American Jackass: John Bolton and the OPWC

Bernard at Moon of Alabama has a most timely and interesting post on the fate of Jose Bustani, the Brazilian diplomat who ran the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , recently awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.

Bernard relates how Bustani was subjected to the unwelcome attentions of John Bolton, the abusive ass in charge of bending international institutions to the will of the neocons in the runup to the Iraq war, when Iraq and Libya sought to remove a US casus belli pretext by acceding to the chemical weapons regime.

The Bush administration was determined to block any efforts by Iraq to reduce its peril by engaging with the international community on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and forced Bustani from his post in 2002.  The injustice of this action was confirmed by an ILO judgment that awarded Bustani wages for the uncompleted years of his term.

I did not know that.  I was aware of Bolton’s unsuccessful efforts to purge ElBaradei from the IAEA, but not the issue of Bustani and the OPCW.  Thanks again to Bernard for shining a light on this dismal episode in American unilateralism.

By coincidence, today the Guardian gave Bolton space on its Comment is Free page to tout his alternative to multilateral engagement through international institutions for dealing with Iran: a military attack.  I would like to think we’ve learned enough to ignore John Bolton, but apparently that’s not the case.

Waiting for Godot...Or This Year’s Big Lie

Further Parsing the North Korean Nuclear Weapons in Syria Allegations

Judging from a couple of items by Syria Comment, China Matters is entitled to a little preening.

Concerning the target of the September 6 Israeli raid on Syria, I wrote yesterday:

If I was going to come up with a plausible contrarian scenario for this whole enigma, I would say:

There are North Koreans in Syria and possibly a bunch of them got killed when Israel bombed a facility where they were working.

The facility could have been some Syrian nuclear facility or a hidey-hole for undeclared North Korean nuclear equipment (unlikely); a factory assembling illegally imported North Korean SCUDs (maybe); or a facility where the Norks were providing unsavory but possibly legal assistance to the Syrians in upgrading their home-made SCUDs (more likely).


Per Syria Comment, Raw Story reports:

Israel did not strike a nuclear weapons facility in Syria on Sept. 6, instead striking a cache of North Korean missiles, current and former intelligence officials say.

American intelligence sources familiar with key events leading up to the Israeli air raid tell RAW STORY that what the Syrians actually had were North Korean No-Dong missiles, possibly located at a site in either the city of Musalmiya in the northern part of Syria or further south around the city of Hama.

While reports have alleged the US provided intelligence to Israel or that Israel shared their intelligence with the US, sources interviewed for this article believe that neither is accurate.

By most accounts of intelligence officials, both former and current, Israel and the US both were well aware of the activities of North Korea and Syria and their attempts to chemically weaponize the No-Dong missile. It therefore remains unclear why an intricate story involving evidence of a Syrian nuclear weapons program and/or enriched uranium was put out to press organizations.

Concerning the absence of official confirmation of the raid’s details and the intensifying campaign of leaks, I wrote:

It’s not credible that the U.S. government would sit on a genuine case of North Korean nuclear trafficking with Syria and let the story dribble out through anonymous sources just to keep the Six Party talks lurching along and give Chris Hill something to do.

Maybe there’s a hardliner plan to leak their story in so much detail that Washington and Tel Aviv’s credibility are put on the line, and the Bush administration will see no alternative except to succumb to the temptation to give this story some official legs—spurious or otherwise.

Syria Comment passes on the text of a John Bolton editorial in the Wall Street Journal, demanding that President Bush get behind the North Korean nukes in Syria story...or else!:

President Bush stands at a dispositive point regarding his personal legacy on North Korea. Until now, one could say with a straight face, if not entirely accurately, that implementing the Feb. 13 agreement was the State Department's responsibility. No longer. The Israeli strike and the possible Syrian-North Korean nuclear cooperation associated with it have presidential consequences. Further concessions to the North can now be laid only at the White House door, just as only the president can bring a tougher, more realistic attitude to the issue. That would be a real legacy.

And...

From China Matters:

Maybe the remarkable official silence on the attack reflects a struggle in Washington as to whether to move on—or exploit the circumstances and ambiguity surrounding the raid in the most inflammatory way possible.


From Raw Story:

Some believe that the Office of the Vice President is continuing to battle any attempts at diplomacy made by the US State Department in an effort to ensure no alternative but a military solution to destabilize and strike Iran, using Syria's alleged nuclear weapons program and close relations with Iran as a possible pretext.

So Well Done! China Matters! Prizes for everyone!

But seriously, a few more observations:

First, the cautious disclaimer: As Freud observed, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes apparently futile, suicidal cooperation in nuclear weaponry between cadet and full-fledged members of the Axis of Evil is just that.

Second, there seems to be a credible basis for the no nukes story, as the Raw Story report indicates. Some knowledgeable people are pushing back against the nuclear story.

As for the report that the North Korean missiles were “possibly located at a site in either the city of Musalmiya in the northern part of Syria or further south around the city of Hama”, that either means that the blabbers are intelligence officials no longer serving (and therefore lacking access to the satellite imagery that would indicate pretty conclusively which Syrian city is proud possessor of a brand new, smoking hole in the ground courtesy of the Israeli air force) or this geographic vagueness is an attempt to disguise the fact that serving officials are dishing to the media.

Third, Raw Story is a bona fide news organization, but it’s nowhere near top drawer (sorry). Maybe talking to Raw Story is a shot across the bow to the hardliners, a warning that the no-nukes story will get fed to the Washington Post and New York Times if the nuclear nonsense continues.

Fourth, if the nuclear story is untrue then somebody is (gulp) lying. The nuclear story, with its tale of Israeli commandoes, seized nuclear material, and anxious conferences between Washington and Tel Aviv is too categorical and detailed to be treated as the result of incomplete information and inference. If the nuke story is nothing more than The Big Lie, it’s a pretty bold move.

So far John Bolton doesn’t seem to be sure of independent corroboration for the nuke story.

But the important point here is that the truth is unimportant.

The only question is, will the Bush administration run with the story or not.

John Bolton wants an official endorsement of the story, regardless of whether it's true or false, by the Bush administration, so that the credibility and prestige of the United States are irrevocably invested in the nuke story, standards of evidence evaporate, and the only question is, are you with us or against us.

So what we’re really holding our breath for here is that Waiting for Godot moment.

Will President Bush follow Vice President Cheney’s lead and decide to push the Bolton line, in which case the principled moderates in the State Department will simply roll over again, suck it up, and grimly push the nuclear story even if it’s false?

Or will the President decide to let the nuclear story peter out unconfirmed?

And ratchet down tension in the Middle East just as he’s trying to foment an Iran-centered crisis?

And expose himself and his support from his remaining knuckledragger base to an escalating barrage of leaks and accusations--orchestrated by hardliners outside of his administration and beyond his control--that he wussed out on a North Korean nuclear provocation in the Middle East?

Hmmm. Don’t like the direction this thought experiment is heading.

My original post is here.

Nuclear Red Herring

Update, September 16, 2007

I was hoping the North Korean nukes in Syria story was an opportunistic bit of Boltonian nonsense that would be put to rest with a bit of State Department pushback.

I found the subsequent statement from the State Department’s Andrew Semmel—who is apparently a non-doctrinaire arms control professional— to be reassuring unremarkable and the epitome of mush-mouthed Foggy Bottom ambiguity:

Andrew Semmel, acting deputy assistant secretary of state for nuclear nonproliferation policy, did not identify the suppliers, but said North Koreans were in the country and that he could not exclude that the network run by the disgraced Pakistan nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan may have been involved.

He said it was not known if the contacts had produced any results. "Whether anything transpired remains to be seen," he said.

Semmel, who is in Italy for a meeting Saturday on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, said Syria was certainly on the U.S. "watch list."

"There are indicators that they do have something going on there," he said. "We do know that there are a number of foreign technicians that have been in Syria. We do know that there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment. Whether anything transpired remains to be seen."

"So good foreign policy, good national security policy, would suggest that we pay very close attention to that," he said. "We're watching very closely. Obviously, the Israelis were watching very closely."

Asked if the suppliers could have been North Koreans, he said: "There are North Korean people there. There's no question about that. Just as there are a lot of North Koreans in Iraq and Iran."

Asked if the so-called Khan network, which supplied nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, could have been involved, he said he "wouldn't exclude" it.

I was rather nonplussed and somewhat disturbed at the alacrity with which major media outlets were willing to run with this apparently low-key waffling as confirmation of dramatically heightened U.S. concern about Syrian nuclear programs.

And don’t ask me what he was communicating about Iraq.

I still think the story’s nonsense, but I wonder if State has lost the ability or desire to push back and instead is anxiously coasting along on the anti-Syrian wave, hoping against hope it will have an opportunity to jump off before the crash.

Especially if the State Department has given up on trying to defend diplomacy and multi-lateralism in the Middle East.

This account from the Telegraph gave me pause.

I also found it eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war, where the earliest full-throated expression of neo-con intentions for the Middle East was found in the Telegraph and the London Times, and became a template for domestic U.S. coverage:

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action [against Iran].
...

Miss Rice's bottom line is that if the administration is to go to war again it must build the case over a period of months and win sufficient support on Capitol Hill.

The Sunday Telegraph has been told that Mr Bush has privately promised her that he would consult "meaningfully" with Congressional leaders of both parties before any military action against Iran on the understanding that Miss Rice would resign if this did not happen.

The nugget that long-suffering Condoleezza Rice will put up with another catastrophic war with the Middle East only if President Bush is able to “meaningfully” logroll the sheep in Congress is so snarkworthy, I don’t know whether to take it as a telling detail or a ludicrous joke.

So maybe the Syria nuke story is somehow part of the Iran war product that’s being rolled out, and State is going along.

Maybe it’s because Iran’s own nuclear program isn’t going to achieve weaponization for at least two years, and it would be rather peculiar for the U.S. to mount an attack against Iran before President Bush leaves office “because he doesn’t trust the incoming administration to do the right thing”.

So if there’s going to be an existential threat/casus belli/nuclear thing that justifies a high risk attack against Iran in the next 12 months, the nukes have to come from somewhere.

And that only leaves the North Koreans and A.Q. Khan, maybe via Syria...to kill three birds (Kim, Assad, and Ahmadinejad) with one stone.

Heck, maybe four. If John Bolton feels emboldened to run the table, he’ll probably allege that North Korea gave the nukes to Iraq, which hid them in Syria, who tried to sneak them to Iran.

Halleleujah!

We’ll soon see if American media and politics is ready to follow the implausible nuclear script again, and acquiesce to another Middle East war.
CH

Below is the original post from Sept. 13:

Middle East security is far off the China Matters beat, but we have delved into Boltonian rhetoric on North Korea in some detail, as well as documenting the continued unwillingness of foreign policy hardliners to acquiesce to moderate control over North Korea policy and denuclearization process under the Six Party Agreement.

So I feel I can add a comment on the accusations made by John Bolton of North Korean—Syrian cooperation in some kind of nuclear program in the Wall Street Journal, and an article by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post linking these allegations to a highly provocative attack by Israeli jets against an as-yet unidentified target in Syria.

Josh Landis’s excellent expert blog, Syria Comment, was the first to link the attack on Syria with John Bolton’s WSJ op-ed, and is the first resource for this story, providing exhaustive coverage of the regional press and informed commentators on the issue.

The Washington Post North Korea—Syria article, although obviously a product of the sympathetic leaker-leakee relationship that pervades foreign policy coverage, by itself raises enough red flags that objective observers will detect the strong smell of fish .

The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a few senior officials under the instructions of national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, leaving many in the intelligence community unaware of it or uncertain of its significance, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Some cautioned that initial reports of suspicious activity are frequently reevaluated over time and were skeptical that North Korea and Syria, which have cooperated on missile technology, would have a joint venture in the nuclear arena.

Hmmm.

Objectively, I think the North Korea—Syria nuke story is buncombe. Both Damascus and Pyongyang are energetically trying to normalize relations with the United States, and not provide the U.S. with a casus belli to destroy their countries.

I think it’s more likely that the story represents a cynical attempt by Bolton and the hardliners to foment a new crisis in a new part of the world in order to justify their policies and expand their power.

This new initiative is necessary, I believe, because the previous boogeyman—nuke-wielding North Korea—has disappeared from the mainstream Washington radar since the denuclearization agreement is basically chugging along as planned, despite hardline efforts to sabotage it through the BDA fiasco.

It’s time to change the terms of debate or, if you would, move the battle to more favorable ground.

Dragging Syria into the North Korea equation replaces a venue in which the United State currently displays no appetite for risky confrontation—North Asia—with an arena much more hospitable to the hardliners—the Middle East--in which the United States is desperately pursuing unilateral high risk policies targeting Iran and Syria in an attempt to gain traction in Iraq.

So the Boltonian hardliners can wrongfoot the State Department moderates by hinting that Foggy Bottom is being snookered by the perfidious North Koreans. At the same time, welcome grist is provided for the anti-Syria mill as the Bush administration is trying to forestall French-led rapprochement with Damascus.

If you want to drill down and get totally Machiavellian, you might say Bolton & Co. are offering the Bush administration a Faustian bargain:

We’ll whip up an anti-Syria nuke scare for you, dragging in the North Koreans. The cost: collapse of the Six Party Agreement...and disgrace of the State Department moderates.

As to parsing the nature and significance of the Israeli airstrike and possible collusion between hardliners in Israel and the U.S., thankfully, as an Asian affairs blog, China Matters doesn’t have to march through that minefield.

For that, there’s Syria Comment, whom I’ve added to the blogroll for our readers’ convenience...

The Moustachio'd One Phones It In

Thanks to readers David and BB, I had a chance to read John Bolton’s Wall Street Journal op-ed.

I had anticipated a laborious and tedious fisking might be required, but there’s not a whole lot of there there.

Owing to frustration, despair, or an emotion familiar to many people covering the Banco Delta Asia saga—boredom—the moustachio’d one seems to be phoning this one in.

The rhetorical reed he leans on is that resolving BDA was not part of the original agreement, the North Koreans are renegotiating, the State Department is caving, (I’m paraphrasing here) Chamberlain, rolled umbrella, appeasement, blah, blah, blah.

Bolton writes:

... we now face the nagging question whether there are other secret side deals beyond BDA. Of course, the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it, by definition. Most troubling, however, is that State apparently thought it too sensitive to share with the American people until the February deal broke down in an unavoidably public way. (John R. Bolton, Pyongyang’s Perfidy, Wall Street Journal, May 18,2007)

The first, surprising point, is the incoherent statement “the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it...”

“...by definition...”

Huh?

This apparent non-sequitur (which reads like the remnant of some biting apercu that, though perhaps fully formed in Mr.Bolton’s mind, did not quite make it to the printed page), is a poor set-up for his accusation that the promise to resolve BDA was “too sensitive to share with the American people until the February deal broke down”.

Let’s go to the transcripts—from February 13, the day the deal was announced (not, of course, the day it "broke down"):

Secretary Rice, February 13 briefing:

QUESTION: Madame Secretary...we've been told that the North Koreans expect that the issue of the Macao bank will be resolved shortly and that within 30 days they will see some of their funds released. Is that true?

SECRETARY RICE: Let me speak to the second of those first, Barbara. We have agreed that we will, in the separate working group that has been working on this issue that the Treasury Department heads, seek to resolve the issues concerning Banco Delta Asia. Now, remember that the case is against the bank for activities and so we do need to resolve that. Treasury is working to do that. We've been having good discussions with all of the parties involved in that and we'll look to what kind of remediation needs to take place to resolve our concerns. But that's a legal channel. We've been very clear that it has to be resolved within that channel. But we've said that in 30 days we would seek to resolve it. I think the Treasury will be speaking to these issues at another time.


From Christopher Hill’s February 13 television interview with AP :

QUESTION: You mentioned the thirty days to resolve BDA. I mean, can you give more specifics on that? Is that all the accounts?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I can’t at this point, but we said we would resolve them in thirty days. We have had senior level discussions about that. I think we will get that done.

QUESTION: And that was at the Berlin meeting that you discussed that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: I discussed their offer in the Berlin meeting, but we’ve been working very hard to make sure it can be wrapped up.

QUESTION: People say you are caving in -- this was a line that you guys took, and you gave up on these sanctions, and --

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, I think you will always have people that think any concession you make is a cave-in, but I think one must understand that in any negotiations both sides have to give. So I think we’ll just have to see what we can do to move the denuclearization process forward.

QUESTION: Is that part of the whole strategy to use that pressure? I mean, you have leverage on one side?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, the North Koreans have been involved in some illicit activities which are, very frankly, unacceptable. You know, you can get away with having a bad human rights record, you can get away with having a bad human rights record and being engaged in illicit activities. But I think it’s tough to get away with having a bad human rights record, having illicit activities, and making nuclear weapons. So I think the North Koreans have found that, increasingly, there was a sense they needed to be scrutinized. It’s no surprise that when you are involved in making weapons of mass destruction, people have a tendency to look at your finances.

QUESTION: And the Treasury issue is being resolved?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Well, I mean with respect to the BDA, the Banco Delta Asia, we’re prepared to resolve that within thirty days. But with respect to the overall issues, overall financial issues, I think the North Koreans seem to understand that they need to get out of this money laundering business and ultimately start getting out of this nuclear business.

Hopefully this will put paid to the hardliner talking point that the BDA demands were not part of the deal and came out of left field--or that the State Department was secretly canoodling with Kim Jung Il and treacherously keeping their greasy transactions secret from President Bush.

I do not think, however, it will mark an end to efforts to distract attention from actual hardline attempts to derail the Six Party Agreement by sounding misleading alarms about “Pyongyang’s Perfidy” and State Department betrayal.

Things are getting more desperate for the hardliners on North Korea...

There are encouraging signs that the bizarre inability of the world’s only hyperpower to enable the remittance of $25 million to North Korea is attracting more and more skeptical interest.

And there are signs that the hardliners are getting desperate. John Bolton has been summoned to muddy the waters with a conspiracy theory op-ed.

Arms Control Wonk posts critically on a John Bolton op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attempting to create a narrative involving “secret agreements” to explain why the Banco Delta Asia issue is still holding up the Six Party Agreement.

Now, the Wachovia bit. Bolton is obsessed that the North Korea deal has some secrety side arrangement including US bankers (code word!), the Trilateral commission and the Illuminati. Well, at least one bank, Wachovia:

Third, we now face the nagging question whether there are other secret side deals beyond BDA. Of course, the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it, by definition. Most troubling, however, is that State apparently thought it too sensitive to share with the American people until the February deal broke down in an unavoidably public way. (blockquote from Bolton’s op-ed)

I haven’t got my hands on the full op-ed yet, but it appears that Bolton is pushing the idea that there is a conspiracy between the State Department and Wachovia to appease the North Koreans by using the BDA remittance to provide North Korea with a permanent conduit to the world financial system.

For that premise to work, you’d have to believe that a U.S. bank would be willing to defy the Treasury Department for the sake of North Korean business and whatever goodies the appeasement-happy State Department can push its way.

Not too likely. There’s a more logical explanation.

I added my two cents in the comments:

Bolton’s argument makes no sense. He’s trying to substitute an implausible narrative (the North Koreans are scheming not to get their money back) for a more plausible one: that hardliners in the Treasury Department allied with Bolton are scheming to block the BDA resolution so the Six Party Agreement will fall apart. His gyrations have to be even more difficult and contrived because the State Department is seeking to force the issue by identifying a bank (Wachovia) that is willing to take the money if Treasury agrees.

So here come Bolton’s bizarre conspiracy theories about “secret side agreements”.

It’s all rhetorical chaff, thrown with increasing desperation because, if there’s another Condi talks to Hank moment, Treasury grants the approval and the money goes to North Korea and the Six Party Agreement proceeds, journalists and Congresscritters are going to start thinking: it looks like some people in Treasury held up this agreement for three months. What was all that about?

I’m glad ACW is paying attention to this issue. Maybe other outlets will follow.

Neo-Conundrum

Hardliners in the U.S. Government Struggle not to Accept the Consequences of the Failure of their North Korea Policy

China Matters goes meta, summarizing dozens of posts and tens of thousands of words written over the last six months to explain why Banco Delta Asia matters—and why the mainstream media should and actually might begin covering it critically and responsibly.

As the Banco Delta Asia farce groans into its third month, it should be time for even the most credulous, lazy, and bigoted observers to realize there is a problem.

The problem isn’t with our North Korea policy.

The problem is with the refusal of elements within the Bush administration—perhaps at the highest level--to come to terms with their failure on North Korea, and the unwillingness of much of the media and Congress to question, investigate, or even think about that.

The big screwup at the heart of our North Korea problem is that at the beginning of its second term the Bush administration committed itself to an aggressive effort to isolate North Korea from the international financial community in the service of a policy of...

...well, nobody really knows.

The easy answer is regime change.

But I had this interesting exchange with Onefreekorea, a vociferously pro regime-change website on the issue of the Six Party Agreement (the “February surrender”):

As an occasional reader, I was struck by your statement:

To them, our February surrender reaffirmed that Their Way prevailed and Our Way — a policy of regime change by pressure that in fact never really existed — has been abandoned.

If “Our Way” never really existed, what was “our” actual policy before Chris Hill & Company took control?

Can you clarify? Thanks!
...

As I stated above, a policy of regime change by pressure that in fact never really existed
I think what in fact really existed, though it was initially opposed by some, was a policy of continuing the Clinton policy of pursuing an Agreed Framework, on slightly less gullible terms.

I agree with his observation.

I think the Bush administration wasn’t prepared to make a full-court press on regime change remotely approaching what we did on Iraq

However for the sake of political expediency in pandering to the conservative political base, President Bush gave free reign to a purely economic campaign of isolation and destabilization against North Korea led by John Bolton, coordinated by David Asher, and executed by Robert Joseph at the State Department and Stuart Leavey at Treasury.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lazy internal justification for the half-a-loaf policy, as in “If they can achieve the results they are promising, then President Bush will go before the American people, our allies, and the UN and do what it takes to finish the job”.

Trouble is, achieving true financial isolation and an internal crisis in North Korea through the aggressive application of economic sanctions alone was a fundamentally unviable policy.

The Chinese and North Korean regimes have many differences, but they have a shared interest in preventing the establishment of a pro-American regime in North Korea through coup, collapse, or insurrection.

And as long as China was keeping North Korea’s economic lifeline open, a campaign of financial isolation was doomed to failure.

The fatal piece of hubris by the hardliners was to assume that “will” could trump “skill” and circumstance, and a determined escalation of the confrontation to involve China would compel the Bush administration to back their policy and force Beijing to blink and abandon North Korea.

It appears that the hardliners chose Macau as a point of attack, both to cut off North Korean access from the international financial system at an important node, and to threaten China with sanctions against its banks.

So in September 2005, the hardliners announced a Patriot Act Section 311 investigation against Banco Delta Asia as a demonstration project to “kill the chicken in order to scare the [Chinese] monkey”—words of exquisite self-delusion by David Asher that will probably be carved on the headstone of the Bush administration’s failed North Korea policy.

And then, quietly and inevitably, the wheels came off.

The North Koreans walked out of the Six Party talks, as the hardliners probably hoped they would.

But the Chinese didn’t blink, for hundreds of millions of good reasons—China’s size and strategic importance, the US debt it holds and buys, and the value of the trade between it and America.

And the North Koreans didn’t come back to the international scene until they had a powerful new bargaining chip—an atomic bomb they had hastened to completion during their absence from the talks.

The hardliners attempted to use the outrage to rally international support for an anti-North Korea united front, but failed miserably.

A UN resolution condemned and sanctioned North Korea, but Chinese and Russian vigilance ensured that it could not be used as a pretext for escalation.

John Bolton energetically if misleadingly and futilely promoted the resolution as an endorsement for a broad campaign of economic warfare against North Korea under the banner of the Proliferation Security Initiative.

Condoleezza Rice dutifully jetted around the world trying to rally support for an aggressive anti-Pyongyang policy, but in Asia could only count on Japan, Australia, and Singapore.

President Bush squandered his diminished political capital after the November mid-term elections in a fruitless attempt to advance the hardline agenda at the APEC conference, but South Korea’s pointed refusal to abandon its Sunshine Policy of engagement for PSI-driven confrontation probably signaled the death knell for the US effort.

So Bush dumped the hardline policy and let the realist team of Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Hill take over.

They held direct discussions with North Korea in Berlin in January; then they let China orchestrate the Six Party talks, midwife the agreement, and strengthen China’s claim to hegemony over the affairs of the Korean peninsula.

After this debacle, the hardliners retired to lick their wounds and consider their options.

It couldn’t have been easy.

Their policies had turned out disastrously.

They had grossly misjudged their ability to construct a global web of economic sanctions against North Korea—and compounded their perhaps willfully wishful thinking with an over-estimation of how far the Bush administration would back them on China.

Failure was virtually preordained.

And that failure had consequences: it strengthened the position of China, alienated South Korea, and given US foreign policy an image of incompetent intransigence.

And, most damagingly of all, this failure had resulted in the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear weapons power—a genuine policy disaster.

The hardliners have been toying with Dolchstoss (stabbed in the back) memes to explain their failure, but there are so many knives in their back—from the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Russians, the realists, Bush himself—they look like pin cushions.

Going after their numerous enemies would only emphasizes how isolated and discredited the hardliners are.

A source of continual hardliner concern must be worrying about getting blamed for letting Kim Jung Il get The Bomb.

Condoleezza Rice pointedly fired a shot across their bow in early March with a studiously orchestrated campaign of leaks, backgrounders, and Congressional testimony designed to assert that John Bolton’s hyping of North Korea’s (possibly nonexistent) highly enriched uranium program triggered an excessively confrontational policy that led to Pyongyang’s withdrawal from the talks and assembly and test of their bomb.

If the intent was to forestall an attack by the hardliners that Appeasers Incorporated a.k.a. Rice, Hill, & Company had sold out the interests of the United States for the North Korea deal, it seems to be working.

But it looks like the hardliners are still working fanatically and almost overtly to sabotage the Six Party Agreement by preventing the resolution of the Banco Delta Asia matter.

Perhaps they believe that the only way to escape condemnation for a policy that strengthened China and gave North Korea the bomb is to make the alternative policy fail.

Then they can return to their self-assigned roles of being the voices of truth, righteousness, and realism—and power-- on Asian policy.

If you’re keeping track, that’s faulty logic.

No amount of sabotage of the Six Party Agreement will vindicate the hardline policy.

To their eternal discredit, the hardliners haven’t stopped trying...

...even though the North Koreans, apparently confident of their advantageous position, refuse to bite on the series of provocations and delays the hardliners have thrown up.

On the simple matter of resolving the issue of frozen North Korean accounts in Banco Delta Asia, the hardliners have apparently engaged in a three month campaign using government rulings, secret briefings, prevarication, and procrastination—and spinmeistering to the US media--in an attempt to stall remittance of the funds and sabotage the Six Party Agreement

By now, the North Koreans and the world financial and diplomatic community are simply standing on the sidelines observing the ridiculous battle the Bush administration is engaged in—with itself.

And now we get the first murmurings from the mainstream media that Treasury’s refusal to expedite the Banco Delta Asia agreement—an absolute anomaly in an administration that subscribes to the theory of the unitary executive and the unchecked right of the President to set policy—has its roots in a dark and familiar place: the office of the Vice President.

U.S. government officials first disclosed the request made to Wachovia. Treasury officials declined to comment, but sources said that many officials are dismayed that the administration is now asking a major U.S. bank to work around an order issued two months ago. Some White House officials have also objected to using a U.S. bank, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supports the possible deal with Wachovia. (Glenn Kessler, Transfer of N. Korean funds sought, Washington Post, May 17, 2007)

As I blogged on May 17:

First time, by the way, I’ve seen a report that “White House officials” and not just Treasury Department types are opposing the BDA deal.I’d guess you’d have to say the only “White House official” who has the juice on Asian matters to oppose Condoleezza Rice—President Bush’s favorite apparatchik—and blithely shrug off the humiliating two month farce this has become for US diplomacy is probably Vice President Cheney.

The indefatigable Vice President Cheney, by the way, apparently used his recent trip to Asia in an ad hoc, off the reservation effort to will a new Asian anti-China coalition into existence.

Cheney’s continued defiant willfulness could strike a blow at the cherished doctrine of the unitary executive, which shelters all actions of the executive branch under the umbrella of presidential prerogative.

In the matter of the vendetta against Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, Cheney’s lawyers made the jaw-dropping defense that any actions he took to defame Wilson and expose Plame were protected by his unique Constitutional position as a quasi-President—which gave him the right to define and defend “policy”, by outing CIA agents and orchestrating press campaigns against his critics if necessary.

If Cheney tries that argument to justify interference in the North Korean issue—where he is apparently undermining an explicit administration diplomatic initiative—it would be clear his objective was not to promote policy: he would be seen defying presidential policy to enhance his influence, preserve his power, and maintain his ability to act with impunity.

By highlighting the sordid contradiction between power-grubbing reality and the Hegelian ideal of the unitary executive, we might be as close to a constitutional crisis as we’re likely to get with this anything-goes administration.

Leaving aside the pulse-quickening question of whether the North Korean question could finally put the kibosh on Dick Cheney, the issue before us is this:

Perhaps the BDA story has become so ridiculous—and its role in the political maneuvers of a rogue clique within the administration sabotaging this country’s foreign policy in order to regain its influence and initiative so apparent-- that journalists and Congressional investigators will finally say:

It’s not a case of where there’s smoke there’s fire. Here we have the smoldering embers of a colossal bonfire of failure and delusion.

Well, maybe they won’t.

My preferred explanation for why the main media outlets, with the exception of McClatchy, don’t use their squishy cranial matter to make sense out of the ludicrous Banco Delta Asia story, instead of mindlessly transcribing anonymous administration backgrounders:

Journalists don’t want to see truth used in the service of evil.

Clear-eyed critical reporting by the mainstream outlets could have undercut US and international political support for the invasion of Iraq; but very few journalists and editors were ready to assume the moral responsibility of prolonging the reign of Saddam Hussein by reporting on the factual and logical deficiencies of the Bush administration’s case.

It’s easier to say, Their guy’s bad and I’ll give our guy the benefit of the doubt in my reporting, even if his facts look a bit dodgy.

Same with North Korea.

We’re supposed to let the North Koreans get some money tied up in a sanctioned bank in Macau as a confidence-building measure so the Six Party Agreement on nuclear disarmament can proceed.

The stated cause for the two month delay is absurd: that a Treasury rule under Patriot Act Section 311—a rule that can be revised or discarded through secret, unilateral deliberations—is somehow binding the hands of the most authoritarian executive in recent American presidential history .

But the media seems to be acutely aware of the embarrassment and the possible moral cost of providing aid and comfort to the toadlike Kim Jung Il by taking cognizance of the fact that our North Korea policy is built on bullsh*t.

So one can almost feel the strain of cognitive dissonance that’s making the sweat pop out on the foreheads of journalists as they try to blame the North Koreans for the fact that we won’t give their money back to them:

QUESTION: Given that it's been a month since the April 14th deadline and initially you were saying that you would give it days and that your time was not infinite, your patience wasn't infinite. What have you heard from the North Koreans besides the fact that they intend to meet their February 13th obligations, about how they're actively working to resolve the BDA issue?
...

QUESTION: But when you say the time was not infinite before, are there any kind of punishments for North Korea if they don't move quickly on this?
...

QUESTION: What do you see that gives you confidence that they are trying to work through it?

That’s enough for one day (May 15) at the State Department press briefing.

The Democrats have a similar problem on the issue of oversight. Beyond the immediate political desirability of looking tough on Kim Jung Il, Democrats are probably enamored of Patriot Act Section 311 sanctions as the prime example of the virtuous, consensual soft-power coercion they expect to apply as their primary diplomatic tool in the post-Bush era.

Also, with our hard-power forces bogged down in Iraq, financial sanctions look like one of the few effective weapons left in our arsenal—ones that should not be weakened by public criticism.

Blogs like China Matters, of course, don’t wield any political influence, so we don’t have the weight of the world on our shoulders.

We can follow the story—and the truth—where it leads.

But it’s also the right way.

Governments don’t lie just for the sake of speed and efficiency.

They lie because they haven’t managed to address real problems, because if these problems were revealed and discussed, our leaders might become discredited and lose the political initiative

Sometimes these are problems that can’t be solved. Sometimes the problems could have been solved but the lie has forestalled public scrutiny, so the caravan can move onto the next problem—and maybe the next lie...

...and the next, and the next...

...until the consequences of all those successful lies—the fatal accretion of faulty assumptions and failed policies--come home to roost.

What I believe we have on the BDA matter is a small clique trying to sabotage our current North Korean policy, not because it has a better policy, but because it wants to avoid accountability and responsibility for a policy that has already failed.

And I think the media and Congress should go after it.

It’s not an issue of giving Kim Jung Il a hand.

It’s a matter of helping the United States get out of a jam that the hardliners put us in—and perversely want to keep us in.

There’s no point anymore in giving failure the benefit of the doubt—or the protection of willfully obtuse and credulous coverage.

BDA: The Beat Goes On...and On...and Onandonandon

From the May 3 Financial Times:

A senior US official said Pyongyang had encountered several problems in consolidating all its accounts at BDA. In addition to not realising how many accounts it held at the bank, the official said North Korea appeared to be having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds.

Once Pyongyang had consolidated its accounts, officials said it could withdraw the money from BDA. South Korean and US officials confirmed that North Korea wanted to transfer the money to Italian and Russian bank accounts. (Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Anna Fifield in Seoul, N Korea still to recover frozen $25m, Financial Times, May 3, 2007)

So it looks like the lump sum approach is going ahead, no doubt to the chagrin of Bush administration hardliners who hoped to force North Korean account holders to present themselves (if they could or dared) to withdraw their funds in person with a suitcase.

And I’m not surprised that North Korea is “having difficulty getting the necessary signatures to release the funds”.

Especially since one of the signatures they will presumably need is Colin McAskill’s, since his group purchased the Daedong Credit Bank. About $8 million in Daedong’s accounts were frozen when Treasury announced its Patriot Act Section 311 action.

Pushing for a logical resolution to the BDA mess, McAskill had wanted the legitimacy of his accounts confirmed, and acknowledgement that he could move the money without restriction or fear of potential sanctions for whatever bank handled the funds.

From the April 15 International Herald Tribune:

Colin McAskill, a British businessman who represents Daedong Credit Bank in negotiations over its frozen funds, said he would insist on using legitimate banking channels to shift money from the newly freed account. "I am not going to stand in a queue behind other North Koreans with a suitcase and try to move it," McAskill said. "We will move it through the banking system."

Good luck with that, Colin.

The point at issue here seems to be that the United States does not want the BDA settlement to signal a breakdown in U.S. efforts to impose an international financial embargo on North Korea.

Reviewing what the international community had agreed to do concerning North Korea, I reviewed UN Resolution 1718, which sanctioned North Korea’s WMD and proliferation-related activities.

In the process, I came across a classic piece of Boltonianism:

The resolution also provides for a regime of inspections to ensure compliance with its provisions, building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative.


One thing that jumps out is Bolton’s reference to “building on the existing work of the Proliferation Security Initiative”.

In fact, the UN has repeatedly refused to endorse the PSI, the US-led security operation that could be construed as giving Washington and its allies license to conduct unilateral interdiction activities with UN approval.

Bolton, as I’ve written before with enormous corroborating detail, had been indefatigable in asserting UN support for the PSI when no such support existed, a point that mush-minded supporters of PSI—who apparently misconstrue the PSI as a piece of muscular multi-lateral dogooderism—have stubbornly refused to grasp.

Second entry in the John Bolton “I said it loudly and confidently so you must believe it is true” pantheon is:

This resolution also targets other illicit activities of the regime in Pyongyang, and includes a ban on trade in luxury goods. It targets the way Kim Jong Il finances his weapons of mass destruction programs through criminal activities like money laundering, counterfeiting, and selling of narcotics. It imposes a binding requirement on all member states to take action against those activities and freeze the assets of entities and individuals of the DPRK involved.

Actual references in UNSC Resolution 1718 to targeting Kim Jong Il’s criminal activities as part of the anti-WMD sanctions action:

Zero

Nada

Bupkus

Nothing there about moneylaundering, Supernotes, meth, phony cigarettes, or counterfeit Viagra.

For those of us who care, there are about 200 pages of UN-approved documents here describing the nuclear, ballistic missile, and WMD-related trade with North Korea that the international community had agreed to embargo.

The "illicit activities" enjoined by the UN relate to trade in these particular embargoed items.

UNSCR 1718, that celebrated expression of international unanimity was, of course, not enough for John Bolton.

Just as he did with the PSI statement, Bolton took the back door (or “signing statement” approach), declaring a unilateral interpretation that added new elements to an agreement that has already been negotiated and signed.

Here, his purpose was to establish a spurious link between the UN resolution—designed specifically to sanction North Korea’s WMD efforts—to US efforts to ostracize the North Korean government and economy as a whole from the international financial system.

For the United States, the necessary conceptual link—as David Asher, one of the primary architects of Washington’s anti-Pyongyang effort, defined it —was to regard the North Korean government as an essentially criminal enterprise.

Therefore, any and all international financial activities could be construed as buttressing the essential criminal activities of the North Korean “Soprano state”, including its signature racket—acquisition of a nuclear capability.

This conception certainly made dealing with North Korea easier for the heavy thinkers in the Bush administration—there was no North Korean activity that was licit and unrelated to WMDs, so we could go after everything.

However, it was not an idea that was embodied in the UN resolution, nor was it one that the world at large had endorsed.

Now, the United States has gone overboard in imposing the North Korean financial sanctions.

It is not only trying to force the international community to participate in a unilateral sanctions regime that goes beyond the wording and intent of the UN resolution.

It is attempting to maintain that regime even when it conflicts with the agreements made by its own State Department to denuclearize North Korea under the Six Party Agreement.

It’s come to a point where I think that many countries are getting sick of the US preoccupation with the $25 million in BDA.

More dangerously, it threatens to discredit the pretensions of the Patriot Act Section 311 regime to legitimacy and effectiveness in the eyes of the international community—in fact, making it look like another piece of dangerous, stubbornly and incompetently executed idiocy by the Bush administration--just as we wish to use it as the vehicle for our anti-Iran diplomacy.

Another Boltonian Policy Bites the Dust?

With the departure of John Bolton and (most of) his cabal from the State Department, there has been an orgy of making hay while the sun shines e.g. quickly executing policy and personnel initiatives that would have been 86’d by the moustachio’d one and his White House cohorts if they still held power.

And it’s not just Condi Rice and her realists who are frantically reaping the harvest.

France has pitched in, calling for the ancient and anachronistic EU arms embargo against China to be lifted (from The Nation [Pakistan], Arms embargo against China unjustified: France, March 20, 2007, h/t to Antiwar.com for the article):

The European Union’s arms embargo on China is no longer justified and should be lifted, France’s defence minister said on Monday, adding that this did not mean Paris wanted to start selling weapons to the Chinese.

The arms embargo has no technical justification because French and EU regulations are already more restrictive than what’s in the embargo, Michele Alliot-Marie told a news conference in Beijing....

The embargo only concerns the EU and hasn’t stopped other countries from supplying weapons and components to China, Alliot-Marie said at the end of her China visit...

The political justification for the embargo is based on criticisms on the part of the EU over certain human rights issues, she said, without saying what those were. But the same countries accepted that China get the Olympics even though the criteria for getting the Olympics are the same as the embargo. Their logic is inconsistent, the minister added, without elaborating.

The embargo was instituted in 1989 in response to the Tian An Men massacre, cutting off arms sales to China until its human rights behavior achieved more civilized standards.

Since then, if China has done a bad job of moving forward, the world has done a good job of moving back.

Viewed in the context of an unprovoked invasion of Iraq by the democratic and civilizing powers of the West and Japan that has cost upward of 500,000 Iraqi lives, the Tian An Men massacre, while not a walk in the park, does not justify an arms embargo approaching its second decade.

In fact, in 2005, with China, with a fifteen-year record of reasonably good international behavior and recognized as a politely enthusiastic handmaiden to President Bush’s GWOT (Global War on Terror), Beijing (end the EU) entertained genuine hopes that the embargo would be lifted.

However, the Taiwan issue flared up again and, in a worrying sign that the politics of containment, confrontation, and regime change were designed for application beyond the Middle East, John Bolton and his allies in Japan lobbied vociferously and effectively for maintaining the embargo.

In fact, the looming Boltonian plans for China was one of the inspirations for the creation of this blog, and in one of my first posts in April 2005, I wrote on Bolton’s efforts related to the EU arms embargo as follows:

Quote

...the EU’s retreat from lifting the arms embargo [is] no doubt China’s sorest disappointment:

Beijing was certain early this winter that a European Union arms embargo against China would be lifted (a move ardently opposed by the Pentagon). But last week, the EU said it no longer had a consensus to lift. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in a frank interview with German media, even mentioned a possible need for a form of containment of China, until its social, political, and military direction became clearer.

Getting the EU to back away from lifting the arms embargo was one of John Bolton’s major achievements, accomplished with the help of a House of Representatives resolution and intensive lobbying of the European powers by both the United States and Japan—something the Chinese are well aware of.

John Bolton’s Feb. 25, 2005 speech in Tokyo laid out the position for and rationales for America and Japan’s joint approach to quarantining China, including scuttling the EU’s plans of lifting the arms embargo:

Similarly, we are having discussions with other governments about existing arms embargoes against China and about our concerns that others--such as the EU [European Union]--may lift their embargoes and thereby negatively impact the security of America, and its friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region....

I expect the Europeans beat a retreat on lifting the arms embargo when they realized that America’s post-9/11 engagement with China beyond the most cosmetic gestures is dead. Rather than try to welcome China’s post Tian An Men return to full membership in the family of nations with a few juicy arms deal, it was better to back off and avoid getting tangled up in another U.S. scorched earth foreign policy crusade.

Those with long memories will recall that the sanction regime against Iraq was weakening because of European indifference and impatience before the Bush administration stepped in with its anti-Saddam campaign and made it clear that it would not permit Saddam’s Iraq to regain the measure of legitimacy and protection under international law that status as an unsanctioned, member-in-good-standing of the nation-state club bestows.

With that background, it must be especially disturbing to China that the U.S. wants to maintain an explicit sanction and embargo regime against China, with the implication that China is prone to devious, dangerous pariah-state behavior that the leadership and force of the United States-and Japan-- is needed to check.

Again, from John Bolton’s speech in Tokyo:

The second reason we oppose the lifting of the EU arms embargo against China was very well stated by our friend Foreign Minister Machimura, when he noted that "We are against a lifting of the arms embargo. The matter of the lifting of the arms embargo is one of great concern not only for Japan but for the security of East Asia as a whole."

Our respective government’s positions on resolving the Taiwan-China Cross-Strait issue are well-known. Suffice it to say, though, we are concerned that any measures that allow China to significantly improve its coercive capabilities could make fostering a peaceful resolution of this issue less likely. We concur with Foreign Minister Machimura that it will contribute to regional instability.

Moreover, as I highlighted above, no adequate mechanism currently exists to prevent China from transferring technology and lethal weaponry to other, less stable regions of the world, including rogue states, or to use it for the purposes of internal repression.

Endquote

If the embargo is lifted, China may feel a greater sense of security because it has access to European arms.

But it will be more relieved to know that, with the defection of the EU, US efforts to maintain internationalized sanctions against China have crumbled and Beijing is free to step off the US sanctions--regional sanctions—UN sanctions—interdiction and destabilization escalator that John Bolton had designed for it.