the end of ambiguity about its nuclear capacity foreshadows a very different era, in which the concern may not be where a nation’s warheads are aimed, but in whose hands its weapons and skill end up.

This ‘graph spooks me. The bit about “it has never developed a weapons system it did not ultimately sell on the world market, and it has periodically threatened to sell its nuclear technology” gives me a serious sense of foreboding..Not to mention,”in whose hands its weapons and skill end up.”

That, my friends, is the drum beat of war right there in front of you.

If things get a little, uh, hot in these parts, it will be that thinking that does it. The idea that it’s not so much that the DPRK has WMD, but that they would hand such weaponry over to a third party that would be justification for some sort of military involvement just a few miles of my current location.

As Democrats were quick to note on Monday, four weeks before a critical national election, President Bush and his aides never gave as much priority to countering a new era of proliferation as they did to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

This is, like, taunting the Bush Administration into action. Not only doe it use such in your face phrases as “before a critical national election,” it also rubs in the whole “told you so” aspect of the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

Notably, Mr. Bush did not repeat that threat on Monday morning. Instead, he drew a new red line, one that appeared to tacitly acknowledge the North’s possession of weapons. The United States would regard as a “grave threat,” he said, any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material to other countries or terrorist groups, and would hold Mr. Kim’s government “fully accountable for the consequences of such actions.”

To critics of Mr. Bush’s counterproliferation policy, this seemed a recognition that the North had successfully defied American, Chinese and Japanese warnings about building weapons and testing them, and was now simply trying to manage the aftermath. North Korea, it appears, is taking a page from Pakistan’s strategic playbook: it exploded its first nuclear device in 1998, endured three years of sanctions, and now has emerged as a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States.

These two graphs seem to be the crux of the confusion the Bush administration has about what to do. The first graph seems to be threatening, using the sentence: The United States would regard as a “grave threat,” he said, any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material to other countries or terrorist groups, and would hold Mr. Kim’s government “fully accountable for the consequences of such actions.”

What’s a “grave threat?” How do you react to it? It does stress, however, that it’s the idea of “any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material to other countries or terrorist groups” being a serious threat. That’s the fear, that’s what would put American bombs in the air and GI boots on the ground.

The second graph, however, seems to be something of a geopolitical shrug. “They got The Bomb. So what? So do a lot of other countries that shouldn’t be running with scissors.”

Mr. Bush’s aides say that if Mr. Kim believes he, too, can expect the world to impose a few sanctions and then lose interest in the issue, he is wrong. “He is really going to rue the day he made this decision,” Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said of Mr. Kim on Monday.

This seems like Mr. Hill knowing his Korean mentality - the only way to get results is to scare the crap out of them. That’s why, at least in my opinion, Clinton was at least moderately successful with the DPRK — he made them believe he was willing to actually go Dr. Strangelove and start a needless, foolish war. So the DPRK backed down. Bush is being way too American — if he wants results he has to rip off his shirt, open the gates of hell and stare the death of millions in the face. The DPRK will *probably* back down. That’s the only way to “fix” this problem without an actual war starting. We’d all get the beejeebas scared out of us in the process, but it would get the job done.

“Think about the consequences of having declared something ‘intolerable’ and, last week, ‘unacceptable,’ and then having North Korea defy the world’s sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese,” said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. “What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that’s it?”

This seems to even doubt to the idea that the only reason we would bother the DPRK would be if we could prove a transaction of a nuclear device had taken place. This seems to say that by definition, a DPRK with an A-bomb should be eliminated or removed as a threat.

That returns Mr. Bush to the problem he faced when he came to office, and that his aides have never stopped arguing about: whether the best way to contain North Korea is to further isolate it, or to draw it out of its paranoid shell. The nuclear test may force Washington to pick a strategy.

This last bit seems not just a declarative statement, it’s a command: “Pick a strategy, damn it.”