by hilzoy
North Korea has agreed, in principle, to give up its nuclear program:
"The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in nuclear negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which Pyongyang promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Foreign powers said they would provide aid, diplomatic assurances and security guarantees and consider North Korea's demands for a light-water nuclear reactor.The agreement is a preliminary one that would require future rounds of negotiations to flesh out, as it does not address a number of issues, like timing and implementation, that are likely to prove highly contentious. China announced that the six nations participating in the talks would reconvene in November to continue ironing out the details."
However, North Korea has just demanded a light-water reactor in exchange for a deal.
As far as I can tell, if this agreement works out (which seems to be a big 'if'), it would mean that after five years of stalemate, during which North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons, we are going to return to something a lot like the agreed framework. I rather liked the agreed framework, not because I thought it was a magic solution that would enforce itself, but because it was the least dreadful of a set of bad alternatives. I just wish we hadn't taken that little detour during which North Korea became a nuclear power.
Things are bad in Iraq:
"Over 17 days this month, guerrillas across Iraq killed at least 116 Iraqi forces and 346 Iraqi civilians in drive-by shootings, bombings and other violence, according to Iraqi officials.And in the west, Zarqawi's foreign and Iraqi fighters this month raised the black banners of al Qaeda in Iraq in the border city of Qaim, one of many areas in the region where Iraqi government forces have feared to take up positions or moved out. Al Qaeda fighters recently carried out public executions of men suspected of supporting U.S. forces or the Iraqi government.
"Whoever is protected by Americans is in our sight and in the range of our fire," Zarqawi's group declared in statements posted Thursday in Anbar province's capital of Ramadi, which along with nearby Fallujah is a major stronghold of the estimated 30,000 U.S. forces in the western province. The statement appeared hours after al Qaeda rocket and mortar strikes on U.S. military installations in Ramadi killed one Marine.
The same morning, scores of al Qaeda fighters streamed into the streets of Ramadi, taking up positions with new automatic weapons. Witnesses said one group of insurgents proudly displayed a new rocket launcher that put U.S. armored vehicles in the glowing red beam of its targeting laser."
Meanwhile (via Atrios), a billion dollars seems to have mysteriously vanished from the Iraqi Defense Department procurement budget, and (via Billmon) Inside the Pentagon reports that "A growing number of U.S. military officers in Iraq and those who have returned from the region are voicing concern that the nascent Iraqi army will fall apart if American forces are drawn down in the foreseeable future." And then (via TAPPED) there's this:
"Hundreds of Saudi fighters who joined the insurgency in Iraq showed few signs of militancy before the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, according to a detailed study based on Saudi intelligence reports. (...)The study by Middle East analyst Anthony Cordesman and Saudi security adviser Nawaf Obaid may offer further fuel to critics who say that instead of weakening al Qaeda, the 2003 invasion of Iraq brought fresh recruits to Osama bin Laden's network.
It said Saudi Arabia had interrogated dozens of Saudi militants who either returned from Iraq or were caught at the border. "One important point was the number who insisted that they were not militants before the Iraq war," it said. "The vast majority of Saudi militants who entered Iraq were not terrorist sympathizers before the war, and were radicalized almost exclusively by the coalition invasion," the study said.
Backing up their claim, 85 percent of those interrogated were not on any watch list of known militants, the study said. Most came from the west, south or center of Saudi Arabia, often from middle class families of prominent conservative tribes. Many were well-educated and had jobs and all of them were Sunni Muslims, the study said. Majority Sunnis in Saudi Arabia are troubled by the emergency of Iraq's Shi'ite majority."
More al Qaeda fighters: just what we needed. Especially in light of this new report:
"Meanwhile, a United Nations panel of experts issued a report Monday saying there is no shortage of recruits for terrorism worldwide and that Iraq has provided new training ground for them, replacing al Qaeda bases lost in Afghanistan."Al Qaeda has managed to recover from the loss of Afghanistan as a training base for terrorism by exploiting the situation in Iraq," the report said. The report was the third by an expert panel set up by the U.N. Security Council to monitor al Qaeda, the Taliban and their associates.
Recruits travel to Iraq from many parts of the world, "acquire skills in urban warfare, bomb-making, assassination and suicide attacks," and return to integrate with local fighters in their home countries, the report said."
We live in interesting times.
But we're winning, right?
Posted by: DaveL | September 19, 2005 at 10:45 PM
I applaud North Korea's decision to (finally) give up its nuclear program. Now, when is the US going to do the same? (Not to mention Britain, France, Pakistan, India, China, Russia, the Ukraine, Israel, and so on)?
Posted by: Dianne | September 20, 2005 at 08:07 AM
Why on earth would we do that, Dianne? Given that the technology exists and continues to exist, and that we can't go backwards in time and erase that knowledge from the human sphere of scientific discovery (yet ;) ), then the better-behaved Western powers maintaining nuclear arsenals as a deterrent, if nothing else, is not only sensible, but imperative. Would you rather a world in which all those countries dumped their nukes, but crazy dictators and other potential troublemakers continue to pursue making new ones or stealing existing ones? I wouldn't.
The "No Nukes" world is a fantasy. That ship sailed half a century ago.
Posted by: Phil | September 20, 2005 at 08:23 AM
Well, apparently, deal's off for NK.
This is George Washington University's National Security Archive and these two 'electronic briefing books' have lots of interesting declassified documents
from Bush I and Clinton
North Korea and Nuclear Weapons
From the latter, this caught my eye
Other documents shed light on the internal policy deliberations and debates that have marked prior administrations' efforts to address the threat posed by the North Korean nuclear program. An excerpt from an interview with Charles W. Freeman, a long-time State Department China hand who was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing during the Reagan years, centers on Freeman's recollections about a still-born step toward opening direct talks with North Korea that might have emerged from a surprising Chinese offer during the first Reagan administration to broker such discussions. This initiative was effectively killed, according to Freeman, by the determined opposition of Paul Wolfowitz, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Freeman speculates that Wolfowitz's hostility to the initiative was rooted in part in the latter's ideological suspicion of any Chinese initiative and his concerns over adverse reactions from the Republican right-wing to such talks (see pp. 430-431 of the excerpt). Wolfowitz's reputed role as the intellectual driving-force behind the hard-line positions taken by the Defense Department on Iraq, North Korea and other members of the "Axis of Evil" suggests that long-standing debates continue to be waged in the current administration.
To regular readers of ObWi, these two EBB might be of interest
The Interrogation Documents
and
Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past
tons of other stuff
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 09:00 AM
Phil: I'm not really expecting Shrub to give up any missles or reduce the number of weapons he has available, mostly for purely Freudian reasons. Consider it from the point of view of the leader, dictator or otherwise, of a small, poor country, though. The US can dominate you militarily, economically, and socially. It can wipe your country off the face of the earth simply because its leader wants to make a political point. You can not develop nukes and remain vunerable or develop nukes and have a mild deterrent. Which would you do? Now, suppose you decide to develop nukes. The US, a country which maintains over half of the nuclear arms in the world, lectures you on the evils of going nuclear. Might you not feel that the US's position was just slightly hypocritical?
Posted by: Dianne | September 20, 2005 at 10:33 AM
Dianne, I'm not going to speculate about George Bush's penis issues or other Freudian whatevers. If you feel comfortable doing so, knock yourself out. It's an irrelevant distraction.
The point is that even if we got rid of our entire nuclear arsenal tomorrow, those that mean to do us -- or others -- harm will continue to pursue developing or acquiring them. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Given that fact, does it make sense to discard our own deterrents? Of course not.
As to hypocrisy, well, no, I don't think it's hypocritical at all to say that stable Western countries, or other democracies, can probably handle their nuclear arsenals responsibly while overambitious dictators or non-state actors cannot. It has nothing to do with "the evils of going nuclear"; it has to do with whether that party can be trusted to handle them. And I doubt that the US is alone in its assessment of whether NK or Iran should have nuclear bombs; in fact, I know it is not alone. None of the other current nuclear powers want them having them either. So this has little to do with Evil US H-Bomb Hegemony or somesuch.
Posted by: Phil | September 20, 2005 at 10:47 AM
Dianne, the United States maintains well-defined command and control sytems for its nuclear weapons. We have every right to be concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of nations governed by paranoid dictators or religious fanatics. It may be hypocritical for us to say "nukes for me but not for thee", but welcome to the real world.
LJ, your first link ("deal's off") also goes to the National Security Archive homepage. According to the NYT and CNN, it appears the deal is still on - or at least not dead. Did you have something indicating otherwise?
Posted by: ThirdGorchBro | September 20, 2005 at 10:56 AM
Oops, Phil already responded. Me shut up now.
Posted by: ThirdGorchBro | September 20, 2005 at 10:59 AM
Phil: I didn't mean that I thought that NKorea would be as responsible with a nuke as the US (which isn't itself very responsible, given some of the history...but there it is). Bush's psychological issues aside--and I must agree that they are probably secondary, although I think "irrelevant" is a little strong given his actions in Iraq--it is harder for the leader of a democracy to go nuclear one morning because he/she feels like it than it is for a dictator to do the same. So, yeah, nukes in the US are probably marginally safer than nukes in NKorea or even Pakistan or some of the less stable ex-Soviet countries.
Nonetheless, if I were the leader, elected or dictatorial, of a small and relatively powerless country, I'd probably look at what's happening in Iraq and want something to prevent Bush (or Clinton, or Chirac, or whomever) from invading one day at apparent random. And nukes seem to be one of the few effective deterrants to that. And if I were in that situation, having the leader of the only country to ever drop nukes on a city would sound pretty hypocritical to me. After all, if you don't feel comfortable giving up nukes, even living in a very large and powerful country with a large military and many non-nuclear options for deterring attack, how much moreso might someone in a small country with few resources and virtually no way to repel an invasion feel about it?
Posted by: Dianne | September 20, 2005 at 11:42 AM
"So, yeah, nukes in the US are probably marginally safer than nukes in NKorea or even Pakistan or some of the less stable ex-Soviet countries."
Ya think?
"Nonetheless, if I were the leader, elected or dictatorial, of a small and relatively powerless country, I'd probably look at what's happening in Iraq and want something to prevent Bush (or Clinton, or Chirac, or whomever) from invading one day at apparent random."
Surely, and obviously. This doesn't actually suggest that it's either a good thing Kim Il Sung, or one or another Supreme Leaders has the bomb.
I'd be worried as hell if I were a Third World leader, about the bomb. That doesn't mean I'd use it wisely, or that other folks shouldn't worry about my potential use.
Posted by: Gary Farber | September 20, 2005 at 12:01 PM
"So, yeah, nukes in the US are probably marginally safer than nukes in NKorea or even Pakistan or some of the less stable ex-Soviet countries."
I forgot to mention that there are actual objective differences in safeguards, so far as we know.
This is, like, incredibly important.
Posted by: Gary Farber | September 20, 2005 at 12:02 PM
So now that I'm home from work I see what liberal japonicus was talking about - North Korea now says that it will not dismantle its nuclear weapons program until after the US supplies light water reactors, which is contrary to the agreement made yesterday. But this may just be continued bargaining rather than an outright rejection.
We can hope, at least.
Posted by: ThirdGorchBro | September 20, 2005 at 06:46 PM
Oh, I just now saw hilzoy had already put this news in the post. Color me chagrined (it's kind of a pinkish muave, if you must know).
Posted by: ThirdGorchBro | September 20, 2005 at 06:49 PM
Sorry about the screwed up link, y'all. Get all excited about breaking news and that's what you get. The link I had was the US refusal to the NK demand.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 06:55 PM
LJ, that link is from a couple of days ago. Last I heard, the US had agreed to "consider" providing a light water reactor after North Korea dropped its program, but now NK is demanding it as a precondition.
Posted by: ThirdGorchBro | September 20, 2005 at 07:03 PM
Surely, and obviously. This doesn't actually suggest that it's either a good thing Kim Il Sung, or one or another Supreme Leaders has the bomb.
I don't think anyone here is seriously suggesting that it is. Just pointing out that all of this counterproliferation diplomacy essentially boils down to giving another country a better alternative to having nukes--and that alternative needs to be better from their point of view.
We simply have neither the manpower nor the national will to force North Korea or Iran or almost any other country to give up nukes. We just don't--ending nuclear proliferation at the barrel of a gun is a complete non-option. So if that's lurking somewhere in anyone's mind, forget about it, it's not going to happen.
Sanctions? They have proven to be, shall we say, a less than effective solution, at least with North Korea. In fact, we really don't have much in the way of disincentives with which to threaten a would-be nuclear power at all.
What does that leave us with? Aside from impotent tut-tutting and saber-rattling in public, we can attempt to exert our influence with neighboring countries, some of which might find a more receptive ear in our target country. This requires various kinds of soft power, power which is are getting pretty thin these days.
Or, we can offer incentives and positive alternatives. This is frequently derided as "appeasement", or characterized as "nuclear blackmail". Depending on how you want to frame it, either might even be right. But they're considerably more available and effective than our other options.
So when Dianne, or someone else, points out that these countries have very good reasons of their own to want nukes, and that sanctimonious chiding from the US about nuclear proliferation comes off as a double standard, you might want to listen. These are factors we have to overcome if we want to discourage North Korea or anyone else from getting nukes--because when they say that they've got them and implicitly ask what we think we can do about it, the only honest answer is "not much".
Posted by: Catsy | September 20, 2005 at 07:22 PM
Whoops, thanx for that. I'm more mauve than you, now.
It's apparent (at least to me), that we have to 'buy off' NK. This was the underlying realization of the Agreed Framework and it is precisely what this admin has rejected. Mike Chinoy, on CNN, had a special on NK and noted that market 'reforms' had the effect of visibly improving life in the capital, so the notion that by refusing to pay the price, somehow, NK is going to collapse upon itself is extreme folly. Neither China nor the South are going to allow that to happen. In fact, I don't think the South wants any part of the North, not only thinking about the short term chaos, but the long term repercussions, as can be seen by the parallel situation in Germany and the most recent German election. I believe that even if South Korea could wave a magic wand and solve all of the short term problems of reunification, they would not accept the bargain if it meant that they had to look at a situation where the government is totally split. (on a side note of far fetched speculation, I believe that Koizumi's landslide here in Japan is due to Katrina. I think he would have won, but the landslide came when Japanese equated the ramifications of political change with an inability to handle large scale disasters)
Furthermore, the NKoreans can easily present this to their followers as the US trying to create a situation where they can cut off power to the North. One should also note that Japan is also against providing anything for NK not because of the logic of the situation, but to firm up their base, as the kidnapping cases still a consistent source of outrage here.
The key to all this is the Chinese, but they basically benefit when things are unsettled, so they have an incentive to push NK only so far and no more.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | September 20, 2005 at 07:34 PM
How hard would it be for us to give North Korea a light-water nuclear reactor that just happens to destroy itself in an unfortunate mishap shortly after it goes on-line?
Accidents will happen, you know.
Posted by: GaijinBiker | September 21, 2005 at 12:20 PM