The smart boys at The Note say that the weekend will be dominated by North Korea. This is true, perhaps in large measure because of the Heisenberg Note Principle that operates on the herd of notso independent minds that cover "politics" in this nation. If The Note says it's news, it's news, up to an including the fact that Bush enjoyed his breakfast yesterday. (See yesterday's Note if you think I'm kidding.) One of the things I'd write a book on --if everybody got to write the books they wanted to and didn't have to worry about mortgages and such things-- is the ongoing epistemological conflict between journalists and intellectuals, specifically academic intellectuals. I've got a lot to say on the topic--which I'm not going to say here--except to point out that the worst insult you can offer a historian or political scientist behind his back is that he is "just a journalist." They say this at Harvard about the great Stanley Hoffmann, believe it or not. And the simplest way for an editor to kill a story is to claim that it's already "history," and so who gives a ****? Personally this drives me crazy for a million different reasons, but I keep pushing the stone up the hill anyway.

Today's stone is constituted from the sections of The Book on Bush that deal with George W. Bush's dealings with North Korea, which, quite clearly in this opinion, helped to inspire this unnecessary mess. None of it will be considered relevant by the Smart Boys on Sunday, and to be fair, it would not really count as "history" if this were my dissertation. But here it is, anyway, because, well, I run this little place. But first, one person upon whom I frequently rely for my understanding about the Koreas is Bruce Cumings.

Now here's me:

The tone of Powell's tenure was set early in the administration when he announced that he planned "to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off" in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The president not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung, thereby humiliating his honored guest as well. A day later, Powell backpedaled. "The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea," Powell said. "There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin--that is not the case." He later admitted to a group of journalists, "I got a little far forward on my skis." It would not be the last time.

As former ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at the moment of Bush's carelessly worded "Axis of Evil" address, "Besides putting another knife in the diminishing South Korean president," the speech would likely cause "dangerous escalatory consequences [including] . . . renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued export of missiles to the Mideast." North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes columnist Richard Cohen, was "a stumble, a fumble, an error compounded by a blooper. . . . As appalling a display of diplomacy as anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I."

Bush made a bad situation worse when, in a taped interview with Bob Woodward, he insisted, "I loathe Kim Jong Il!" waving his finger in the air. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people." Bush also said that he wanted to "topple him," and that he considered the leader to be a "pygmy." Woodward wrote that the president had become so emotional while speaking about Kim Jong Il that "I thought he might jump up." Given what a frightful tinderbox the Koreas have become, Bush's ratcheting up of the hostile rhetoric could hardly have come at a worse time. In December 2002 the North Koreans shocked most of the world by ordering the three IAEA inspectors to leave the country, shutting down 1 cameras monitoring the nuclear complex in Yongbyon and removing the IAEA seals in their nuclear facilities. The following month, Pyongyang announced it had withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted its small research reactor, and began removing spent nuclear fuel rods for likely reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. In October 2003, it announced that it had finished reprocessing spent fuel rods into plutonium and now possesses "nuclear deterrence"--another way of saying it has the bomb. No independent confirmation was available. Even including Iraq and Iran, the Korean peninsula is probably the single most dangerous and possibly unstable situation on Earth. As Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, observes, "If you wanted a case of imminent threat and danger, according to the principles enunciated in the National Security Strategy document, then North Korea is much more of a threat than Iraq ever was in the last few years."

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation "a no-brainer.") One suspects the president's decision was motivated by a combination of unreflective machismo and a desire to provide military planners with an excuse to build a missile-defense system. But in doing so, he displayed a disturbing lack of familiarity with the details of the negotiations he purposely sabotaged. "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he said at the time. But at the time, these "agreements" numbered just one: the 1994 "Agreed Framework," which froze North Korea's enormous plutonium-processing program-- one that was bigger, at the time, than those of Israel, India, and Pakistan combined--in exchange for economic aid. Bush aides were later forced to admit they could find no evidence to support the president's accusation. (A White House official tried to clear up the matter by explaining: "That's how the president speaks.")

No sensible military options exist to deal with the North Koreans when they promise "total war" in the event of a U.S. attack on their nuclear facilities. While the United States does have thirty-seven thousand troops stationed on the other end of the DMZ, the North Koreans have eleven thousand artillery guns, some possibly chemically tipped, within fifty miles of Seoul. In addition they have roughly thirty-seven hundred tanks and seven hundred Soviet-built fighter jets of uncertain vintage, but no doubt sturdy enough to make it to Seoul for devastating bombing missions. With about a million soldiers and another seven million reserves, North Korea has the fourth or fifth largest standing army on Earth. In a best-case scenario, with a surgical strike against the nuclear plant itself and no attendant radiation effects, thousands of U.S. troops and tens of thousands of South Korean troops would probably still be killed, and millions of refugees would be created. Clearly no responsible leader can willingly risk such a catastrophe. But choosing not to deal with the problem of North Korea presents the world with two profoundly worrying prospects. The first is that North Korea will make one of its bombs available to a party that would in fact like to use it--perhaps even al Qaeda. (U.S. weapons inspector David Kay claimed to discover a $10 million deal for just such a transfer between North Korea and Iraq, though the former kept the money and did not deliver the material, insisting that U.S. pressure made it impossible.) Second, a spiraling collapse of the regime could lead to a last-ditch attack on Seoul, with both conventional and nuclear weapons. As one U.S. official put it, toleration of a nuclear North Korea sends the same message to Iran that the invasion of Iraq sent to North Korea: "Get your nuclear weapons quickly, before the Americans do to you what they've done to Iraq, because North Korea shows once you get the weapons, you're immune."

Those who have long dealt with the Korean problem began, in mid-2003, to express alarm at the consequences of Bush's mishandling of it. "I think we are losing control," worried former secretary of defense William Perry. "The nuclear program now under way in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities." Only six months earlier Perry had been arguing in public that the problem was addressable, "if we did the right things." Now, however, he worried that "time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous." His 1 The administration describes its current policy toward North Korea as one of "tailored containment," which a senior administration official explains to mean: "It is a lot about putting political stress and putting economic stress. It also requires maximum multinational cooperation." The Bush plan seems to be to persuade several key Asian countries that now provide cash and assistance to Pyongyang to turn off the taps and stand by as its people starve and the nation--with its nukes--implodes. But those upon whose cooperation the policy rests appear to have little inclination to support the plan. South Korea's population, like that of most of the world, has grown increasingly distrustful of the Bush administration's behavior and is far less eager to follow the U.S. lead. Its current president, Roh Moo Hyun, won his office by following the German pattern, with a campaign that stressed his independence from the United States and its martial declarations. The Chinese remain by far the North Koreans' most important trading partner, supplying for instance 70 percent of its crude oil needs and much of its foodstuffs. Its leadership has shown no interest in doing Bush's bidding or participating in a strategy that appears designed to create political change through mass starvation. And the last thing Japan wants to see is the collapse of the regime, thereby finding itself facing a nuclear-armed, unified Korea on its borders.

The obvious solution--both to the strategic problem and to the humanitarian crisis--is clearly some sort of negotiated buyout, along the lines that the Clinton administration began, but fumbled. Under the terms of that deal, North Korea was to freeze and eventually eliminate its nuclear program while the United States spearheaded an international effort to provide fuel and light-water (non-weapons-producing) nuclear reactors. The Clinton administration also tried to negotiate an accord whereby the North would have forfeited its long-range missiles and terminated all missile exports. But hopes of concluding the deal--which would have required a presidential trip to Pongyang--collapsed when Clinton decided in the final weeks of his administration to table the trip in favor of trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a Middle East peace deal.

Perhaps because such talks were associated with his predecessor, and no doubt because he wished to keep the focus on Iraq, Bush refused to carry out this plan and instead sought to play down the sense of crisis. "It's a diplomatic issue, not a military issue," he insisted in early 2003. When Bush advised Americans to "learn the lessons of the Korean peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq," he appeared to be arguing that the United States should have invaded those nations as well, when it still had the chance. "But as Bush sets it out," Michael Kinsley notes, "the 'lesson' of Korea seems to be that if you don't go to war soon enough, you might have a problem years later that can be solved through regional discussions. That doesn't sound so terrible, frankly."
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*One of the many manifestations of this journalists/intellectuals warfare is that the Times almost always gives significant intellectuals much crappier obits than they deserve. Judging by obituary attention, for instance, Wendy Wasserstein was, approximately a million times more important to the fate of humankind than Edward Said. My obsession with this topic was piqued by the new biography of Richard Hofstadter--for which we are waiting Eric R's review--that noted that Hofstadter got such a crappy obit that Lionel Trilling was moved to write in and complain. Sean Wilentz, writing in TNR, explains: "The New York Times' strange and grudgingly respectful obituary for Hofstadter elicited a strong rebuttal from Lionel Trilling, one of what can only be a handful of published letters to the editor ever to complain about a death notice. Far from the nondescript, methodical academic whom the Times described, Trilling said, Hofstadter was 'one of the most clearly defined persons I have ever known ... an enchanting companion, almost memorably funny," who also "was notable for his openness not alone to ideas but also to people of all kinds.'"